[I recently took up walking.
Yes. Walking.
Before this, I apparently spent decades crawling or floating or otherwise gliding through life like some confused sea creature, but now I walk...a new skill I have bravely acquired at the tender age of “old enough to know better.”
And on these excruciatingly long walks (because everything is excruciating when you don’t yet identify as a non-couch potato) I listen to my thoughts doing full Simone Biles style gymnastics in my head. My thoughts, I’ve realized, are far physically healthier than I am. Emotionally? Hard to say. We don’t talk about that.
So on my last walk, somewhere between kilometre two and total existential collapse, my mind wandered to academic integrity violations. Cheating. As educators we spend an absurd amount of time plotting how to police it...building traps, setting timers, rewriting assessments, playing a pedagogical version of “Catch Me If You Can” with students who, frankly, are sometimes much better at this game than we are.
When students do get caught, we hold meetings about penalties. Should it be a zero? A warning? A disciplinary note? A plague upon their house?
And this is the moment where my brain...always unstructued like a Tarantino movie... smash-cuts to another scene entirely.
Pharma.
Yes, the next great satan.
(After banking. And consulting. And gaming. And tech. Honestly, how many faces does satan have... and why are they all incorporated?)
We often complain that doctors treat symptoms instead of causes. “Another pill,” we groan, “instead of getting to the root.”
And suddenly I thought: aren’t we doing the exact same thing with academic integrity?
We treat symptoms...cheating...with penalties.
But we refuse to ask the more uncomfortable question: why are students cheating in the first place?
Let’s take a step back...unless you’re already sitting or lying down, in which case please remain horizontal for your own comfort.
Why do students cheat?
Sure, we can rattle off the usual suspects:
Didn’t study! Procrastinated! Pressure for a good grade! Weak prerequisite knowledge! Laziness! Want an award or Dean’s List Standing!
But these are symptoms. No student comes to school thinking they will cheat their way out of courses. These are surface-level explanations we use because they’re tidy and convenient and let us avoid thinking too hard.
If we dig deeper...and my mind, currently a bustling marketplace for moronic thoughts, is digging eagerly...it always, consistently, relentlessly comes back to mental health.
We are raising children who carry childhood trauma into adolescence and adulthood...trauma that stands directly in the way of learning. And before someone starts chanting “In my days...”with misplaced superiority...let me gently inform you that this tone is the emotional residue of trauma. No one escapes it by invoking nostalgia.
Parents do not deliberately traumatize children. But unprocessed trauma travels generationally. And it arrives in our classrooms disguised as anxiety, avoidance, perfectionism, disengagement, procrastination, burnout...and yes...cheating.
Now, academics will argue, often correctly, that they were trained to conduct research, not provide therapy. Teaching was already a stretch...mental health coaching is laughably beyond scope.
And genuinely, no one is asking them to do therapy.
We’re simply asking for compassion.
Just a little bit. As we stagger through our own struggles, maybe we can extend some humanity to students slogging through theirs.
Here is the actual solution...
We need formal, mandatory mental health courses embedded in the curriculum.
Not optional workshops no one attends. Not pamphlets in the counseling center. Not a “wellness week” involving cupcakes and a golden retriever.
A real course.
Every student.
First semester.
And then a half-course in each subsequent year.
Because the high-achievers and the barely-hanging-on students need the same thing...to learn about themselves before we expect them to learn about supply curves, regression models, and discounted cash flows.
And while we are redesigning the first-year curriculum, let’s add ethics before they see a single “core” business course. Help them think about purpose, responsibility, and moral reasoning before they learn how to optimise profit.
I am still searching for a school...and a faculty...with the courage to do this. In the style of Ben Stein asking “Anyone, anyone?” in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, I wait for someone to raise their hand and say they will try it out. And if you do, call me...maybe! (Too cheesy?)
We ask students to take risks, to innovate, to dream, to dare.
But the adults?
We hide behind precedent and policy and the familiar comfort of how things are done.
It is, frankly, unfair.
And until we face the causes, not just the symptoms, we will keep treating cheating like a crime rather than what it actually is: a signal. A plea. A mirror held uncomfortably close.
Maybe it is time we stopped looking away.