Is there a specific category of people who cheat?

Cheating, by definition, is an act dishonestly or unfairly to gain an advantage. Now, this seems straightforward but I just wanted to get the exact definition to clarify, as the issues we will be exploring in the following paragraphs can be quite confusing. There have been many debates and research conducted to support or oppose the argument as stated in the title. This article will seek to explore the rift in opinions concerning cheating.

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Freakonomics is a book written by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt. As you can see from the title, it has got quite a bit to do with economics. So let’s just dip into that for a second. The only concept you have to understand is “incentive”; it’s probably familiar to many already, but allow me to explore it once more as many know of it just on the surface. An incentive is a motivator. Traditional incentives are rewards for certain actions and thereby yielding the desired outcome. The effectiveness of incentives has changed as the needs of Western society have evolved.

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Dubner and Levitt have conducted a few interesting pieces of research to find a common ground between different groups of people we often do not group together. The one I will be exploring in this article is a research comparison between sumo wrestlers and a school teacher. What could be the possible similarities? Well apparently, there’s one. They both “lie”. Everyone pretty much lies but this is on to a different extent. Lying leads to cheating and cheating can be illegal at times. And guess what? It’s illegal in this situation as well.

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First, a school teacher. Before I go on, I am most certainly not implying that school teachers cheat the system all the time. To be fair, most teachers are amazing and try to lead their students to what’s best for them. But in this article, we are only exploring the very extreme end of it, so just keep that in mind as I go on. Schoolchildren, of course, have had incentives to cheat for as long as there have been tests. But high-stakes testing has so radically changed the incentives for teachers that they too now have added reason to cheat. A high-stakes test is a test with important consequences for the test taker. Passing has advantages, small ones such as permission of proceeding to the next grade along with bigger ones such as a high school diploma, a scholarship, or a license to practice a profession. With high-stakes testing, a teacher whose students test poorly can be censured or passed over for a raise or promotion. In Singapore, there is a system known as KPI, which can promote teachers to drive students, even those who are less academically inclined. If the entire school does poorly, school funding can be withheld; if the school lacks fundings, the teacher stands to be fired. And in the United States, those who are fired first are those whose students did not receive high grades. High-stakes testing also presents teachers with some positive incentives. If his or her students do well enough, they might find themselves praised, promoted, and even in a wealthier state: the state of California at one point introduced bonuses of US$ 25,000 for teachers who produced big test-score gains. And if a teacher were to survey this newly incentivized landscape and consider somehow inflating her students' scores, she just might be persuaded by one final incentive: teacher’s cheating is rarely looked for, hardly ever detected, and just about never punished, as it is incredibly hard to detect and punish every single one of them. Before we go explore some of the brazen and subtle ways of cheating the teachers have demonstrated, I brought one rather humorous incident: A fifth-grade student in Oakland recently came home from school and told her mother that her amazing teacher had written the answers to the state exam right there on the chalkboard. Such instances are certainly rare, for placing your fate in the hands of thirty rather clueless witnesses doesn't seem lịke a risk that even the worst teacher would take. (The Oakland teacher was fired.) If you were willing to erase your students' wrong answers and fill in the correct ones, you probably wouldn't want to change too many wrong answers. That would be a tip-off. You probably wouldn't even want to change answers on every student's test-another tip-off. Nor, in all likelihood, would you have enough time, because the answer sheets have to be turned in soon after the test is over. So what you might do is select a string of eight or ten consecutive questions and fill in the correct answers for, say, one-half or two-thirds of students. You could easily memorize a short pattern of correct answers, and it would be a lot faster to erase and change that pattern than to go through each student's answer sheet individually. You might even think to focus your activity toward the end of the test, where the questions tend to be harder than the earlier ones. In that way, you'd be most likely to substitute your correct answers for the wrong ones. Here’s a quiz for you just for a little fun: which teacher cheated and who didn’t?

Class A

Class B

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No sumo wrestler has been punished for cheating. Even the Japanese Sumo Association officials who occasionally come in contact with it and decided to ignore it, saying that it is a false accusation of losing players, who are often repressed. Just by putting the words ‘sumo’ and ‘cheating’ in the same sentence, you can offend the entire nation. When the honesty of the sacred sport that represents the country is attacked, there aren't many people who’d take it without being offended. Nevertheless, the allegation that there was a pre-organised sumo game is often raised by Japanese media. Interestingly, this occasional press claim provides another opportunity to gauge the corruption of the sumo world. Media surveillance creates strong incentives. If two sumo wrestlers are manipulating a match at their player-training centre, will be particularly careful when the bee-like journalist and TV camera are focused on them. So, what will happen during this time? Let's look at the data of the sumo contest held immediately after the possibility of match manipulation was raised by the accuser. On the last day of the game, when 7-7 players played a match against 8-6 players, what are the odds? 50% as usual. The 80% of winning chances that Levitt has confirmed in the last analysis is nowhere to be found. No matter how much you try to diminish the meaning of data, there is only one implication of this result. It seems quite difficult to argue that sumo wrestlers did not manipulate the match. A few years ago, two former sumo wrestlers made huge disclosures about sumo cheating. In addition to game manipulation, drug use and sexual harassment, bribery, and tax evasion. And… They both died at the almost same instant right before the briefing, and this is factual and unbiased.

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In summation, people do lie, as indicated with the above professional examples. Cheating albeit whether intentional or not, compulsive or not, tangible or not exists across the board in society.