ENGLISH 5

SRJC MARCO GIORDANO, inst.

DIAGNOSTIC ESSAY: Your assignment is to write a letter to the editor of The Oak Leaf refuting the one below. You are to identify the main claims and attempt to refute the fallacious supports for them--or indicate their lack of support and credibility. Keep in mind that your letter will be read by a complex audience: the students who didn't cheat, the ones who did, and the community at large with an interest in the integrity of SRJC. You may also wish to discuss the image and purpose of college implied in the text.

A LETTER TO THE OAK LEAF.

(1) With a great show of moral indignation, it was recently revealed that 47 per cent of Santa Rosa Junior College students "cheated" on quizzes, prelims and examinations. Since then, readers of The Oak Leaf have been deluged with pious commentaries. Isn't it about time someone asked whether our modern Puritans aren't being overly righteous in this matter? A little giving or taking of information on an examination, or the use of a few cheat sheets, is not such a bad thing as some prudish minds would have us think. The very fact that so many loyal SRJC students indulge in this is evidence that it can't be very wrong.

(2) On the contrary, copying or the use of cheat sheets seems quite pardonable in many courses. In a course which requires remembering a lot of facts, why not use cheat sheets? It's only a difference of degree between using them and using some elaborate system for memorizing facts. Both are artificial means to help you remember.

(3) If we view the problem from another angle, we can see that what is so smugly denounced as "dishonesty" may actually reveal foresight--which is certainly a praiseworthy trait. If you were going into an unknown wilderness, you would take along the things you knew were needed for survival, wouldn't you? Taking cheat sheets into the unknown territory of an examination shows the same foresight. Now suppose also that one of your companions on this expedition desperately needed water of food or help of some sort. You'd do what you could for him, wouldn't you? Helping someone on an examination isn't any different.

(4) To put the question another way, suppose we define charity as "giving" to a person in need." Isn't one, therefore, performing an act of charity during an examination when one gives some "needy" person the desired information? The fact that one isn't giving money or food doesn't make the act any less charitable.

(5) If we inquires who is stirring up this fuss over alleged "cheating," we find it's the faculty--in other words, the persons who have selfish interests to protect. Obviously, they flunk students to make them repeat the course and thus to keep it filled.

(6) Finally, to take a long-range view, why should colleges get all excited over what they choose to call "cheating" when there are much more urgent things for them to worry about? When the very existence of our democracy is being threatened by terrorism, why fret about the source of Johnny X's information on an exam in ancient history?

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Email to: Marco Giordano