Discipline or forgiveness

There was rampant cheating on an assignment I had handed out at this top-10 B-School. Students were required to submit report on a business case. It is not uncommon to have a student or two trying to smuggle someone else’s work in as their own. But this was at another level. As I read the 5^th file in my inbox, I had this feeling of deja-vu. By the 25^th, it was like being caught in an endless loop of reading the same stuff over and over. Groundhog Day came to mind. When I confronted them in class with the evidence, the list of excuses was quite entertaining. 

There is a process at this B-School to handle situations such as this. Visiting faculty is required to forward the offending material to the administration office and withhold the grades for these students. The admin office then sets up a committee to investigate the offence and hands out appropriate punishment, usually involving a make-up assignment in lieu of the one where the work was not honestly done. Seems like a fair process to me. 

Students seem to believe, going by their pleas, that the administration gets vindictive and drags out the investigation, keeping their results in limbo. “Should have thought about that before you tried to hoodwink the prof.,” I thought to retort, but herein lies the quandary. 

Clearly, there are some students who have done the work and others who have been parasites. In sending the case to the disciplinary committee, the honest are also put through the wringer. Worse, it is very likely that in some warped sense of fairness, the same punishment will be meted out to both the honest and the criminal.

 

Even so, I am inclined to follow due process in this case. In today’s world, it is not enough to be good and honest, it is also imperative that we are careful. If we have learned to not keep our baggage unattended at airports and railway stations, then we should have also learned by now, to not leave our work lying around for others to pilfer. In a more innocent age, we would happily agree to do a joint check-in because a stranger’s baggage was over the 20kg limit. It would be unwise to do so today, lest we find ourselves in the Bangkok Hilton, or worse, at Gitmo Bay.

There is another reason for my reluctance to be lenient. There is a pervading malaise in our educational institutions where sloppy work is acceptable, and cheating is considered par for the course. It is almost taken for granted that students today will cheat at every opportunity they can. These same cheats will then be more likely to try and wiggle out of doing their pay’s worth of work at the office, like Wally in ‘Dilbert’.

Do we, the middle class, owe it to our country to do a little something for discipline? As it is we do not try and correct the errant traffic violator, fearing the dreaded, “Aap se kya matlab?” We will shake our heads in disdain at the corruption in public life, at the incompetence all around us and at the Dilbertism at work; but do nothing about it even when there are processes in place to empower us to act. Often, it is because we are afraid of the powerful and their willingness to abuse their power. But what about those situations when we find ourselves in the position of power? Why do we as Indians still find it more convenient to look the other way? Forgiveness is glorified in our culture, for it supposedly makes a good person better.

But here’s the other thing about forgiveness. It also emboldens the wicked by reinforcing their belief that they can get away with anything.