The Cost of Education without Ethics

Excellence takes effort.

I was surprised to find out on the comp.lang.ada newsgroup that Debian Linux was carrying an unauthorized fork of my TextTools project. I don't have time to do a lot of upgrading of my older projects and it's great to see someone contributing to my source code. However, I never received the upgrades to fold into the official source code--or they got lost along the way. You see, it's easy to make upgrades to an open source project. But it's harder to work with the maintainer to install the changes, test them on other Linux distributions and do an official release. Meanwhile Debian risks compatibility problems if I upgrade the real source code.

Driving north for our family Christmas, I passed by a school along Highway 400 boasting a greater than 90% employment rate for graduates. I wondered how the school justified that the education they gave was the key to landing a first job.

In the 1990s, I undertook my graduate year at Queen's University. I came from Brock University and I was told by the Queen's staff that their school was in a different league than Brock. During my time at Brock, I developed a reputation as one of the best markers, having caught computer science students who cheated. When I was given papers to mark at Queen's, I was reprimanded for taking longer to grade the papers than anyone else. "Just look at the output and rubber-stamp a grade. We don't have time to look for cheaters or review each line of the assignment, " my supervisor told me.

So I was not surprised by the results of an extensive study conducted by the University of Guelph that says cheating is rampant in Canadian universities (CTV). The study said that over half of Canadians cheated to get through university, and three-quarters cheated to get through high school.

The problem is compounded with the poor grading system. I have seen A students get C's and C students get A's. Whether or not you've taken the material before doesn't matter, nor if you're taking care of disabled relatives at home. I've seen professors that read verbatim out of textbooks, and professors who give an F to a student who disagrees with their theories.

On the other hand, I've also seen professors who agonize over fairness in an unfair system. Once such professor was the late F. Ray Skilton from Brock University. Skilton used to give a special programming assignment to first year students. For the assignment, he would ask the students to write a program that would simulate multiple choice test results for a one semester class with 30 students. The program was to assign random answers to the tests and plot the resulting grades. "The university system, " said Skilton, "believes that a normal distribution is the ideal curve for a class. What do you think the students plotted for the assignment?" "A normal distribution," I replied. "Which means, " he continued, "the university ideal is a class where all students are randomly guessing and the professor has no influence. The university system endorses teachers who cannot teach. Professors who are effective are penalized."

The problems with Canadian universities was brought back to mind last month over the actions of Simon Frasier University. As many people know, most universities were founded by Christians as a way to promote education, communication, ethics and understanding. Simon Frasier announced last month that it would be removing Christian symbols from the school coat-of-arms on the grounds that foreigners might think the university had a religious affiliation (Canada.Com, Bruce Allen). The university chancellor argued so strongly against the change, on the grounds of tradition, that his office was allowed to keep using the old logo (Canada.Com). And, of course, there's the attempts by Carleton University to fund certain viewpoints and suppress others, most recently last month over abortion...something often used as a way to cheat life's responsibilities (KXMC).

The removal of religion from universities has often been accompanied by a removal of responsibility, accountability and consequences. This was the subject of Allan Bloom's 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind. An atheist, Bloom preferred religion in schools because it made students use their minds for more than memorizing dry facts in the moral vacuum of relativism.

In one of my favourite Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, Calvin announces that self-interest was the way to live one's life. Hobbes pushes Calvin into a mud puddle and says, "You were in my way." Calvin replies angrily that it should only apply to himself and not anyone else. Half of all university grads cheated their way to success. Do I want a doctor who cheated to perform surgery on me? Or a mechanic who cheated to fix my car? Do I want to entrust critical things to unethical, untrustworthy people? I imagine that most of those university cheaters would respond, "Only I get to cheat! No one else should!"

If an education is to mean anything, students must be trustworthy. If diplomas are to mean anything, they must be trustworthy. And if employees are to mean anything, they must be trustworthy. When a person cheats, they cheat themselves and everybody who went to that university.

It may be that universities are ignoring bad behaviour and accurate grades, but still I don't want to be known as a citizen from the country of cheaters.

January 15, 2007