When Your Professor Asks You to Cheat: A Conversation with Dr. Joel Heng Hartse

The Academic Life

We all know that academic integrity matters. But do we all agree on what academic integrity really is? Somewhere beyond the nuances and gray areas is blatant cheating. And that’s always wrong . . . but what if your professor asks you to cheat? This episode explores:

• How well students understand academic integrity.
• Why Dr. Heng Hartse designed a course that required cheating.
• What he and his students learned from it.
• How it feels to cheat, and why some students feel forced to do it.
• A discussion of the article “What Happened When I Made My Students Cheat.”

Our guest is: Dr. Joel Heng Hartse, who teaches at Simon Fraser University. He wrote Sects, Love, and Rock and Roll (Cascade Books, 2010); Dancing About Architecture is a Reasonable Things to Do (Cascade Books, 2022); co-authored with Jiang Dong Perspectives on Teaching English at Colleges and Universities in China (TESOL Press, 2015); and is the author of the article “What Happened When I Made My Students Cheat,” published in Inside Higher Ed (November 9, 2022).

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.

Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:

• Intellectual Appetite, by Paul Griffiths
• “Dishonest Behavior in the Classroom and Clinical Setting: Perceptions and Engagement” by Emily L. McClung and Joanna Kraenzle Schneider
• “Literacy Brokers and the Emotional Work of Mediation,” by Ligia Ana Mihut, in Literacy and Composition Studies, volume 2, number 1 (2014)
• Jeffrey Moro’s blog article “Against Cop Shit”
• The New York Times article on the aftermath of “Harvard cheating scandal”
• This podcast on learning from your failed research

Welcome to The Academic Life! On the Academic Life channel we embrace a broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Find us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN.

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