Disclaimer:  I love Malcolm Gladwell.

If all this article does is turn you onto him, then writing this has been worth it for me.  Since I first read THE TIPPING POINT, I've enjoyed the way he sees things.  And since BLINK and OUTLIERS, I have now become a true fan.

So, when he took on the changing idea of "cheating" in a recent New Yorker article I read, I instantly thought of how it paralleled to the same changing idea of cheating in the classrooms of high schools and colleges around the country.

Here's how Gladwell sees it... He begins the article profiling an elite cross-country skier whose face is literally the color red.  "Mäntyranta carries a rare genetic mutation. His DNA has an anomaly that causes his bone marrow to overproduce red blood cells. That accounts for the color of his skin, and also for his extraordinary career as a competitive cross-country skier. In cross-country skiing, athletes propel themselves over distances of ten and twenty miles-a physical challenge that places intense demands on the ability of their red blood cells to deliver oxygen to their muscles. Mäntyranta, by virtue of his unique physiology, had something like sixty-five per cent more red blood cells than the normal adult male. In the 1960, 1964, and 1968 Winter Olympic Games, he won a total of seven medals. In the 1964 Olympics, he beat his closest competitor in the fifteen-kilometre race by forty seconds, a margin of victory... never equaled in that event at the Olympics before or since."

Here's how else I see it...  Maybe the elite athlete's "dope" is the current student's internet, or Google, or general access to information.  Is it cheating if a student learns the same concept that was taught in class from watching a Khan Academy video?  What if the student who watched the Khan Academy video scores 50% higher than everyone else?  What if others didn't think to watch the video, or don't have easy access to the internet?  Or, what about the following >>>  While writing a Huckleberry Finn essay over the weekend, a student goes online and finds that other schools, and other teachers, have given their students the exact same prompt to write to over the years.  The students reads some of the Huck Finn papers on the internet and it helps guide him/her towards a solid understanding of what they should write about.  The student gets an A+.

The bottom line is this:  Cheating is wrong.  

It's just hard to define cheating when some people do very little to get ahead, and other people work infinitely hard just to have a shot at some level of success.

Gladwell sees cheating as a grey area.  I think in 2013, in regards to academics, cheating is more "grey" than it's ever been.  It's still wrong, and it always will be... it's just a whole lot harder to define.

To read Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker article in its entirety, CLICK HERE