The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

But the story does not end there. We submitted the essays we purchased to WriteCheck.com, a website that inspects papers for plagiarism, and found that half of the papers we received were largely copied from existing works. We decided to take action and contacted the essay mills to request our money back. Despite the solid proof from WriteCheck.com, the essay mills insisted that they had not plagiarized anything. One company even threatened us with litigation and claimed that they would get in touch with the dean’s office at Duke to alert him to the fact that I had submitted work that was not mine. Needless to say, we never received that refund …

The bottom line? Professors shouldn’t worry too much about essay mills, at least for now. The technological revolution has not yet solved this particular challenge for students, and they still have no other option but to write their own papers (or maybe cheat the old-fashioned way and use a paper from a student who took the class during a previous semester).

But I do worry about the existence of essay mills and the signal that they send to our students—that is, the institutional acceptance of cheating, not only while they are in school but after they graduate.

How to Regain Our Ethical Health?

The idea that dishonesty can be transmitted from person to person via social contagion suggests that we need to take a different approach to curbing dishonesty. In general, we tend to view minor infractions as just that: trivial and inconsequential. Peccadilloes may be relatively insignificant in and of themselves, but when they accumulate within a person, across many people, and in groups, they can send a signal that it’s all right to misbehave on a larger scale. From this perspective, it’s important to realize that the effects of individual transgressions can go beyond a singular dishonest act. Passed from person to person, dishonesty has a slow, creeping, socially erosive effect. As the “virus” mutates and spreads from one person to another, a new, less ethical code of conduct develops. And although it is subtle and gradual, the final outcome can be disastrous. This is the real cost of even minor instances of cheating and the reason we need to be more vigilant in our efforts to curb even small infractions.

So what can we do about it? One hint may lie in the Broken Windows Theory, which was the basis of a 1982 Atlantic article by George Kelling and James Wilson. Kelling and Wilson proposed a critical component of keeping order in dangerous neighborhoods, and it wasn’t just putting more police on the beat. They argued that if people in a run-down area of town see a building with a few broken, long-unrepaired windows, they will be tempted to break even more windows and create further damage to the building and its surroundings, creating a blight effect. Based on the Broken Windows Theory, they suggested a simple strategy for preventing vandalism: fix problems when they are small. If you repair each broken window (or other misbehaviors) immediately, other potential offenders are going to be much less likely to misbehave.