Friday, May 11, 2012

Drug Enhanced Academics



In this article, the perception of drug enhanced academics is discussed.  A recent survey of freshmen at Penn State University found that, while most freshmen believe that it is wrong to take drugs to increase abilities to perform for athletic events, they did not believe it was wrong to take drugs to increase abilities for academic events.  It was interesting to see the reasoning behind such an idea.  It is believed that most of the freshmen saw using drugs such as steroids in an athletic event was cheating because by one athlete using the drugs to outperform all the other athletes he is giving himself an unfair advantage.  However, when the freshman saw that the drug use was to better perform on a test, they did not see it as cheating because the person using the drugs was not directly giving themselves and advantage over the other students.  This is somewhat wrong though.  In classes where it is graded on a bell curve, he students are in competition with each other.  This means that a student using drugs to study for an exam is giving themselves a direct advantage over a student who does not use drugs to study for an exam. Therefore, perception of what is cheating can be different from what was originally thought.

No comments:

Post a Comment