[It's pretty obvious that the average CollegeCandy reader has some very strong opinions. Opinions that she likes to share with everyone on the site.

Alright, since we spent last week debating what it means to cheat in a relationship, it only seems right to figure out what the other kind of cheating means – the kind that involves teachers. Everybody thinking dirty things about teachers, get your mind out of the gutter (for now). Seriously though, we’ve all read the school policies about cheating and plagarism, but at the same time, most of us have done something that we wouldn’t really want the school to know about. How guilty should we really feel? It’s time to duke it out!

There are some things we can pretty much all agree are cheating – copying a paper word for word (or Wikipedia *cough cough*), sneaking a peek at someone else’s test answers. But what if you take someone else’s info and reword it? Or if you take the ideas from another work and write it out your own way. Afterall, most scholars read other papers on their topics and get ideas from them that they craft into thier own work and that’s not considered cheating. True, scholars add things to the information they borrow, but if you do the same thing, then is it ok? And what if you don’t borrow much? What if it’s just one sentence? Or just a quote that you forgot to mark? According to most school regulations that could qualify as cheating – and get you kicked out.

You also get into an inky area when it comes to “study groups”. On the one hand, it can be helpful and legit to get a bunch of people together to work on something tough, but if you’re coming up with the same answers and ideas, then it’s not very different than mental plagiarism. And with math and science classes, the problem only gets more complex because one person almost always comes up with the answer first, leaving everyone else to basically copy it down.

Oh and let’s not forget the other side of this equation – what if aren’t the person using someone else’s work, but someone selling work to be used by others? All of those term paper sites and test answer keys floating around come from somewhere. Someone out there is selling the work; does that count as cheating?

Ok, what do you think? How seriously would you take the word “cheating” and how far would you push it? Put it to a vote in the comments!

I remember in my senior year of high school, one girl was found to have plagiarized part of a paper from the internet. Not only was she suspended; she had to deliver a speech in front of the entire class, explaining why plagiarism was wrong.

Princeton has been particularly aggressive on the cheating front in the same way. We have honor code meetings, have to write a page on matriculation illustrating our understanding of it, and get regular updates from the honor committee. All the same, when I arrived there I discovered whole new layers of gray areas.

In problem set classes, for example, there are plenty of people who like to work in study groups. That’s all well and good, except when “study groups” turn into “let’s just copy the answers off each other.” I thought that kind of behavior was only in the occasional math class, but I was surprised to learn that it’s much more prevalent in college. When all that matters for your future career is that good grade in an Orgo class, it can be extremely tempting just to write down the process and answer of your friends, whether you understand it or not, and worry about the final exam later.

I’m not taking a holier-than-thou position on this, either. I’m just lucky I’m not tempted in my classes. As an English major, I don’t have much opportunity to enter the grey area of cheating short of blatant plagiarism, which offends my sensibilities as a writer. I’m curious how fellow students feel about the study group phenomenon, however. When the chips are down in a really tough class with a really tough grader, would you copy the answer of a friend on a problem set?

I have friends who specifically take the classes of people they know just so they can hit them up for answers on a regular basis. I find it disturbing, but I also acknowledge that not every college class is going to reach the ideal of “I just take it to learn!” Some classes are a grind and are meant to be endured rather than enjoyed. But how far will today’s college student go to endure them?

Last year I was on the receiving end of some of the grey area-cheating. I took a class with a friend that was heavy on the paperwriting. I was accustomed to this, but my friend wasn’t. He took to sending me drafts the night before the deadline, pleading for revision help. On a couple of occasions, I gave revision suggestions. Then I told myself that enough was enough, and I wouldn’t do it anymore. I don’t think giving revision help is cheating at all; it’s not giving any direct answers, and at Princeton you can get revision help from the teachers right up until the day the paper is due. But it still made me cautious about how much help to offer.

Nowadays, with the ease of the internet, it seems like the grey area of cheating or plagiarism has expanded hugely, and the good ole-fashioned honor code is struggling to keep up.

Where do you draw the line?

[Photo courtesy of reviewjournal.com]