Month: September 2017

When I think of ethical conduct, at least in an academic setting, academic dishonesty or cheating is the crux that commonly comes to mind. Though it is a relatively mundane topic, and rather cliché, I feel that (as a student) it is still worth discussing.

I admit that I may (or may not) have a different view on cheating than most. For much of my life, I honestly do not understand cheating, or deeply understand why people engage in it. I do not mean that I have a transcendent ideology or am too naive to understand that people do cheat, but rather I do not understand what it would take to make me cheat (again).

One of the first and last times I cheated was in 2^nd grade. I was young, and struggled mightily with spelling, a problem I still have today. I remember feeling pressure to do well, and not understanding, at least at the time, why I had such a difficult time spelling the word basket or country. To the 2^nd grade me cheating seemed to make sense. I could write the words down, and just copy them over. Simple. Easy. What could go wrong? Well, apparently looking into your desk for a prolonged period of time every 5 seconds is a bit obvious. (As a substitute teacher, and a GTA I can also attest that high school students and college students are just as obvious with their methods…)

To summarize what happened next… I got caught, I got in trouble, I cried, and I felt embarrassed. Looking back, I feel that I was just as embarrassed for feeling the need to cheat as I was actually getting caught. Roughly one year later I was tested and diagnosed with dyslexia and 15 years later I am still terrible at spelling. How did cheating help me? Short answer: It didn’t, and was never going to.

I cannot say for sure if my 2^nd grade mishap shaped how I view cheating, or if it was random events over the next few years, but by the time I got to high school I no longer saw the benefit of cheating. I think this can be, more or less, traced back to how I view learning. I don’t care about my grades as much as I care about understanding the information. If I would ever fail an exam I would be more disappointed in not understanding the material than getting the ‘F’. Honestly, I would rather get a ‘C’ grade and know that I understand an ‘A’ worth of the material than get an ‘A’ with the comprehension of a ‘C’.  Admittedly, I will argue for my grades, and do care about them, but more so when they do not directly represent my knowledge of a topic. My point is, I value understanding more than the grade.

This little shift in perspective, I think, makes it easier for me not to cheat. By valuing the process more than the result I have found that the result is almost always guaranteed. If you strive to understand all the material given to you (not crammed for an exam just to regurgitate it and forget it) odds are your exam will reflect a higher level of understanding, making the need for simple shortcuts superfluous. If I want an honest barometer of my work, then how would putting someone else’s work down tells me anything of value? How did cheating on my spelling test in 2^nd grade help me understand that my difficulty spelling has more to do with how I perceive and view words than my intelligence? The short answer is that it doesn’t, didn’t, and never would. Cheating doesn’t provide any real benefit, but a short term payoff and the placebo that you actually understand.

I recognize that there is immense pressure on each one of us to ‘do well’, and that sometimes cheating seems like a life line. However, in a profession where our mistakes directly impact people’s health admitting what you do not know is sometimes more valuable than what you do know. I believe that some of this world’s biggest issues can be attributed to powerful people unwilling to acknowledge their own deficiencies. I believe cheating, or other unethical activities, slowly begin to blur the lines between actual and perceived understanding as well as right or wrong.

As an exercise for our Graduate Engineering Ethics class, we recently conducted a mock press conference related to the Washington DC Lead Water Poising Disaster where each student played a role as a member from the major agencies involved. I was assigned the EPA, and for several days leading into the Mock Press Conference, I was struggling to decide how I wanted to approach the conference. On the one hand, I personally felt obligated to be as transparent as possible, but I somewhat felt that this would go against what I thought the EPA would actually do.

For a few days I went back and forth between what I thought I would personally do (tell as much of the truth as I could, knowing what I would have known at the time) and what I thought the EPA’s action would be (withhold information and deflect blame onto other agencies). During this internal debate, I was somewhat surprised by how strongly I felt that I knew the EPA would not be entirely honest in their account of the events. This could potentially be contributed to hindsight, knowing that the EPA did not handle this event particularly well, or maybe it is just human nature to deflect blame instead of take accountability. Regardless, I decided to be as true to myself as possible by being transparent and forthright with my statements and explanation of the events. I also wanted to see what would happen if an agency admitted outright that they made mistakes and were trying to rectify them as quickly as possible. After deciding on my course of action, reviewing the materials given to me, and formulating my talking points, I went into the press conference feeling relatively at ease. Granted it wasn’t my actual career on the line, but even if it was I didn’t see the benefits of deceit.

My opening remarks admitted wrong doing and poor oversight, acknowledged pain and suffering, but reiterated that the EPA was fundamentally created to serve the public and that ‘we’ would do our best to better realize this goal through our actions. After these remarks, I felt that the panelists interviewing us (interrogating might be a better word) were visibly accepting of my apology and surprised; they seemed to turn their probing questions (which I image would have been directed toward me), and scorn toward the agencies who were less honest with the presentation of their actions.

By admitting that I was (at least in some part) to blame, I seemed to provide vindication to the interviewers while those who lied were ‘attacked’ as if their lies were personal attacks on those asking the questions. This back and forth forced those who lied to stick to their guns, so to speak, perpetuating the lie-probing question-lie interaction that seemed to develop. Down the road, having these statements on record would force future discourse into similar molds.

This then raises the question, why, when given the opportunity, do agencies feel the need to attempt to deceive the public? The only reasonable explanation I can see is that individuals do not want to personally sacrifice their job or that the organization does not want to be tied to their mistakes. Though I understand the need for self-preservation, this necessity, in my opinion, should not transcend an engineer’s requirement to safely provide services to the public.

Organizationally, I fail to see how admitting mistakes is a better look than perpetuating dishonestly until they are publically found out. Instead of the handful of errors they originally committed, you are left with numerous instances where the organization is irrefutably wrong.

Agencies actively withholding information forces experts to aggressively push issues and fervently call out the agency’s wrong doings in public forums. I imagine, to the layman, this looks as if there are significant disagreements between the experts and the agencies that represent them, and likely leads to public distrust. Personally, when public opinion can sometimes be finicky, I would hate to see a national loss of respect for an important agency (such as the EPA) through the deliberate actions of our own field. However, if agencies are not willing to police themselves, and admit when they inevitably make a mistake, then there is no alternative but for experts to provide aggressive oversight regardless of the overarching ramifications on public opinion.

It is my opinion that due to the impact these agencies have, they will inevitably falter and proverbially get blood on their hands; however, I think it is better to clean your hands, then bathe in it.

Welcome to Blogs@VT Sites. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!