Chea-lping: Good or Bad?

         To talk about helping has always been a dilemma, because there is a thin line between helping and cheating, and sometimes this line is inconspicuous. In the book “DOWN ON THE ISLAND,” Jim Cooper talks about how he faced this conflict during his stay in Puerto Rico as an English professor at El Colegio. Cooper mentions that what help and/or cheating means for a person is influenced in a great part by his/her cultural background and because of that, it is almost impossible to define which is correct or incorrect. While he was teaching he noticed Puerto Rican students constantly cheated in their tests no matter the grade level, because they thought that they were helping each other and not cheating. The reason was that this behavior is, not only allowed by the professors, but also, encouraged by them when they ask some students to teach the others academic skills. So the question is: Should a professor punish a student who is doing something that was taught to him/her? Professor Jim Cooper tries to answer this question throughout the chapter titled “Helping” but apparently, cannot answer it completely, because each situation, country and culture is different and so must be analyzed differently.

        When Cooper talks about his teaching experiences in Puerto Rico, he contrasts American and Puerto Rican’s way of thinking about how people see education, which he considers one of the factors for why Puerto Rican students cheat. He thinks Americans have a more competitive behavior in the educational context than Puerto Ricans do, and explains that Puerto Rican students are more cooperative which cause them to cheat more. An interesting anecdote of Cooper that could represent this behavior is when he asked a student why he let other students look in his paper and the student answered that it was because “I’m just trying to help him. He is my friend (80).” This provides evidence that the student did not really know what cheating really means. Rather, he knows cheating is not correct, but for him his was not cheating, but helping. Actually, Cooper makes a distinction saying: “A Puerto Rican student will let his neighbor look at his test paper because he wants to help him get a good grade. An American student will hide his paper from his neighbor because he is only interested in getting a good grade himself… (81)” The point in all this is that it is hard for some people to know the difference between cheating and helping because they have never really been taught what it is. I am a Puerto Rican student; I know the difference between cheating, helping and competing, and I think the best way to avoid people cheating is by teaching them to being cooperative whit each other, but also competitive. I think a student can be both, i.e., he can help another student but should be aware aware that in the future they probably are going to compete for the same job. With this information I am pretty sure they will know the difference between helping and cheating. 

        Jim Cooper in the chapter “Helping” talks about, what I think is one of the biggest problems Puerto Rican educational system has: When helping becomes cheating? Although, Cooper makes a strong critique about Puerto Rican educational system, what I really think is that the real point about this is the helping and cheating definition, and about what is correct or incorrect. And he makes question that if our cultural background influences the boundary between helping and cheating can we define what the terms really means? Is it helping correct or incorrect? Who decides what is correct or incorrect? My answer is the same as Jim Cooper’s when a teacher asked him about why cheating is wrong if a student learns more doing it than listening him:

“I have no good answer”.