Home » Arts & Life » Cheaters never prosper

Cheaters never prosper

Cheating is always a concern at post-secondary academic institutions but recent studies suggest it may be more than a simple issue of wandering eyes.

Delroy Paulhus, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, has identified a link between academic cheating and sub-clinical psychopathy.

According to Paulhus, impulsive cheaters have four common characteristics consisting of erratic behavior, callousness, anti-social tendencies and manipulation. They also often possess a malevolent combination of high ambition and low moral inhibition.

According to James Côté, a sociology professor at Western, 60 to 80 per cent of students have cheated at least once in their lifetime, with arrogance as their primary motivation. He believes students at Western are no exception.

“[Our] culture has adopted characteristics where narcissism can be fairly functional to succeed, as well as sub-clinical levels of psychopathy — just take a look at our business leaders,” Côté  says.

The majority of people receive their moral code from the media, according to Côté. In a culture which idealizes the outlaw — a person who doesn’t have much of a conscience and gets what they want by any means necessary — people are apt distort the “Seven Deadly Sins” into the “Seven Virtues of Capitalism.”

“We live in a culture of academic disengagement, which is alive and well at Western,” Côté says. Where people are more concerned with the end credential rather than the learning aspect of education.”

—Vanessa Vernick

Follow the Gazette on Facebook and Twitter.