True Story 4.07
A student’s dilemma: Help a colleague or refuse to cheat?
The setting for this story
Craig recalls the months he spent in Munich studying German as a foreign language.
A story of misaligned minds8
Except for myself and two other Americans, the German course was populated almost entirely by students from Eastern Europe and Turkey. When our teacher gave a quiz, she sometimes left the room for a short time. As soon as she was gone, most of the students – except myself and the other Americans – immediately shared answers, apparently without the slightest hesitation.
I was dismayed by such open and widespread cheating, or as my Eastern European classmates called it, “the exchange.” However, my lack of participation in these exchanges made me appear disloyal to the group. Apparently, the other Americans and I were failing to demonstrate group solidarity by not sharing answers with those who, even more than us, were struggling with German.
Craig’s question
Why were my classmates totally cool with the exchange, while I found it offended my values?
Critique of story 4.07
Once again, getting to the heart of a classroom complication obliges us to attend to the deep differences between the individualistic and communitarian systems of social norms and values.
What Americans and most other Western peoples call cheating is usefully understood as a working example of individualism. Our rejection of cheating is a reflection of our strong preference for personal independence and self-reliance, personified by the cowboy. Those who cheat are signaling their inadequacy, their need to depend on another – not admirable! We pity someone who must depend on another in any sustained way, and we pity the person on whom he or she depends. And we hope the course of our own lives will minimize the occasions when we must be in either role.
Joining the exchange would place Craig in one or both of those disagreeable roles. He accepts that the purpose of quizzes is to gauge the extent of each student’s learning – an individualistic goal that the exchange directly undermines. For all these reasons, Craig refuses to join the exchange. So deeply implanted are these values that he finds the exchange offensive.
In a communitarian value system, children have ingrained in them values such as mutual aid, group solidarity, and the responsibility of the older and wiser for the well-being of the younger or less knowledgeable. In such a society, self-reliance rarely is useful; individualism is not admired. What people rely on is interdependence: We get ahead as a group via the ongoing giving and receiving of support. When values such as these prevail, “cheating” isn’t even a concept.
An African educator is reported to have defined cheating as the withholding of information from a member of one’s group who needs it. Such withholding would give the hoarder an unfair academic advantage over a family member, colleague, or friend.9 Such behavior is unacceptable within a communitarian system of values.
For thought
Think about how Craig’s classmates from Eastern Europe and Turkey evaluated the three Americans’ refusal to participate in the exchange. What might each of them tell their relatives and friends about this when they return home? Maybe this: “The three Americans refused to join in our exchanges, though I didn’t understand why. But what really shocked me is that they also refused to exchange with each other!”
Related stories
Story 4.15 concerns plagiarism, also explained from the perspective of individualistic values.
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Endnotes:
8 Ott, 225.
9 Lingenfelter, 445.
Full citations are available at misalignedminds.info/References.