What is Cheating?

Who can define cheating at Harvard? Many students admit they can’t pinpoint the meaning of the term. Does a blowjob on the side count as cheating? What about hastily copying your roommate’s Core problem set a few minutes before class? Merriam-Webster can’t tell students what cheating means in their daily lives. But in this Scrutiny, a number of past and current students—whose real names have been changed in this story—give FM their own accounts of how

cheating affected their Harvard careers.

50 Miles, One Unusual Way to Stay With Your Lover

Judith Brandt once waltzed onto “Crossfire” and flatly informed the CNN-watching public that she wasn’t going to obey their stodgy rules. Judith Brandt is a cheater. She wasted away 12 years in a less than happy marriage, and today admits she is the “other woman” in another man’s marriage. But Brandt doesn’t think there is anything wrong with this. She’s scoured tomes of biology and anthropology, only to conclude that cheating is a healthy impulse.

Late this summer, Brandt’s book, The 50-Mile Rule, brought her philosophy to the general public. She says her work uncovers the secret lives of adults, in which everyone but the least confident engages in the occasional infidelity on the side. She sought to explain the method behind smart cheating, telling future mistresses to always keep a 50-mile distance between them and their married lover.

But in college many of us don’t have that luxury of distance, and yet we still cheat. At Harvard, like on so many other campuses, cheating is the shadow institution that sustains some of our relationships. Brandt argues that the culture of Harvard might encourage cheating to a degree many of us aren’t even aware of.

There is a certain type of person who is drawn into the underworld of unfaithful relationships. It’s the girl who seeks perfection in a lover; it’s the guy who always likes to feel in control. At Harvard we know competition and many of us know how to prioritize ourselves—our needs—above all. Brandt says Harvard couldn’t be a more ideal breeding ground for the psyche of the cheater—and looking at the real-life stories, it’s hard to disagree.

“I can’t even describe the rush I felt the first time he stuck his hand down my shirt,” says Monica, a senior, as she describes the first time she cheated on a (now) ex-boyfriend. “I’d been having this miserable semester and this guy down the hall from me just kept flirting with me. He was like my fucking forbidden fruit. I knew I needed a release and somehow I felt like I just had to do this. It was something I needed for myself—and my sanity.”

Monica’s story is far from an aberration. For all too often the story of cheaters is a story of self-interest above all. Monica says she cheated in order to relieve a certain emotional pain, but many cheaters say they became unfaithful because of a sense of worth and entitlement.

“Almost everybody cheats as some point, that’s just a fact of life,” Brandt says. “But there are some people who are drawn to these behavioral patterns more than others. It’s those who are imbued with a high sense of personal value. You see the world as your oyster, and you think there is nothing wrong with taking everything that world has to offer.”

Brandt didn’t attend Harvard, and her national book tour never brought her within these Ivy-covered gates. But somehow the description she gives of the cheater seems to hit particularly close to home. Many of us were brought up to believe that we were special. At Harvard, this sensibility infuses much of what we do and causes many of us to think that our hard work should reap substantial rewards. When cheaters among us whisper about their indiscretions, their stories usually fit within this framework.

When Jon, a sophomore, decided to cheat on his first girlfriend a few years ago, he says he was already accustomed to the idea that there were some things he simply deserved. He had a cute little girlfriend at the time, one that he says looked particularly tantalizing in wet T-shirts by the pool. But when it came down to it, his itsy-bitsy girlfriend just didn’t understand the needs of someone like Jon.

“Here’s my rule,” he says, recalling his lofty teenage standards. “Head equals no cheating, and I wasn’t getting head.”

Jon admits today that cheating probably was not the noble thing to do and openly says that he feels “really bad” about how the relationship eventually turned out. But for many students like Jon, cheating seems to be the product of seeing yourself—and your needs—as important enough to break the rules.

Gabby, who graduated in 2000, says her days as a Harvard girl only perpetuated a strong sense of self-worth that continues to impact her relationships.

“There’s a sort of elitism when you go to Harvard and even more so when you leave,” says Gabby, who admits to cheating regularly on her post-college boyfriend. “I’m in New York now and I always notice this real sense of expectation. There’s always this bare minimum standard that all of us should be able to land a guy who went to an Ivy League school, will hook up with us, treat us well and take us out to nice clubs. When you’ve made it through Harvard, you sort of feel like you deserve that.”

Luke, a senior, talks about his friend, Isabelle, the way an older brother talks about his sister when he describes how Harvard nearly ruined her self-confidence. It wasn’t until Isabelle engaged in cheating—the ultimate act of selfishness—that she was able to regain her footing at school.

“Harvard—the stress of it—was all pretty hard on Isabelle,” Luke explains. “She came here really alive and capable, but then she sort of lost a lot of spunk. She became really concerned with survival, which for her was staying in school and not flipping out.”

This new interest in not flipping out resulted in Isabelle settling for a boyfriend who Luke describes as “a pretty big tool.” Luke says that Isabelle spent countless hours with her boyfriend each week, despite the fact that he never made any effort to really get to know any of her friends, forgot her birthday and didn’t even hook up with her on a regular basis.

Luke says that many of Isabelle’s problems began to abate when she started cheating on her boyfriend, having casual sex with Luke in the afternoons after class. He says Isabelle seemed to become a lot more confident when she began to indulge some of her needs.

For Marcus, a junior, the story of self-confidence doesn’t revolve around himself. When he talks about cheating he does so with a breathy quietness because he’s speaking about his more charismatic partner, the one who started his relationship down the road to infidelity.

Marcus met his drama-queen Harvard boyfriend in a club in Boston when Marcus was still a student at a different New England college. When the two went back to their hometowns for the summer, Marcus says intense infatuation made it hard for him to be apart from his new beau. “I was pretty much immediately enraptured with him,” Marcus says. “I went to visit him three times in the summer, and one time I even drove my parents’ car 12 hours just to see him. My parents didn’t even know where I really was.”

But summer loving turned sour the day after Halloween, when the boyfriend broke a planned clubbing date, claiming that he had suddenly begun to feel ill. Marcus called his room later and found he’d gone out. After a few brief perusals of the gay clubs on Lansdowne Street, Marcus found his boyfriend with someone he’d met on the Internet.

When Marcus looks back on the experience, he says he attributes much of the cheating to his ex’s general self-absorption. “I think I was drawn to him initially for the same reasons he cheated on me,” Marcus says. “I was a little bit lonely, and he had this incredible personality and was always really entertaining. I found out later though that he was completely self-important.”

Marcus says he eventually went back to the boyfriend, only to discover that his partner’s self-obsession just wouldn’t fade. This was clear to Marcus when the boyfriend began spending “hours and hours and hours” obsessing over an audition tape he wanted to submit to “The Real World” in the spring. Near the end of their relationship, Marcus says he began cheating on the boyfriend out loneliness.

“He thought he was so wonderful and he couldn’t understand why anyone would ever cheat on him,” Marcus says. “He was so angry with me he screamed at me for hours and tried to slam my fingers in the door.”

Talk about relationships is infused with the language of sports. Guys are players, and many females cause them endless angst by playing games. When it comes to cheating in relationships, Brandt sounds like a Science B-29 textbook as she repeats over and over again in The 50-Mile Rule that cheating comes down to the art of winning.

Brandt’s basic argument—something she calls “the most profound statement one could make on cheating”—hinges on several key points. Brandt argues that when women are confronted with men, on a biological level they are always forced to subtly consider their nurturing potential. Women inherently are attracted to men who appear able to serve as good fathers—a criterion that often leads women to choose men that appear healthy, attractive and able to provide financial support.

Men, on the other hand, are much less stingy in how they dole out their affections, more prone to hear biological signals telling them to reproduce (or hook up) with as many people as possible. On this subconscious level, men try to hook up with the most attractive woman they can get.

“These biological concepts are the reality, and I think if people understand that, it explains a lot of why men act the way they do and women act the way they do,” Brandt says. “Of course, not every guy is out there catting around and not every woman is in it for her own self-interest. But I think about my own life, and I think we can all think about our lives in this sense, and some elements of the argument seem to apply. In my case, so many misunderstood one-night stands can be explained in these terms.”

The environment at Harvard has even been pointed to as a breeding ground for female-female competition of the exact type that Brandt emphasizes in her argument. When 19 girls founded the Seneca in 1999, they saw these competitive tendencies—and the problems they created—as one the key problems in the Harvard community. “One goal [of the Seneca] is that we want to create a support system for women and really get to know each other in non-competitive setting,” a hopeful Alexandra B. Seru ’01, one of the original co-presidents of the Seneca, told FM in 1999.

However, many female social clubs later, the problem of competition between females at Harvard still exists, and Brandt says competition between females is the driving force behind environments saturated with cheating.

At Harvard, some females see cheating as a way to succeed in the dating pool. Lily, one senior, says that she sees competition play out most simply by the way guys treat girls who are already involved with someone else.

“Boys love going for people who aren’t single; they just love the competition,” Lily says. “Here I think a lot of people define you by who you’re dating. You don’t want to be single because guys can just smell the desperation on girls when they’re not with someone. It’s better to keep up the front, even if it’s just a front.”

But when the cheating is no longer a front, and is well known on campus, it can often become a source of competition between cheating-heavy couples. When Marcus was still with his boyfriend, he said the competition between them drove them both to cheat. Marcus said he sometimes felt expendable to his boyfriend and wanted to prove that he too could attract someone from outside their partnership.

“There are so many games in relationships, and that’s why they always feel so unnerving,” Marcus says. “I think relationships with a lot of cheating or flirting in them always make it feel like one person is ahead of the other one. You never want to be in that position where you feel like you care way more, or don’t have as many options as the other person.”

For Lily, the whole dating scene is in many ways an endless competition. She says she first started cheating on her boyfriend when she realized that the new guy would be able to offer her many more fun social opportunities. After that it became a constant comparison of the two in her mind.

“I’m going to be honest, I think the new guy I’m dating is just a great trade-up,” she says. “The reason why you cheat is always to trade in, isn’t it?”

Everything I Needed To Know I Learned in Expos (Or Did I?)

First-years learn the ins and outs of only one kind of academic cheating. Says Assistant Dean of the College David B. Fithian, the secretary of the Administrative Board, “As you know, each Expos class should spend at least one session or more discussing how to improve students’ usage of source material and their ability to use citations correctly.”

But at Harvard a lot of cheating goes on in classes where papers are not involved. Several computer science teaching fellows told FM that every year a sizable chunk of the students who are forced to take a year’s leave of absence come from the CS department. And in Science Cores and introductory economics classes many students say they leisurely copy homework assignments without thinking of their actions as actual cheating. There is a lack of knowledge about the definition of cheating on campus, and that ignorance—as students who have been Ad-Boarded can attest—proves to be quite dangerous.

Many students who cheat in humanities classes say that they know exactly what they are doing. We revisit Luke. Luke admits that, as a first-year at Harvard, he constantly engaged in cheating with his roommates. “It’s sort of amazing to me sometimes how easy it is to get away with stuff in Harvard exams,” Luke says. “There’ll be 300 people in a single room, and only four little people in the front looking for cheaters. When you’re taking those big freshmen classes, it just becomes so easy to scribble a few things in a blue book and then place it on the empty seat between you and your roommate. If the roommate waits long enough to pick it up, he’ll never get caught.”

Luke is like many of Harvard’s academic cheaters, who admitted to romantic cheating after being contacted for an interview just on academics. With that in mind, listen to what Luke has to say about his belief that in many cases his interests are important enough to justify bending the rules.

“I sometimes think I should feel bad, but honestly the way they work us here, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it,” he says. “I think you pick and choose the rules that should apply to you in some cases, and in this case, I just think we can’t be expected to learn all this stuff.”

Luke’s attitude toward the rules was echoed by another student who cheated in his first year, Bobby. Bobby, who is now a junior, has a weakness, and that weakness is Español. After weeks and months of suffering through homework that took him hours and was hopelessly incorrect, Bobby decided to have his roommate do his homework for him. “I was basically just trying not to fail, and I justified my cheating by the fact that I thought it was a dumb requirement,” Bobby says. “It’s really easy to rationalize as well because you know a lot of people do it, and in the end, it’s victimless.”

Those who engage in a more profound sort of cheating become their own victims. Jacob, a student who was forced to take a year off from school after he was Ad-Boarded for turning in a sophomore literature paper that he copied off the Internet, says he always knew he was completely culpable.

“It was bad, I admit, but I never realized I’d get caught,” says Jacob, who ultimately graduated in 2001. “My roommates knew that I was cheating, too, and that was the real problem.”

Jacob says his roommate had a sense of a “culture of honor” at Harvard, and decided to turn Jacob in to his senior tutor when it became apparent that the literature professor was not going to detect his indiscretion.

“My roommate had begun to hate me because I was doing a lot of coke all the time in that room,” Jacob says. “It angered me, though, because even though I was honest, the entire proceeding was filled with dishonesty. My senior tutor denied to me that my roommate was the one who turned me in, and it wasn’t until years later that I found out who was responsible. That sort of dishonesty has angered me for years.”

When academic transgressions occur in non-humanities fields, many students say that it becomes much more difficult to determine the line between what is permissible and what can’t be accepted. According to Fithian, professors and TFs have the responsibility of making policies clear when the students aren’t dealing with traditional paper-writing plagiarism. But many students say that policies in some Core courses are far from clear.

“I’m taking a QR class right now,” says Tobenna D. Anekwe ’03. “And to be honest, I have no idea whether we are allowed to work together on problem sets or not.”

One student, Manny, who was forced to take a year off for academic dishonesty, says it was this exact sort of confusion that came into play in his case. When Manny was a sophomore he took a Science Core, and one week he cheated on a problem set—the sort of assignment that would only count as a check-plus or check-minus—by simply copying a few answers from a friend who sent him her problem set in an e-mail. Within a few days of turning it in, Manny found himself before the Ad Board, and soon he was forced to take a year off.

“I knew that I was cheating when I did it, I guess, but to me it seemed all right as a one-time thing, since this was just a Core class,” Manny says. “All this problem set was doing was helping me to prepare for the final. The whole issue really doesn’t make much sense to me to this day.”

For many students the idea of leaving school for a year for copying a single problem set seems ridiculous.

“That’s unbelievable to me,” says Nina, who is currently a junior. “I took ‘History of Life’ and I don’t think I ever did a single problem set. And when you take Ec 10, everybody just sort of congregates in the Science Center and copies each other’s work. I’d say I copied maybe eight of the 10 problem sets for that course.”

Harpaul A. Kohli ’02-’03, president of the Physics Club, says that in many non-humanities courses, students usually know the cheating policy based on the culture of the department. Kohli says that in the math department, students are encouraged to work together “almost to the point of sharing answers.” But this ultimately is a function of the way departments like math and physics handle the curve.

“In the math department, there is no fixed grading system, so everyone is in it together,” Kohli says. “In the math department, if everyone does well, no one does worse, and that culture of trust really encourages less cheating and more collaboration.”

In departments like computer science, however, students are told frankly that any sort of collaboration will not be accepted. CS 50, in fact, is notorious for using a program that checks student problem sets for cheating, and results in a high number of students who are kicked out.

But even when math and science departments have clear policies on cheating, academic dishonesty in these departments is somehow still harder to pinpoint. Often there really is only one way to solve a math or physics problem, and professors are unable to prove cheating when students have duplicate answers. But this was not true in the case of Jennie C. Lin ’03. When Lin was a first-year, someone in an organic chemistry course copied her work during a midterm. Her creatively incorrect answers immediately gave the cheater away. Lin recounts the story of the professor calling her one morning and thanking her for her ineptitude. “He told me that if I had answered everything correctly there’s no way he would have ever known,” says Lin, who now studies English. But the entire situation changed the way Lin understood cheating at Harvard.

“Cheating is one of those things I always romanticized as acts of desperation, and it seemed like everyone around me was pretty damn smart already without cheating,” Lin says. “In high school, someone’s always walking around telling you to cover up your test with your arm, but here the testing scene is pretty laid-back.”

In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, John Putnam extols the value of his name, telling others that he can’t let dishonesty tarnish his stellar reputation. In the crucible of academic pressure that exists at Harvard, however, many students put their names on the line every semester in the interest of making the grade. Many would argue that they don’t even have the chance to keep their shreds of honesty, as Harvard doesn’t always do a good job making it clear what acts count as an academic transgression.

If the definition of cheating remains unclear, students say the Ad Board does not deal with cases of academic dishonesty in a nuanced way. For students like Manny, this issue is especially biting. “I remember when I was preparing for my case I was looking through student handbooks trying to see if there were any loopholes for cases like mine,” Manny says. “What really struck me, though, was just how unfair it seemed that students who cheated in cases like mine, and students who plagiarized their thesis, and even students who at that point committed a rape would receive the same punishment as I did. To me that seems completely unfair.”

In the current Undergraduate Council presidential election, Rohit Chopra ’04 is running on a platform that includes pushing for student presence on the Ad Board. Manny, when he hears of this proposal, says he doesn’t think such a thing would ever be productive in any sense, as he “wouldn’t want kids who are tight with the administration looking at student cases.”

Fithian, who says he often hears discussion of adding a student member to the Ad Board, seems to offer a similar prognosis. “I’ve talked to others of my colleagues at schools with honor codes and my sense is that often students are harsher on their peers,” Fithian says. “At UVA, for instance, if you cheat at all, you’re usually out. Our sense is that sometimes when it comes to cheating, good people make mistakes. We don’t believe that most students that are caught cheating are irredeemable.”