Normative Revisionism about Student Cheating
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Normative Revisionism about Student Cheating Odysseus Makridis 1 & Fred Englander 2,3
# Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
This paper considers characteristic views advanced in the past fifteen years that may be considered relatively sympathetic to student practices of cheating on graded assignments or exams. We detect and analyze typical fallacies that are recurrent in articles that promote a revisionist view of cheating as morally permissible. We offer a general, deontological argument that cheating is immoral. The efforts to justify student cheating take several forms. For example, it has been argued that cheating may be tolerated if the student did not intend to cheat, perhaps because of a failure to understand the normal rules or expected procedures. We also argue that student collaboration in graded work constitutes cheating even if the instructor condones such collaboration. In a similar vein, we address the view that student copying is cheating even if the instructor alters the rules to allow such copying. This moral view can be applied to any cheating behavior, we argue. As a specific example, we demonstrate how it can be applied to the pedagogical recommendation that instructors should encourage their students to cheat in order to cultivate student skills in the area of cyber security. We also address the view that student cheating can be justified by situations in which the student believes that he/she is being subjected to an unfair or unethical overall learning environment. Keywords Cheating . Deontology . Student collaboration . Intentionality . Flipped exam
Introduction In the face of an expanding academic literature on student cheating, there have been a number of articles published, primarily in the past fifteen years, which have tried to at least somewhat
* Fred Englander [email protected]
1
Department of Literature, Language, Writing, and Philosophy, Maxwell Becton College of Arts and Sciences, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, NJ 07940, USA
2
Department of Economics, Finance, and International Business, Silberman College of Business, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, NJ 07940, USA
3
Milltown, New Jersey, USA
O. Makridis, F. Englander
sympathetically explain, justify, and even advocate for student cheating. Pabian (2015) reviews the literature on student cheating and defends a non-traditional ‘defense’ of student cheating through his interpretation of Bouville (2010, p. 813), stating that, “the literature lacks any consistent theory of ‘why cheating is wrong.’”1 The present paper offers such a theory and also presents a description of many of the various arguments that have been made suggesting a re-evaluation of the traditional disapprobation of student cheating. This paper also presents a critical perspective on those revisionist arguments that advocate for a more sympathetic perspective on student cheating. Since this literature sympathetic to student cheating, of course, represents a challenge to a longstanding apparent consensus, there is a burden to provide justif
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