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In case you missed the recent controversy surrounding Lance Armstrong, let me sum it up in a nut-shell. Armstrong is an American, former professional road racing cyclist. He is also the founder of the organization Livestrong, which provides support for cancer patients. Between 1999 and 2005, Armstrong had won the Tour de France a record-breaking seven consecutive times. In 2012, he was stripped of those seven titles, and was issued a lifetime ban from competing in any sports that fall under the World Anti-Doping code, after the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) charged him for using performance-enhancing drugs. Earlier this year in January, Armstrong was also stripped of the bronze medal he won at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney for the same reason. Initially, when the charges were first place against him, Armstrong insistently and constantly denied the doping, professing that all accusations against him were nonsense. However, in a now notorious interview with Oprah this past January, Armstrong finally came clean and admitted that all of his Tour de France wins had been under the influence of performance enhancement drugs. However, he explained that he did not feel his wins would have been impossible without his use of the drugs, because of how many of his competitors were also doping. In a way, Armstrong viewed doping as simply a levelling of the playing field. Many felt this was an incomplete confession and lacked a true apology.
Prior to this controversy, Armstrong had garnered an enormous amount of fans due to his athletic abilities, however, for many he has been more than a professional road racing cyclist: he has been a symbol of hope, endurance and perseverance due to his battle with and survival from cancer, and his subsequent philanthropic endeavours. In other words, Armstrong transcended beyond sports and became a kind of hero for many people. That is why the recent Armstrong news was more than just a scandal in the sporting world; it was a personal disappointment and let-down for the people who perceived Armstrong as an embodiment of good morals because of his work with Livestrong. However, Armstrong still receives much support for the ideals that this organization was meant to embody. Furthermore, many suggest that the media’s portrayal of Armstrong as the new poster boy for cheating is too harsh a treatment. The fact is that many in the public do not want to marry the idea of Armstrong as a cheater with the idea of him as a symbol of endurance. This is because people often need a role model to look up to, and when our role models ‘fail’, it can make us question our values which, in general, people don’t often like to do.
The Armstrong controversy seems to reflect a society that puts such an emphasis on measuring success through status or winning that people feel like they constantly have to reach towards some impossible standard of success. This does not excuse cheating, but it addresses the more important issues present in the Armstrong story: Why do we cheat? Is ‘winning’ ever worth compromising your integrity? How common has cheating become?
For students, cheating is not a foreign notion. Though hopefully not a tactic used by the student-body, academia is rife with the pressure to achieve. Students go to school and face the stress of achieving simultaneous good grades in a variety of different subjects, all at once. There is the feeling that we have to compete with our peers for the best marks, so that we can get the best scholarships, and go to the best schools, and get the best jobs. It can feel like a race, except the finishing line is a blurry end-goal, and we often lose sight of what’s really important along the way. Education is a privilege and to cheat your way through it is to disrespect that privilege.
Though for many of us, school is important in order to have the necessary qualifications for our desired careers, the most primary and basic reason for seeking out education is to learn the truth about things, about how things work. Therefore, cheating is an especially profound wrong-doing in school, because it goes against the very core principles of academia. Conversely, it is also a signifier of how much pressure and stress students feel under in order to achieve more and more. The fact that a student would go to school in order to become educated about a subject, and then cheat in order to pretend they know about that very subject is paradoxical. But should all the blamed be placed on the student, or should the pressure to ‘get ahead’, and the stressful atmosphere of educational institutions be taken into consideration?
Oftentimes, students don’t even know they are cheating. With so much information at the touch of our fingertips, it can be easy to appropriate the work of another person without even realizing it. With the advent of technology, plagiarism has become increasingly easy, and this adds a further question to the idea of cheating: If you don’t mean to cheat, is it still cheating? Or is intent to cheat a necessary factor in being found guilty?
While I tend to have an optimistic view on society, it’s hard to avoid the fact that the news is often populated with stories of cheating: athletes take performance enhancing drugs; banks hide money, deceiving taxpayers and investors; reality TV shows feature people publically cheating on their partners; governments sometimes bail out specific, undeserving companies in order to protect their own interests; journalists and media-workers make up completely fabricated stories about public figures and then splash the stories on magazine covers as though they’re true. With large institutions such as these participating in the notion of cheating, it’s up to the development of our own ‘moral compasses’ to keep us honest and fair.
According to Bruce Weinstein, author of the book Is It Still Cheating If I Don’t Get Caught?, when it comes to cheating, honesty is key. If you come clean from the start and admit to cheating, people respect you more. If you wait to get caught out, people assume that you felt no morose for the misconduct.
University can be a fairly tumultuous experience in terms of studying and reaching for those high grades. Sometimes, students become so caught up in anxiety that they almost develop ‘tunnel-vision’, believing that one good grade is a make or break situation. Though failing a class is never a desirable outcome, it is not the end of the world and will not permanently shape the rest of a person’s life. However, in school, while we are constantly being told to figure out our lives and to come up with concrete plans for success, failure takes the shape of an insurmountable hurtle. It is this type of thinking that will lead a student to cheat rather than go to a teacher for help, or drop a class in order to have a more manageable semester.
Thinking of failure as the worst possible position to be in is what leads us to value winning, even unjust winning, over integrity. Furthermore, it’s what leads us to cheat. In the case of Armstrong, as reported by Rory Carroll for The Guardian, Armstrong admitted that he had lost himself in the “fairytale narrative of an athlete who battled back from testicular cancer to triumph in cycling’s most gruelling race, raise a beautiful family, and launch a cancer charity, Livestrong… it was this mythic perfect story. And it just wasn’t true.”
Cheating should not become a tolerated occurrence, but rather than merely pointing fingers at people who cheat as immoral or bad human beings, perhaps the priority should be understanding why people cheat, and that even people with the most upstanding principles can make poor judgement calls when under crushing pressure. Every situation clearly varies, and there are different levels of cheating, with different kinds of outcomes – the worst-case scenario being when cheating leads to the detriment of other people. Nonetheless, while cheating should be acknowledged and recognized as unjust and unfair way of going about through life, failure should too be acknowledged as an experience that does not diminish a person, and winning should not be promoted as the only value worthy of pursuit. The important thing is trying, and having the integrity to stay true to yourself and others while doing so.
To end with an inspirational quote: “When people cheat in any arena, they diminish themselves-they threaten their own self-esteem and their relationships with others by undermining the trust they have in their ability to succeed and in their ability to be true.” – Cheryl Hughes
Photo Sources
Photo Two: http://whatwillmatter.com/2012/02/worth-reading-rampant-cheating-in-schools/
Photo Three: http://blogs.studentlife.utoro…
Sources
http://www.guardian.co.uk/spor…
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