Is It Cheating If Everyone Does It?

Today’s Burning Question: Is it cheating if everyone does it? I mean, if everyone taking an exam looks at the answer key, or helps each other then that can’t be cheating, right? It would only be cheating if a certain “select few” people cheated.

Answer: How did we reach this point… where the boundaries between right and wrong, fair and unfair, cheating and playing by the rules – become so… blurry.

Like a number of fire departments that have had to confront the quagmire of “what is cheating”, the Largo Fire Department in Largo, Florida is struggling with where to draw the line. An additional question to the already difficult challenge about where to draw the line  – is when should the line be drawn? Is it fair to draw a line at a given point in time by punishing offenders who did something that their peers before them had done… or should the new boundaries be clearly established first and implemented prospectively?

Five Largo firefighters were suspended without pay last month following an internal investigation into cheating on a promotional examination for a “squad driver” position. The suspensions ranged from 8 to 40 hours and cost the members as much as $680. According to the department, the members violated city policy by sharing too much information about the test. They are accused of sharing a copy of an old exam and discussing questions with those who had already taken the exam.

Fire Chief Mike Wallace thought the matter was closed when the five accepted their suspensions, and opted not to appeal. However, the firefighters union decided to grieve the discipline and what’s more – voted to reimburse the members for their lost wages out of union funds.

Chief Wallace was quoted in the Tampa Bay Times as saying “I’m disappointed…. This creates a sense of undermining the department’s authority over the employees … We’re trying to change a culture that says that’s acceptable.”

Union president Dale Rosko counters that the members did what others before then had always done, “exercising a practice of sharing information that has been acceptable, allowed and even promoted by current and former fire administrations.” Members were “never properly noticed of any change in regards to the testing procedure or that [their] actions were no longer allowable.”

Here is more on the Largo story.

And here is the White Paper on Reputation Management in the Fire Service: whitepaper