The Left Has a Problem with Cheaters

You can't right the wrongs of society if you allow phonies to claim all the benefits

Yesterday, the Free Press published a piece about how online testing, which was instituted to make things easier for busy students and because of the need to continue college educations during the pandemic, has led to massive cheating by students. I don’t think this surprises anyone. But here are some other nuggets from that story:

1. An onsite test, taken on a computer, where “No one checked IDs to make sure the students enrolled in the class were the same students taking the final.” (Unsurprisingly, some students cheated.)

2. Students at Dartmouth are given two chances to take quizzes. Students use a system where everyone systematically fills in answers on the first go-around, so that everyone can get the answers correct the second time.

3. One professor reports that while an application to take an exam late (due to an auto accident, death in the family, or something) used to be very rare, last term 7 out of 90 students requested it.

This comes on top of a bunch of other controversies that one might loosely attach to the same genre:

4. Internet commentator Matthew Yglesias has been harshly criticized from the Left for detailing how lax enforcement of DC traffic laws, especially those that allow people to drive in DC with temporary, paper license plates, and the failure to collect fines, has led to dangerous speeding, car theft, and other crime.

5. Accommodations for learning and other disabilities, such as, especially, allowing students to take college entrance exams without time limits, has led to massive amounts of rich people gaming the extra time rules with fake diagnoses.

6. The Operation Varsity Blues scandal, involving celebrities and other rich people getting their kids into elite colleges by faking athletic talent.

7. Rachel Dolezal, Jessica Krug, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the late Sacheen Littlefeather, and all the other people faking racial or ethnic identities to attain clout.

8. Billions of dollars in fraud in COVID aid programs.

9. Dangerous assigned male criminals transitioning to womanhood to get into women’s prisons, sometimes committing sexual assault or impregnating inmates, and detransitioning back to men upon release.

10. The “emotional support animal” program for air transportation, which the federal government had to severely cut back after it turned out pet owners across the country were falsely claiming to have mental disorders so they could fly their pets in the cabin for free.

What do all these things have in common? Well, basically, that when you try to provide benefits or accommodations for truly needy people, other folks are going to try to fake it. Because we’re human beings. Because humans aren’t particularly honest. Because middle class morality is a luxury, as both George Bernard Shaw (through the character of Alfred Doolittle in Pygmalion) and Chris Rock (“a man is only as faithful as his opportunities”) have observed in different contexts.

But the point is, fakery is inevitable. And the public does not like it. One reason the federal government eventually ignored the disability rights movement and made it a pain in the butt to bring a support animal on an airplane is because the other passengers, and especially the people who obeyed the rules and paid the fees to ship their pets, were pissed off when they saw some Labradoodle who was nobody’s “support animal” in a vest that was obviously bought off the Internet, bothering the other passengers and always threatening to take a pee or a dump on the flight.

Indeed, people who actually do the right thing hate fakers especially. Imagine being either a person who went through several visits with mental health professionals and appointments with dog trainers and adoption services, to obtain a service animal, or a person who had a pet and paid $450 for all the fees and health certificates and special crates to take her dog on the plane legally. What would you think when you saw these people obviously faking it?

And the result is, the program got cut back and now it’s even a little harder for people who do need support animals to take them on planes. I sympathize with those people. But I would also say that this cut-back was a necessary step.

You see, to have programs like this at all, you have to police cheating. Unless you do so, you create immense resentment among people who are doing the right thing, and even worse, you create what I like to call the Baseball Steroids Problem. That problem is that once enough people are cheating, even honest people have to cheat. If you were hitting singles the old fashioned way in the 1990’s, you couldn’t compete with all the guys at your position who were suddenly hitting 25 home runs a year. So as a result, everyone in baseball ended up using steroids. This happened in track and field too- Ben Johnson was disqualified in the 1988 Olympics, but 8 of the 9 people on the starting line in the 100 meters dash (the event he was disqualified from) turned out to have been using performance enhancing drugs. Once you find out your competitors are doing it, you have to do it too.

The Free Press article describes exactly that dynamic happening in colleges. If there’s widespread cheating, and you are the ethical student who insists on doing it honestly, you’re a chump, and you feel like one. You end up at the bottom of the curve even if you were the smartest kid in the class.

So why do I say this is the Left’s problem? For a couple of reasons. First, simply because the Left, more than the Right, tends to be the side that supports these sorts of programs. (To be clear, there are areas such as especially veteran’s benefits that Righties do support, and faking veteran’s status is a significant problem.)

But second, because a lot of people on the Left dislike enforcement mechanisms. For instance, take the Yglesias DC traffic enforcement issue. His critics simply do not want someone with too many tickets to lose his car. It might be his lifeline! He might simply be too poor to afford the tickets! Similarly, the Free Press article talks about the understandable desire of academics not to have to become traffic cops sussing out cheating and enforcing rules against it.

And of course, when you get to stuff like learning disabilities and trans stuff, there’s an extreme hatred of gatekeeping among the Groups who represent these issues within the Left coalition. The last thing trans activists want, for instance, is people making determinations as to whether trans people are actually sincere in their transitions. That could be a disaster for their movement. But that leads them to a position where prison officials are afraid to question the sincerity of people who are clearly transitioning solely because they want to have sex with cis women in the women’s prison, or worse, because they want to rape them.

The key point is that if you want a society where we do as much as possible to level the playing field for disadvantaged people, this sort of enforcement against cheaters and fakers is actually essential. It might suck that a mentally disabled youth might have to document that he isn’t faking his need for extra time, but this is how we make sure that rich kids who just want an unfair advantage on the tests can’t get one. It might suck that occasionally a sincere person who discovers their gender while in prison might not be permitted an immediate transfer, but this is how we protect cis women inmates, already a vulnerable population, from rape. And it might suck that we are taking some transportation away from some working class people in the DC area, but this is how we ensure that people don’t decide that they don’t have to obey the traffic laws at all because the enforcement will never happen.

It’s something the Left should care a lot about, and as of now, it doesn’t.