The Ten Commandments clearly prohibit lying and cheating; specifically in the Eighth Commandment, which says, —You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor,— and also in the Seventh Commandment, —You shall not steal.
Cheating is a combination of lying and stealing. Cheaters steal information or ideas that belong to someone else and lie about their own lack of knowledge of a subject or ability to complete a task properly.
Recently cheating has gained national headlines as the nation’s premier institution of higher education, Harvard University, reports that as many as 125 students have been implicated in a cheating scandal. Harvard is not the only place where students cheat on tests and papers, for as long as there have been schools and students there has been cheating. However, such a large scale cheating scandal at college known for its academic achievements and which claims “Veritas” as its motto, meaning truth, should cause all to pause and reflect on the moral state of our society.
Unfortunately, lying and cheating have become all too routine in the worlds of collegiate and professional athletics and in the arenas of politics and business. Now this moral weakness is seemingly invading the classrooms of the nation’s elite universities on a wide scale. During the last few decades too many academic institutions have embraced and even enshrined moral relativism as the only authentic path to truth and knowledge. When there is no longer a clear and objective moral truth it’s hardly surprising that even elite students at Harvard find it easy to cheat, lie and steal.
This cheating scandal at the nation’s premier university has made it evident that our society, especially our academic institutions, must reject the prevalence of moral relativism and again enshrine the virtue of veritas.
