Cheaters Always Win by J. M. Fenster

Author:J. M. Fenster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2019-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Power Play

When cheaters prosper

Yeah sex is cool and all but have you ever found your entire final on quizlet.”

To translate that tweet into a different language, one called grammar, which wastes untold milliseconds every single day for those fluent in it:

Yeah, sex is cool and all, but have you ever found your entire final on Quizlet?

Quizlet is an app that peppers users with scholastic-type questions, such that they can measure their grasp of required course material. That much harkens to flash cards and practice tests, which have been in use for a long time. As the app has developed, though, actual exams have often been posted and then ferreted out by students who have no compunction about using them.

The tweet above was written in 2018 by a college student in the spring semester of her freshman year at a university in the South. It received 253 “likes” and 58 “retweets,” which doesn’t seem nearly enough for the import of her message.

“Yeah sex is cool and all but have you ever found your entire final on quizlet.”

Colleges in this country started out in the 1600s with the overriding mission to turn out ministers. By the 1700s, they were also turning out mathematicians, doctors, and candidates for the bar. By the 1800s, so many other subjects were included that colleges made a strength of the liberal arts. By the 1900s, technology, which was purposefully specialized, competed with the liberal arts, which were just as purposefully broad in scope. All of those strains can still be found on campuses, but the 2000s have broken with the concept that bound those centuries of academic life into a continuum: the concept of what college is. For that reason, cheating has found a comfortable place, a place where it has become cool and all that.

Over the past few decades, the student body at large has transformed college life, even while students as individuals wend their way to the finish line. They may not know much—to wit, a large proportion, according to a recent poll, can’t say what two sides fought in the Civil War…the American Civil War. But they know exactly what college is for and what they want from it.

The Graduate School of Education at the University of California at Los Angeles studies the subject of students. The Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP), which is based there, conducted its first research project in 1966 by polling 254,480 incoming freshmen at 307 colleges across the country. Hundreds of questions were included then and still are, in what has become an annual project. Many of the responses barely budge across the years, leading to the triumphant impression that college kids are just like their grandparents. By looking at the section in the CIRP reports labeled “Objectives Considered to be ‘Essential’ or ‘Very Important,’” however, one can peer into the expectations of the new collegians, expectations that reveal the modern answer to the question of what college is. One response in particular, supported by others, kicks a hole in the picture of college life as it was drawn in all the previous centuries.

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