A Jeanne Site
A Jeanne Site
In what way can "cheating" be viewed as something other than a moral deficiency?
A. Cheating can be explained as a kind of magical invocation to protect the universe a student understands.
Congratulations! A is a Good Choice!
This answer reflects your understanding of the Preparatory Reading for this Seminar. If the student respects academic knowledge, and engages in positive transference to the object of academic discourse, then the student may be "acting out" her admiration and respect (love) of learning by trying to capture the magic potion of academic discourse, without actually understanding such discourse. This could lead to the student's copying academic language from an academic source, almost out of a kind of reverence. When we accuse such a student of plagiarism we are making the unstated assumption that the copying of answers is a rational behavior, when in fact it may be a magical potion kind of "acting out," which is not rational, and is not amenable to rational argument because for the student, the behavior is not rationally based. This argument can be found in Jonathan Lear's Open Minded in his chapter on "Acting Out" Transference, Chapter 4, as I recall.
Back to Pass? or Prepared? Choices on Cheating and Structural Violence