Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

One thing I want to say here is that "entrapment" isn't a moral principle; it's a legal one, and it isn't universal. We don't get it from English Common Law, where it wasn't widely known before the founding of the US, and was rejected when it did come up. Entrapment is a checks-and-balances balance of power mechanism, not a general rule of conduct.

Furthermore, while we don't reach the question of whether this dummy test constituted entrapment (because it doesn't matter), it's also simply not entrapment under the US legal definition (arguably the most important such definition). In the US, an entrapment defense requires you to (1) admit that you did the bad thing, (2) prove that you were somehow coerced (at least psychologically) into doing that bad thing, and (3) prove that you had no predisposition to doing the bad thing. You're searching for exam questions and memorizing a bogus final exam. You know you're cheating, you know it's wrong, and you do it anyways. You're culpable.

Agreed. I'm no moral authority nor expert in ethics but this is pretty cut and dry to me. I think the most important aspect of entrapment (although all are relevant in the legal sense) is the second clause: coercion.

Without being explicitly coerced into doing something "illegal" (cheating in this case) I don't see how there could ever be a case to make that this is immoral. The students are cheating of their own free will. Case closed.

The coercion's implicit.

Ever since these students were 9 years old, everyone around them including (and especially) those in public education have told them that they need to go to college and get a degree or they'd be destitute and living in a ghetto.

Then they get there and college is even more absurd than public school ever was. They sit in a giant lecture hall listening to these people who don't live in the real world with the rest of us talk about things that do not matter (how many credits were for something other than electives or your major when you went?), threatening to flunk them if they can't jump through pointless hoops.

So, they go back to the dorm after class, and do research the best way they know how, and they find relevant study materials. Did he catch them smuggling the answers into class on a phone, or written in microscopic print on the inside of the rims of their glasses? Were they copying someone else's tests? Did they pay a lookalike ringer to sit in on the exam for them?

Hell no. They did what they were supposed to do. They found what they thought were the correct answers, and went over them enough that they could remember them during the test.

Why would anyone bother to go to this trouble? Because they were coerced. They've been coerced since they were children. He doesn't get a free pass because someone else volunteered to do the coercion for him.

I might be a little more forgiving if they were philosophy majors. If that were the case, then presumably they chose this field of study, and the class itself is relevant to that such that they should be putting in more effort... but even in that case, it is sufficient to fail them, because the low scores are their only real failing. Even then they haven't cheated.

I am sorry but you make a real tour-de-force out of how they are the victim of going to a site that is meant to facilitate cheating by looking up answers to exams, not learning.

You learn by knowing the material, and if you know the material, you don’t have to cheat

Now you can come up with all kind circumstances that make it hard on the students, as you do in your comment, but that’s another discussion entirely and imo outside the scope.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that society treating people with university degrees better than those without is harmful in a sociological sense and likely to increase cheating in universities. I'm less sympathetic to individual students actually cheating in the manner described.

The article says the test was take home, meaning in a practical sense, they could access any resources they wanted while taking the test. They did not need to memorize material as your comment suggests, and would have had the opportunity to copy answers.

> Were they copying someone else's tests?

Yes. They were copying what they thought were a previous student's answers to the same test.

> Yes. They were copying what they thought were a previous student's answers to the same test.

It's fucking multiple choice. If they got correct answers, then their answers would be identical to previous student's correct answers, by definition.

If doing that is cheating, then only the first students to ever get those questions on a test could pass it.

There's some sort of widespread mental illness affecting a large percentage of the population, such that apparently so many of you see this as cheating.

You get that, right? If you learn the answers to questions that end up appearing on the test prior to the test commencing, and you put those answers down on the test because you have memorized them (you know them in other words), this can't ever be cheating. That's not what "cheating" means.

Multiple choice is a red herring here. One can equally memorize answers to a non multiple choice test.

If the point of the test is to check that students understand the material, and if students aren't allowed to look at the answers of previous tests ("looking at other tests without the instructor’s permission counts as cheating"), then memorizing the correct answers to previous tests is cheating.

Memorizing the material is the goal! Being an ethics class, I would have anticipated the gaming of the cheater site. When I saw the wrong answers, I would have laughed my ass off and gone on with life.

Memorizing A/B/C/D answers to a particular selection of exam questions is not the goal of any sensible class.

To be clear, you’re saying that memorizing a sequence of multiple choice answers (like ABBCADADD etc…) is not “cheating” and equivalent to properly learning the material? Yeah… I don’t think you’d have many people agreeing with you there. Imagine if that’s how your doctor got his medical degree.

Entrapment and RICO!

So....these students aren't morally failed cheaters, they are just bad researchers who will copy bad information from random Internet sites?

Your honor, I saw this bicycle just sitting there unlocked. If it hadn't been there, I wouldn't have stolen it. It coerced me. I needed a bike.

Give me a break. They cheated. Case closed.

the test... was a take home... they, well, did not have to remember anything, nor recall anything, nor sit down and take a test -- they copied answers from the available source.

this whole comment unfortunately has taken quite a liberty with its defense of the students and perceived "due diligence".

This feels like you're saying all monetary theft should be legal because of inherent coercion in our capitalistic society.

It seems to me that this could be entrapment in the sense that by putting the exam on the site the professor may have created the perception that it was trivially easy to cheat. That could cause a student who normally wouldn't cheat to decide to do so because they felt that it was necessary in order to stay competitive.

A student who normally wouldn't cheat is not going to go site designing for cheaters, and would not be searching for their finals there. Heck, in my entire college carrier I didn't even know such sites existed.

If professor (or TA) made announcement along the lines of "Don't go to Quizlet and don't download my past exams from there", maybe you'd have a point.. but they did not.

Ah, but those sites are often the top Search results if you search for a distinctive phrase from the assignments. The student may not pay for access, but they will certainly be presented with tantalizing snippets of many solutions.

And many of those solutions are bad ones. They may contain B.S., wrong answers, and things students didn't learn with the class resources. If you copy/paste one of the solutions, you may evade detection and earn a "C".

That's not "entrapment". If all it takes for you to commit an offense is the perception that other people are doing it too, you're predisposed and require no coercion, and thus culpable.

Just to be absolutely clear: it doesn't matter; even if it was "entrapment", it's not necessarily unethical. Plenty of western countries don't recognize entrapment defenses. But it's also just not entrapment.

This cartoon is a great overview of the legal aspects of entrapment.

https://thecriminallawyer.tumblr.com/post/19810672629/12-i-w...

That is great. Thanks for sharing.

I would disagree about entrapment not being a moral principle (or its related to one at least). At its core it is basically just saying it is wrong to convince people who wouldn't otherwise be evil, to be evil.

However this is case is clearly not entrapment.

Well, it's not that it's wrong to convince people to do evil that otherwise would not (arguably, that is conspiracy and is a crime).

The defense is that it's not okay to punish someone for doing something evil they otherwise would not have done if it wasn't for the punishing authorities explicit actions.

Kind of a 'you can't arrest people for crimes you convince them to do' defense.

Besides the ethics of it, there's a productivity aspect. It's like when the British paid for dead snakes in India and people bred snakes. This means there's no reduction in wild snakes.

If three big dudes encircle a guy in an alleyway and say "you want to buy this stolen car stereo for $40, right?" and then you bust the guy for pulling out his wallet, you have done nothing to reduce the demand for stolen property in your city. You caught the demand, but you also created it. (The feature is a built-in amplifier, but the benefit is not getting your ass beat.)

Agreed - the ‘fruit of the poisonous tree’ doctrine is very similar IMO. Making it possible to use evidence collected illegally means they’ll just do that all the time. So make it useless, so they’ll actually follow the rules.

The exclusionary rule of evidence (of "poisonous tree" fame) is another great example of a legal principle that isn't really an ethical principle, and is anything but universal: most of Europe doesn't have it.

Indeed. Entrapment is such a narrow case and is designed to stop the government from taking advantage of vulnerable people.

If you call someone who has just lost their job and is not able to feed their baby and say if you do this drug deal I’ll get you enough to buy baby food that’s entrapment, assuming they weren’t already involved in the drugs trade and this “crime” would never have happened without the government willing it into existence.

And to be clear on the other end (with requisite IANAL) - If the undercover officer says "You holding? I got cash", it is not entrapment. Simply making a request for a transaction isn't entrapment, even if you're being circumspect. Even if you're aggressive about it - "I know you're holding, give me the drugs, man" - That's not entrapment, especially if they are actually "holding". Entrapment is a narrow defense - The Government forced me to do something I would not otherwise have done. If someone other than the government (and it's agents) coerces you, that's not entrapment (but may be a defense).

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