Cheating

"Cheat" redirects here. For other uses, see Cheat (disambiguation).

Cheating refers to the breaking of rules to gain advantage in a competitive situation. The rules infringed may be explicit, or they may be from an unwritten code of conduct based on morality, ethics or custom, making the identification of cheating a subjective process. Cheating can refer specifically to marital infidelity. Someone who is known for cheating is referred to as a cheat in British English, and a cheater in American English.

Sport, games and gambling

Sports are governed by both customs and explicit rules regarding acts which are permitted and forbidden at the event and away from it. Forbidden acts frequently include performance-enhancing drug taking (known as "doping"), using equipment that does not conform to the rules or altering the condition of equipment during play, and deliberate harassment or injury to competitors.

High profile examples of alleged cheating include Ben Johnson's disqualification following the 100 metres final at the 1988 Summer Olympics, and admissions of steroid use by former professional baseball players after they have retired, such as José Canseco^[1] and Ken Caminiti.^[2]

One of the most famous instances of cheating occurred during the 1986 FIFA World Cup quarter-final, when Diego Maradona used his hand to punch the ball into the goal of England goalkeeper Peter Shilton.^[3] Using the hand or arm by anyone other than a goalkeeper is illegal according to the rules of association football.

Illegally altering the condition of playing equipment is frequently seen in sports such as baseball and cricket. For example in baseball, a pitcher using a doctored baseball (e.g. putting graphite or Vaseline on the baseball), or a batter using a corked bat are some examples of this.

Circumvention of rules governing conduct and procedures of a sport can also be considered cheating. During the 2007 Formula One Season, driver Fernando Alonso was labelled a "cheat" for exchanging confidential information between the teams of Scuderia Ferrari and Mclaren.^[4]

Gambling

The wagering of money on an event extends the motivation for cheating beyond directly participating competitors. As in sport and games, cheating in gambling is generally related to directly breaking rules or laws, or misrepresenting the event being wagered on, or interfering in the outcome. A boxer who takes a dive, a casino which plays with secretly loaded dice, a rigged roulette wheel or slot machine, or a doctored deck of cards, are generally regarded as cheating, because it has misrepresented the likelihood of the game's outcomes beyond what is reasonable to expect a bettor to protect himself against. However, for a bookmaker to flatter a horse in order to sell bets on it at shorter odds may be regarded as salesmanship rather than cheating, since bettors can counter this by informing themselves and by exercising skepticism. Doping a horse is a clear example of cheating by interfering with the instruments of the event under wager. Again, not all interference is cheating; spending money to support the health and well-being of a horse one has wagered on is not in itself generally regarded as cheating, nor is improving the morale of a sportsman one has backed by cheering for them. Generally, interference is more likely to be regarded as cheating if it diminishes the standard of a sporting competition, damages a participant, or modifies the apparatus of the event or game. This principle carries over to the financial world where short selling, or betting on a company to do badly, is sometimes characterized as unethical and is banned in certain circumstances and jurisdictions. In the world of gambling, knowing a secret which is not priced into the odds gives a significant advantage, which may give rise to a perception of cheating. However, legal systems do not regard secretly making use of knowledge in this way as criminal deception in itself. This is in contrast to the financial world, where people with certain categories of relationship to a company are restricted from transacting, which would constitute the crime of insider trading. This may be because of a stronger presumption of equality between investors, or it may be because a company employee who also trades in the company's stock has a conflict of interest, and has thus misrepresented himself the company. An advantage player typically uses mental, observational or technical skills to choose when and how much to bet, and neither interferes with the instruments of the game nor breaks any of its rules. Representatives of the casino industry have claimed that all advantage play is cheating, but this point of view is reflected neither among societies in general nor in legislation. As of 2010, the only example anywhere of a type of advantage play being unlawful is for an advantage player to use an auxiliary device in the U.S. State of Nevada, whose legislation is uniquely influenced by large casino corporations. Nonetheless it remains a widely held principle that the law should not impose any restraint over the method by which a player arrives at a playing or betting decision from information held by him lawfully and which he is not debarred from under the rules of the game. In "hole carding", however, a casino player tries to catch sight of the front of cards which are dealt face-down according to the rules. Hole carding is more susceptible to the charge of cheating, since the rules may explicitly forbid the player from knowing the card in question. One way of cheating and profiting through gambling is to bet against yourself and then intentionally lose. This is known as throwing a game or taking a dive. Illegal gamblers will at times pay sports players to lose so that they may profit from the otherwise unexpected loss. An especially notorious case is the Black Sox Scandal, when eight players of the 1919 Chicago White Sox took payment from gamblers and intentionally played poorly.

Strength training

Cheating is also used to refer to movements in strength training that transfer weight from an isolated or fatigued muscle group to a different or fresh muscle group. This allows the cheater to move an initial greater weight (if the cheating continues through an entire training set) or to continue exercising past the point of muscular exhaustion (if the cheating begins part way through the set). As strength training is not a sport, cheating has no rule-based consequences, but can result in injury or a failure to meet training goals. This is because each exercise is designed to target specific muscle groups and if the proper form is not used the weight can be transferred away from the targeted group.

Personal relationships

Main articles: Infidelity, Emotional affair, and Adultery

In western and other cultures, couples tend to expect sexual monogamy of each other. If so, then cheating commonly refers to forms of infidelity, particularly adultery.^[5] However, there are other divisions of infidelity, which may be emotional. Cheating by thinking of, touching and talking with someone you are attracted to may be equally damaging to one of the parties. Emotional cheating may be correlated to that of emotional abuse, which to date is treated seriously in a court of law as physical cheating. With the expansion of understanding of other cultures, there is a wide spectrum of what cheating means. When in a committed relationship, the definition of cheating is based on both parties' opinions, and both parties may redefine their understanding to match the party at an either lower or higher extreme of this definition. Some couples simply believe that cheating constitutes doing anything, whether verbal or physical, that one would not do in front of their significant other. Such examples would include: expressing attraction to another person, electronic communications,texting, data, kissing, making out, and sexual relations.^{[citation needed]}

Many people consider cheating to be any violation of the mutually agreed-upon rules or boundaries of a relationship, which may or may not include sexual monogamy. For example, in some polygamous relationships, the concepts of commitment and fidelity do not necessarily hinge on complete sexual or emotional monogamy. Whether polygamous or monogamous, the boundaries to which people agree vary widely, and sometimes these boundaries evolve within each relationship.^{[citation needed]}

In video games

Main article: Cheating in video games

In video games, cheating can take the form of secret access codes in single-player games (such as the Konami code) which unlock a bonus for the player when entered, and add-ons or exploits which give players an unfair advantage in online multiplayer games.

Attitudes towards cheating vary. On one hand, cheating allows casual players to complete games at much-accelerated speed, and this is especially helpful nowadays as typical Role Playing Games (RPGs) can take well over ten hours to finish. For single-player games, this is largely a matter of taste. On the other hand, as internet-based multi-player games, such as MMORPGs are becoming more and more popular, cheating in those types of games is often prohibited. In many circles, the purchasing of items or currency is also considered to be cheating.^{[citation needed]}

In First Person Shooter (FPS) games, players can use multihacks containing different kind of cheats. These include: Aimbot (automatically aims at targets), Wallhack (allows the cheater to see targets through walls), and ESP (displays information about the targets).^{[citation needed]}

Academic

Main article: Academic dishonesty

A small cheat sheet can be used to cheat during an academic examination.

There is enough evidence to conclude that academic cheating is an extremely common occurrence in high schools and colleges in the United States. 70% of public high school students admit to serious test cheating. 60% say they have plagiarized papers. Only 50% of private school students, however, admit to this. The report was made in June 2005 by Rutgers University professor Donald McCabe for The Center for Academic Integrity. The findings were corroborated in part by a Gallup survey.^{[citation needed]} In McCabe's 2001 of 4500 high school students, "74% said they cheated on a test, 72% cheated on a written work, and 97% reported to at least had copied someone's homework or peeked at someone's test. 1/3 reported to have repeatedly cheated." ^[6] The new revolution in high-tech digital info contributes enormously to the new wave in cheating: online term-paper mills sell formatted reports on practically any topic; services exist to prepare any kind of homework or take online tests for students, despite the fact that this phenomenon, and these websites, are well known to educators,^[7] and camera phones are used to send pictures of tests; MP3 players can hold digitalized notes; graphing calculators store formulas to solve math problems.^[8] Increased competition for college admissions in recent years may also be to blame.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• Academic dishonesty
• Cheating at the Paralympic Games
• Cheating in poker
• Cheating in casinos
• Cheating in online games
• Cheating, Inc., is a 1991 short, non-dialogue comedic silent film about a class of students cheating on their exam
• Gamesmanship
• Online poker

References

1. ^ "Canseco:Steroids made my baseball career possible". Usatoday.com. 2005-02-17. http://www.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/2005-02-13-canseco-60minutes_x.htm. Retrieved 2009-11-19. 
2. ^ "Sports Illustrated:Steroids in baseball". Sportsillustrated.cnn.com. 2002-06-23. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/videoplus/news/2002/05/29/si_steroids_video_archive/. Retrieved 2009-11-19. 
3. ^ "Sportsillustrated.cnn.com". Sportsillustrated.cnn.com. 2005-08-24. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2005/writers/mark_bechtel/08/24/daily.blog/index.html. Retrieved 2009-11-19. 
4. ^ Spearman, Michael (2007-09-15). "Fernando is just a 'cheat'". London: thesun.co.uk. http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/sport/article293761.ece. Retrieved 2010-03-21. 
5. ^ "Dictionary.com". Dictionary.reference.com. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cheat. Retrieved 2009-11-19. 
6. ^ The Case of the Purloined Paper by Brigid Schulte
7. ^ Ohiomatyc.org
8. ^ Reader's Digest, pp. 123-7, March 2006; Cheating: "but everybody is doing it".

External links

• David Callahan. (2004). The Cheating Culture. Harvest Books.
• Stuart P. Green. (2006). Lying, Cheating, and Stealing: A Moral Theory of White Collar Crime. Oxford University Press.
• Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. (2005). Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. William Morrow/HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-073132-X.