<p>@ccstudent1234 Chicken over rice</p>
<p>@whartonpls smd</p>
<p>“If his cheating has no effect on me, let it be.”<br>
Enough good cheaters could push the numbers higher in your state, and you won’t make National Merit. That would have an effect on you, but you won’t know it until you’re one point below the cutoff.</p>
<p>Do you know what’s a good idea? Write a college essay about “challenging a belief or practice” and then use this situation. Bam!</p>
<p>@CCstudent1234 - You evoke the right points but your interpretation of them is fundamentally wrong.</p>
<p>" To properly analyze this, we must invoke economics, which is really the study of how decisions are made.
The fact is that each choice has an opportunity cost."</p>
<p>You are correct to speak of the notion of opportunity cost (although it’s probably hopelessly derivative from whatever AP Economics course you’re doing right now), but you don’t seem to understand it. The opportunity cost of OP’s actions isn’t at all this. “by reporting him, you kept the testing room honest, and you ensured that the rules of law prevailed of selfishness, while, on the other hand, your ill-conceived actions have potentially jeopardized the scores of everyone who was in that room.”</p>
<p>The opportunity cost of an action or decision is the value of the next-best alternative foregone by making said action. The reason that opportunity cost is such a fundamental concept of economics is because it can be anything. Opportunity cost can be very subjective, as it varies for every person depending on their mindset or priorities. An opportunity can have a moral or ethical cost as well as financial or temporal ones, and everything in between. Therefore, it allows people to weigh their choices in much wider ways than in simple financial terms. Here, the opportunity cost of OP’s actions is the next-best alternative, which would have been not reporting the cheater. You don’t touch on that point at all in your paragraph on opportunity cost. The opportunity cost of reporting him is a choice which is undeniably ethically and morally wrong. It was; however, better from a practical standpoint–OP may have jeopardized the scores of everyone in the room.</p>
<p>You bring me to my next point. You say the following. “Look, we can all pretend that one choice was more moral than the other, but that would be moronic” and “It has nothing to do with ethics.”</p>
<p>Wrong and wrong. You’re right in talking about ethics and morality, but you are completely wrong in saying this choice had nothing to do with it. In fact, the primary difference between the action taken and its opportunity cost was ethical weight. Ethics is a discipline of philosophy that is also referred to as moral philosophy; from now on I’ll group morals into the branch of ethics. This field concerns itself with defining right and wrong, good and evil, justice and crime. Reporting (or not) a cheater is therefore completely related to ethics.</p>
<p>Then you say “You chose to inconvenience everyone for to satiate a self-righteous cause.”</p>
<p>Wrong again. If anything, this cause is selfless since OP is a) not self-righteous and b) was willing to sacrifice his own test scores for his actions. Self-righteousness is the selfish pursuit of what one believes to be right. It is usually characterized by a feeling of arrogant moral superiority. If OP felt superior or arrogant, he wouldn’t be having doubts about his actions and he wouldn’t have started this thread or worded his posts the way he did, which was in a tone that was definitely not arrogant or superior in any way.</p>
<p>“Anyone who says that you did the moral and courageous thing is sermonizing ignorantly a blind ideal. The whole premise of reporting him being a venerable act of valor and rectitude overlooks one key point: the College Board is no one’s friend. It is a business, and like all businesses, its only goal is profit, which admittedly is not at all a bad thing, but serves to majorly inconvenience its customers, who are at its mercy, rather than the other way around as is typical for a business. I think that that is sufficient censorious rhetoric.”</p>
<p>I won’t even begin to talk about the atrocious writing here; it reeks of pretentious thesaurus use and ignorance of definitions. Your “key point” isn’t even related to your initial premise. It is also very contradictory. “like all businesses, its only goal is profit”. All right, I can deal with that sweeping generalization. That’s okay. Then, you go on to say that that goal “serves to majorly inconvenience its customers, who are at its mercy”. Alright. I somewhat agree. Then you say this? “rather than the other way around as is typical for a business”. What?</p>
<p>You say that the goal of all businesses is profit. You say that having profit as a goal inconveniences its customers because they are at the businesses’ mercy. Essentially, you argue that because profit is the goal of all companies, they hold all their customers at their mercy. Then you say that typically, the opposite is true? So you invalidate that entire argument.</p>
<p>“I’d like to say something positive about your decision, but I am having immense difficulty doing so because you had nothing to gain and everything to lose.”</p>
<p>Huh? Didn’t you just cite the notion of opportunity cost a few lines up, which basically says that every decision carries some gain and some loss? Didn’t you just apply that notion here? Opportunity cost clearly states that OP’s decision carried ethical gain, and that its opportunity cost (not reporting the cheater) intrinsically carries ethical loss. If you mention opportunity cost, you also accept that every action has infinite minute pros and cons.</p>
<p>“Ok, fine, you diligently and painstakingly prepared and took the test honestly. That alone is something of which to be proud. Cheating the system because of a myopic, blithe, and indolent outlook is despicable in its own way. You stood up for your principles, and satiated your inner voice. Great. But the opportunity cost of this decision was greater than the opportunity cost of not reporting him.”</p>
<p>I… just… you have the sheer audacity of talking about opportunity cost to measure the value of a decision right after saying OP had “nothing to gain and everything to lose”?</p>
<p>This paragraph also admits that ethics were a part of the opportunity costs of both decisions, and that both had to do with ethics. </p>
<p>Your conclusion is also contradictory.</p>
<p>This example is bad because there are no two prisoners here. There is one prisoner, OP, stuck between the two extremes of confessing and staying silent.</p>
<p>In this example, if OP does the ethically right thing and denounces the cheater, OP’s “sentence” would be reduced. Since there is no one to denounce him back, he would be doing what is both ethically and personally right. So according to you it would be a good thing to report cheating on the SAT. You’ve been trying to argue exactly the opposite–the example is poorly chosen.</p>
<p>I believe that ethics should transcend any form of standardized testing, or anything else for that matter. Why? Because the ideals of justice, of virtue and goodness are what our modern society is based on. Socrates postulated that if people know what is right, they will naturally be inclined to do the ethically right thing. He believed that bad actions were a direct result of one’s ignorance, and if the perpetrator of these evils was truly aware of the intellectual and ethical repercussions of these actions, he would know what is right–and he wouldn’t even see those actions as a possibility.</p>
<p>The foundations of today’s democratic world are those mounds of minuscule little platforms that have immense power and importance, in quantities utterly disproportionate to their sizes, for they are the only things holding us up in a world where so much is bogged down. Unfortunately, these scaffoldings are the things people lose track of and forget about, as they prefer to look at the self-important dreams of palaces and skyscrapers that ultimately rest on that all-important foundation of ethics. If we keep looking at the shiny new buildings and don’t remember to maintain the platforms that hoist them up, then everything might crumble to the ground in pieces–and then where would we be? </p>
<p>This was an important gesture because of principle, ethical principle, and if you were at all knowledgeable you wouldn’t even consider going against it.</p>
<p>@merlion Your interpretation of my comments shows that you missed my fundamental point.</p>
<p>@CCstudent1234 How so? I understand that you think the benefits of not reporting the cheater outweigh those of doing so; and I understand why you think that (although I disagree). You also seem to believe that the college board itself is at the root of this problem, but you present confusing arguments for that. </p>
<p>@CCstudent1234 </p>
<p>Speak, friend, 'til thou art truly understood
Hide not the light of truth from these thy peers
To be challeng’d at thy word is for the good
'Tis in seeking, not in sooth, a man endears</p>
<p>Himself unto the scholars brave and true
Who in the clashing of their swords hear sweetest song
And themselves do sing it every day anew:
A curious mind is never truly wrong</p>
<p>Lol, literally EVERYONE loses in this situation.</p>
<p>I guess you could say the winners are the people who won’t be screwed over by a harsh curve, </p>
<p>really hope u didnt screw over everybody else who wasnt cheating including yourself 
obvi the kid shouldnt have been cheating but you might have screwed urself over n ur classmates that werent cheating n prob even the proctor. Soemtimes proctors will get yelled at by their supervisers if they allowed cheating even if they didnt know it was going on. my spanish teacher got fired bc of it. </p>
<p>Too many people have taken AP Microeconomics in this thread.</p>
<p>@CCstudent1234 That would depend on the OP’s value on moral integrity. Clearly, his value of integrity was high enough to justify him reporting the cheater. Purely based on economics, he’s doing what is most valuable to him, and that’s fine. Purely based on just the economics of the “college race,” his decision was uneconomical. You can’t, however, say that the opportunity cost of reporting the cheater was greater than the opportunity cost of not reporting, if the OP loses a significant enough value of “self” from not reporting. </p>
<p>Moreover, I don’t understand how CollegeBoard has created the Prisoner’s Dilemma. There is only one decision here, while the Dilemma requires two active participants, with a total of two decisions. It is how you draw the table (of the decision) that will decide your decision. The OP’s innate table put reporting as the more valuable choice, while yours or mine would put not reporting as the better choice. </p>
<p>That said, good job using economics. </p>
<p>@BedfordTiger You did the right thing, even if your score ends up getting cancelled & you have to retake. It sucks for you, it sucks for the people in the room who weren’t cheating, but you know what? Eff the kid that was cheating. Eff him hard, and anyone else on this post that thinks YOU’RE the ahole for reporting. That kid is an ahole and an idiot. Someone said something to the effect that karma would come back on that cheater and you didn’t need to report him. They’re right–karma DOES come back, and it’s coming back now because you did the right thing. Good job!</p>
<p>Just popping in to say thanks to the OP for reporting the cheater. You did the right thing, whether the hordes of ultra-competitive CCers acknowledge it or not.</p>
<p>How pointless. Some kid went back and randomly bubbled the same letter on every question- you realized that and yet reported him for cheating? Live and let live, man. No need to put yours or someone else’s future in jeopardy because you were busy trying to play Mr. Goody two shoes. Unless someone did something extreme such as use their cell phone during the test, I would keep it to myself. Bubbling in random answers after time is called is barely ‘cheating’.</p>
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<p>This argument is a red herring. It matters not whether the cheater profited by his actions. If unprofitable cheating is allowed to occur unpunished, it smooths the way for profitable cheating to slip under the radar. The clever cheater will simply cultivate the appearance of bubbling “randomly”.</p>
<p>Consider, for example, a cheater who knows that he managed to eliminate A and D on all of the last 5 questions on the last round, but did not have time to decide on and record the most likely answer. Due to the nature of SAT scoring, simply “randomly” bubbling in B for all of those questions is a profitable act.</p>
<p>Cheating is cheating. regardless of the outcome. Were the Black Sox cheating any less because they cheated to lose?</p>
<p>eek i hope i dont take my november sat with people like you</p>
<p>can’t afford to get my score invalidated for doing nothing, y’know?</p>