Recently, I've been wrestling with what to do with cheating in my classroom. Do I name it and address it as such, or use other means to direct students toward what is right? Growing up in public school, my initial impulse is to call it out, and discipline for it...you've cheated, therefore you get an "F" on the assignment. There are a couple of things about the situation that make me question that impulse.

Did the student knowingly cheat?

This may sound like a silly question to begin with, but much of my class is made up of kids who started out in home school, and may have no knowledge of what it is to "cheat". I have found it remarkable the number of things that I, as an elementary teacher, have to state explicitly for my students. I am constantly encountering instances where the curse of knowledge is working against me, and where I expect students to know or understand something that I cannot recall a time of not knowing myself, yet there they are staring at me with blank faces. I'm finding that as a teacher, nothing can be taken for granted.

Now there have been one or two instances where a student has been sneaky, looking to see whether I'm watching before changing an answer, but this is the exception, not the rule. In these instances I address it with the student privately, after the fact. These instances are not my concern though. The answer here is clear. I try to lead them to acknowledge their sin, and to repent.

The instances I'm wrestling with are when students are not being sneaky, but may look over at their neighbor's spelling test to see how their spelling compares, or when they make corrections to their original spelling when they're supposed to rewrite the words a second time beside them for comparison, as the correct spellings are given. Is this really cheating if they don't know it to be such? Did I make it clear that they shouldn't do this? I thought that I had, but maybe I wasn't explicit and trusted that everyone knew what was appropriate.

By calling out cheating, are we leading the student into sin?

I've heard the critique that not wanting to call looking at a neighbor's test cheating sounds a lot like permissive parenting, where the child is just expected to encounter truth on their own without the parents guiding & instructing them.

I believe that the law can be both a teacher (Galatians 3:24), and a stumbling block (Romans 7:7-11). If I explicitly say "Looking at your neighbors paper is cheating, don't do that." or "Correcting your original set of words when I give the correct spelling is cheating, don't do that either." I have now given a command and, as their authority, have placed a stumbling block before the student in two ways:

  1. An action that might have been innocent, can now be innocent no longer. I've told the students not do it, and if they do it again then they are not respecting the authority that God has placed over them (e.g., Honor thy father and mother, and in this case honor thy teacher since the parents have delegated some of their authority, allowing me to operate in loco parentis).
  2. I've planted the idea of cheating into the mind of the student, and they may think "If I do this, and get away with it, then I'll get ahead more quickly." We are tempted to do that which we've been commanded not to do. Augustine describes this in his Confessions: "I loved my own error— not that for which I erred, but the error itself."

What does it mean to cheat?

While discussing my dilemma with a fellow teacher, and making a case for why I'm hesitant to call it out as "cheating", and make a big deal about it, she asked what "cheating" even means. Having recently been on a kick myself to look up the meanings of words, I was shocked that I hadn't thought of this!

According to Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), cheating means "Defrauding by deception; imposing on." If we look up defrauding in the same dictionary, it means "Depriving another of his property or right by deception or artifice; injuring by withholding wrongfully what is due."

Here we see that cheating involves another. It involves a violation of the second greatest commandment, "Love thy neighbor as thyself." In what we call cheating in the classroom, who is being defrauded?

Now some might suggest that cheating would violate one of the Ten Commandments, "Thou shalt not lie," but if we look closely this is an oversimplification that we parents often teach our children. The actual command is "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor." (Exodus 20:16)

Again, love of neighbor is the focal-point. If a lie saves a life in the Underground Railroad or in Natzi Germany, is it sin?

So where do we go from here?

I am comfortable calling sin sin, and dealing with it as such in my classroom. I however, am still not convinced that looking at a neighbors paper, or fixing a misspelled word is sin, unless the student is being sneaky, or I have told them not to do it. Do I think these actions are wise, no, but that is not the same thing as sin. If a student copies off of their neighbor and moves on to the next spelling list prematurely, then they have harmed no one but themselves.

Rather than putting a stumbling block before my students, or giving them a long list of rules, I try to keep my list of rules short and nurture the heart. In the garden of Eden, Adam and Eve lived in a world full of yes, with just one no. (Genesis 2:16-17) There were ten laws that God gave Moses on Mount Sinai. (Exodus 20:3-17) Jesus later said that these could be simplified into just two. (Matthew 22:37-40)

My focus is on showing students the reason they are there (to learn and grow in wisdom & knowledge), to cultivate a love for that, and to show their own actions can prevent that from happening.