Maybe more emphasis needed on ethics

BassFan reported last Thursday that allegations have been made against a professional bass angler after officials discovered heavy weights in the belly of three dead bass. The bass have been traced back to a specific angler. It is not the first time that an angler has been found guilty of cheating to win tournaments. Other sports have discovered cheaters as well.
Ben Johnson cheated using steroids to win the 100 meters. It is now known that many other track stars used similar performance enhancing drugs to succeed.
But the pressure to succeed begins very early for not only athletes but students in school as well.
Everyone understands that parents have a responsibility to help their children do their homework and be ready for the next day of school. But when parents choose to do the homework for their children, because it is easier than working with their children, then they are in fact cheating on behalf of their children. And in the end, their children are cheated out of learning the information they need in school to succeed.
What is the moral or ethical lesson that those children are learning?
News media reporters have also been found guilty of fabricating stories that have eventually been found groundless in facts. For those reporters, the stories were a short cut to fame.
The Internet has made essay writing much easier for students at every level. Professional essay writers have posted millions of essays on the web for people to use. Any and every topic can be found and high school, college and university students are taking advantage of these essays to deliver high quality writings to their teachers. A great short cut to high marks and success.
To combat those short cuts, most colleges and universities now only accept essays in electronic versions and many now run those essays through parsing engines against the myriad of known essays on the web to spot duplication of writing.
And schools have to keep improving their parsing engines to track cheating.
Wikipedia defines ethics as follows: “Ethics (also known as moral philosophy) is a branch of HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy” philosophy that addresses questions about HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality” morality—that is, concepts such as good vs. bad, noble vs. ignoble, right vs. wrong, and matters of HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice” justice, HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love” love, HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace” peace, and HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue” virtue.”
I wonder today if more effort should be placed on ethics in the educational system. Most businesses, corporations, and institutions have a code of ethics that govern their employees.
In school and sports what should the penalty of cheating be? Loss of a credit in the subject? Suspension from school or play? In professional sports should the law be brought into play and those persons found cheating charged with an offence?
In two previous cases of cheating in Professional Bass Fishing, the states in which the cheating took place found the fishermen guilty and one ended up going to jail, while the other paid a very large fine. Both received a lifetime suspension from the sport, as did Ben Johnson.

–Jim Cumming,
Publisher