Cheating in the Eye of the Beholder

One thing became clear in the course of the cheating problem in the business department. This was not a case of writing answers on the back of your hand. The basic issues of fairness were called into question, but in a society where rights of disproportionate possession and accumulation are defined and enforced by law and military intervention, there will always be tension between the desire to join or participate in the community of the elite, and the exclusive expectations of the ruling class. By definition there is nothing mysterious or fundamentally unethical about action taken to pass a class to acquire a degree to get a job of disproportionate economic value.
Adapting the fundamental supply and demand principle of economics, given the opportunity, those with less will take some. Denied suitable opportunities, they may look for those too. The impulse can be defined away as a disturbance to society and a violation of law, but even considering the benefit of an orderly society, it cannot be denied. If education depends on enforcement of “calibration,” as one test security expert so aptly described it, then the result will be a very fine line indeed, so fine that it will be invisible. To designate the use of available information as cheating is simply to emphasize the determination to prevent those who do not have from leveling the field. You outsmarted yourself, so you call the response cheating. And that’s an institutional responsibility, not an individual instructor’s responsibility. It’s a legislative mandate in the interests of economic inequality.
This is not suggesting that there is no such thing as cheating. Cheating is taking more than you need, but that’s another argument altogether. If the students in this case cheated, we made them what they are. If they did not, they are pretty much what the rest of us are, aspirants to economic aristocracy. Maybe we all deserve each other.