Obviously, whether this was true or not is a whole discussion, but the attitude did lead to a lot more cheating (due to desperation) than I'd imagine past generations had.

A midterm being worth 25-33% of a grade, plus some classes only being offered in fall or spring semesters meant a bad test could roughly cost you tens of thousands of dollars, since the next time you could retake the class would be in a year, and it often was a prerequisite for another class. It just leads to an environment that encourages desperate "survival" behavior.

It really is a cultural thing, and that sort of culture is primarily passed down from upperclassmen to underclassmen. I went to a different college with an honor code (Harvey Mudd) and when I graduated in 2019 it was still doing relatively well, but from what I've heard COVID really killed students caring about / adhering to the honor code.

Obviously the first. How is this even a question?

Loyalty is a fundamental moral principle. Loyalty to a friend carries a lot of moral weight. Humans are a social animal, and loyalty to a friend can easily outweigh loyalty to some abstract institution. Like, my friend will still have my back five years from now. The university I went to won't do shit for me.

Like, if you're talking about loyalty to a friend who wants you to cover up an unjustified murder they committed, then I think most people will say the value of telling the cops about the murder outweighs the loyalty to your friend.

But for cheating on some test where probably 30% of the other students are cheating anyways? I think the vast majority of people will say that loyalty to your friend is the more important moral principle here. We all make mistakes in life, and the whole idea of loyalty and love to a friend is that we support them even though they make mistakes. As long as the mistakes are common mistakes like cheating on a test or cheating on a boyfriend, as opposed to things like felony crimes.

But what you are doing here is justifying behavior. That’s separate from a discussion about what’s right or wrong. You have to not only consider one’s friendship, but the negative effects across society that their actions cause. In other words, reporting the friend negatively affects (in general) only two individuals, while cheating affects many more people and cultural values and norms. I’m not a Utilitarian, but intent and effect matter.

Teachers/Professors are already used to accommodating dumb planning/mistakes from students. An honest "I spent too much time partying and fell behind, can I get an extension" email will often get you very far.

Also baffled to hear cheating on a boyfriend included there, cheating of that sort would be friendship ending.

Im not convinced that's the case, if it's a person who can normalise cheating.

They've already made the decision that benefit to themselves outweighs everything else.

I could buy the argument if the friend had a moment of weakness, regretted it, won't do it again, and please don't report it. They've learned their lesson, that's enough.

But if they do it and they're fine with it and they're going to do it again and what's the big deal? Refusing to report that isn't loyalty anymore, it's not sticking with someone who made a mistake, it's protecting deliberate bad behavior.

The question is simply how you balance loyalty to the institution vs loyalty to a friend.

A lot of people will think that cheating in a context where a lot of other people cheat too, is just not a big deal. That it's certainly not worth losing a friendship over. Like, are you going to end a friendship because someone jaywalks? Because they habitually speed 5 mph over the legal limit? Because they sometimes take illegal drugs? Because they deducted things on their tax return that you know weren't actually business expenses?

The size or importance of a moral violation matters, when weighing up conflicting moral obligations.

I think cheating is pretty serious. It qualifies as self-harm, and it harms your classmates by devaluing their eventual degree.

Jaywalking and minor speeding are not even immoral at all, in my view. I don't mean they're insignificant, I mean they're outright not morally wrong to me, so that comparison suggests that we have a pretty strong difference in what we consider to be morally good here.

It's very easy to argue speeding is immoral: it's immoral to disobey any law or regulation passed by a democratically elected government if these is no other conflicting moral principle. So you can speed to rush to a hospital, for example, but everyday speeding is immoral both because it breaks the morally legitimate democratic law and increases the chance of physical harm.

For many people, cheating on a test is little different from speeding. Calling it "self-harm" is a stretch, and there's zero direct harm to your classmates if it's not graded on a curve (which I haven't seen in a long time). And you could easily argue that the marginal difference it makes to the value of everyone's degree from that institution overall is basically as negligible as the marginal difference it makes to public safety as speeding by 5 mph does.

Also, different exams are different. Fewer people will be bothered by cheating on a freshman year calculus exam, whereas cheating on a final qualification to become any type of emergency responder is far, far more serious because somebody could directly die as a result of your lack of knowledge.

I have to say, this is not the sort of attitude I expected to find on this site. Especially from someone defending cheating on exams. Anyway, I'm sure I won't convince you to change your mind on this, and you certainly won't convince me.

And I find it somewhat bizarre that you seem to think there is no moral value in following the law? Especially when I added the caveat "if there is no other conflicting moral principle", which means you believe there is nothing bad about the law?

Or is it the caveat you disagree with, and you think the law must be followed no matter what?

No, I don't see any moral value in following the law. Following the law can be and often is morally good by coincidence because the law encodes some piece of morality, e.g. the laws against theft or murder. But if the law says I'm only allowed to cross the street at designated locations, and I can safely cross at a different location, there is no moral issue with doing so, in my view. If speeding is immoral it is only because of the safety concerns, not because it's illegal. If I refrain from speeding on a road where I believe it's safe to go significantly faster than the limit, it's only because I want to avoid the potential consequences of breaking the law, not because I think it's somehow wrong.

Just so you know, that's not a position most moral philosophers take, as long as the law is decided by sufficiently democratic procedures.

The fact that you belong to a group of people, and the people decide on rules, means that violating those rules is a moral violation against that community of people.

To say that has no moral weight at all is a pretty extreme position. Now obviously if there's a conflict with another principle, there are times that other moral principle should win. But to say that there is no moral value whatsoever in following the law is not something I think many people will agree with. And thank goodness.

Not that it's going to change my view, but I'm curious if that's really the position they take.

And "sufficiently democratic" basically means freedom of political speech, adult citizens can vote, representatives are chosen by majority rule, elections are fairly conducted and not rigged, and laws are passed by majority rule.

Obviously you can always quibble over details such as unicameral vs bicameral legislatures, single-member district vs. multi-member district representation, gerrymandering, judicial review, and so forth.

But if people are allowed to freely debate and the franchise is universal and elections are free and fair and elections and decisions are based on majority rule, then those are the basic conditions. So the US and France and the UK are sufficiently democratic; Russia and Iran and China are not (despite holding elections).

Edit: actually I do have one other thing to say. It's quite a coincidence that the conditions you laid out happen to be those that were met in the US right about the time that book came out. Feels like it might have been working backwards from the conclusion.

The more usual perspective would be that they're both bad.

>The Duke of She said to Confucius, “Among my people there is one we call ‘Upright Gong.’ When his father stole a sheep, he reported him to the authorities.”

>Confucius replied, “Among my people, those who we consider ‘upright’ are different from this: fathers cover up for their sons, and sons cover up for their fathers. ‘Uprightness’ is to be found in this.”

-from the Confucian Analects

That's how you get a culture against cheating. You ensure that cheating doesn't pay, and eventually people learn that cheating doesn't pay. The enforcement is part of the culture.

Salvadorans.

I'd asked them what they expected would happen when they tried to get jobs or landed one. Like how do you fake work? They just said all jobs are group-based like their study group. (Keep in mind they were soliciting my code as their group was struggling to find solutions to assignments.)

The answer is a one of them works at a grocery store as a cashier, another one I saw now manages a bagel store (didn't know all of them). A waste of time, money, and effort to get a CS degree then just not be able to use it.

...yeah, yeah, greener grass, i know.

To the school's credit, they responded as best they could. They considered each case, interviewed the students, and punished them on a sliding scale based on how much cheating, ranging from a zero on that one assignment up to suspension.

Then, for the next semester, they simply changed the rules. You were now officially allowed to cheat all you wanted on homework, but it now only counted for 5% of your grade. That was REALLY bad for people who weren't doing the homework, but it also sucked for people who were just lousy test takers.

I went to a school with an honor code and cheating was rampant among the premeds and future Obamas.