Missing Practice
“Cheating” Don’t Enter Into It*
Yes this is a post about “cheating” and so called “cheating websites” and why I think they present, ultimately a fraud to their users. A terrible and corrosive lie.
But I don’t like to talk about “cheating” because it misnames the core problem and it creates a framing for that problem that allows others to sell solutions which, in my view, are also bad. Luckily, it is not necessary. Let’s talk instead about the problem that the term is sometimes used to name. Missing practice.
A life of practice
I have spent a lot of time in my life doing things that require practice to learn. Some of these became ways for me to make a living: juggling, teaching, research and writing. Others became ways to make my life and others’ lives more fulfilling: cooking, gardening, cycling, running, playing music. I came to all of these areas of activity as a learner. And I’ve never left.
That isn’t the case, alas, with other areas of my learning that required practice. Algebra, for one. Drawing, for another. These I did not practice so much. It is not that I don’t value those things or understand, at some level, that I would be better off if I could do them better. I know ultimately what it would take: practice. That’s it. But knowing that and doing the practice are not the same. Alas.
We learn what we practice. Human adaptability is remarkable this way. Add something to our routine that stresses us out a little one day and we might get irritated and thrown off. But add that same thing every day for a while and…we learn. Our bodies remodel themselves to adapt to the stress and handle it. We make new nervous system connections, new cells and tissues. New memories, new perceptual skills, and new understanding too.
But the opposite is also true. If we don’t practice, none of that happens. If we avoid the adaptive stress, we don’t change. We don’t learn. And if we avoid practice over and over again, our bodies begin to adapt to become better at that. We might lose those connections, perceptions, and structures that once made a particular activity easy to do.
So What Do I Think About “Cheating” Online?
I think the main problem with essay mills and other websites that sell essays to students or that allow them to get answers to homework from others is simply this: missed practice.
If someone else does your practice, they will learn. You will not. It’s that simple. And that applies to just about every subject area at the university level where I teach. It applies to algebra, to playing the cello, to writing. It applies to stoichiometry and ethical reasoning too. If you miss practice, you won’t get good at any of them.
And if you miss practice repeatedly, by getting someone else to write your essays on ethical reasoning instead of practicing yourself, you’ll get good at something else. Another flavor, perhaps the antithesis of ethical reasoning: rationalizing that behavior as worthwhile, as good, as ok at first and then as right. You will adapt.
“You are only cheating yourself.” You’ve heard that one, right? I prefer this: “what are you practicing to become?”
We’re All Adults Here
In the university, we teach adults. And so we can be frank with one another about motives, goals, and outcomes in the way that people who have experienced consequences of our choices can be with one another. Adults understand that there is no reason to expect that you can do something well — factor a polynomial? make a souffle? — that you’ve never practiced. Right?
We know.
This is why I do not make moral judgements of students who, pressed for time or out of desperation, search for a way to make it seem like they have not missed practice.
They know.
Instead I try to understand that behavior, what pressures they feel to make deception a rational choice, and also what caused them to miss practice in the first place. In my own classes, I work to create mutual trust such that rather than go that route — rather than try to hide the fact that they missed practice— they can level with me instead.
I tell them that I want to see their best work. And that my job as a teacher is to try and create the conditions so that I can see truly what they are capable of. Only this way can I see where they might improve, where they might go next. I try to own responsibility for those conditions and ask: what will it take to see you performing your best?
I’m lucky in my life to have some good teachers who do this for me, today. One I go to for bass lessons. He finds just the right combination of task and circumstance to let me find my limits. And then he shows me how I can work on those things that I want to do better. It is invigorating and humbling to do this, at age 51. To be vulnerable and willing not just to show what I can do, but to expose the very edges of my ability and where it frays. Doing that every week, as I do, in front of another person takes a lot of trust and care. But my teacher’s attentive ear is an amazing accelerator of my learning. And as much as I try to make him smile and nod, only when I make a mistake in front of him does he have the feedback he needs to give me the feedback I most need!
I’m a learner first, and then a teacher. Always. And forever. So if a student comes to me and says that their lives were too full to adequately practice, or that some other priorities got in the way. I understand. This happens to me. I know what it feels like to own up to that. As long as time and other circumstances permit — and at the university level they usually do — I try to imagine along with them how we might get back to learning, make room for practice, and create another chance for them to be at their best.
Internet sites that promise to “help” students study by facilitating avoiding practice will never do that. Students go to them in moments of vulnerability too. Not with trust. Often with shame. And what they offer, in the end, is a terrible lie. One that perhaps folks already know or maybe they haven’t confronted yet.
The lie is that missing practice doesn’t matter. That it doesn’t have to have an impact on your goals or your life. That it isn’t the first time you are practicing something else. Practicing to be someone else. Maybe it’s just the one time… Really? Why, then, is there a monthly subscription fee?
And look, folks will rationalize or deflect — try to explain away the lie — by talking about grades and grading and bias. But I did not mention those for a good reason. Grades are not learning. Grades are never sufficient to describe learning. And they are mostly not necessary either. Can they be useful? Yes, sometimes. As a kind of shorthand. But they can certainly be wrong too.
In the end, nobody is hurt by a false grade. What causes harm is missed practice.
If I show up to a cello recital having not done the practice to prepare, I think most everyone can guess what would happen. It might be uncomfortable, but it is unlikely to do serious harm to others. But wherever practice has consequences for other people, missed practice and misrepresented experience can do a great deal of harm. Not just for the learner but for others too.
What people call “cheating” does indeed present a societal moral hazard as it compounds. But it isn’t merely a lapse of character. It is one rooted in the absence of adaptation. And the subsequent collapse of trust in the apparatus of learning to prepare people — you, me, us — to be who we will need to be for one another. In that kind of world would you go to the symphony? hire someone to fix your high-pressure boiler? schedule a surgery? fly on an airplane?
What does that have to do with buying answers for a geography quiz online, you might ask? Buying answers is practice for something too. The question is practice for what?
*Yes, this is a Monty Python reference.
