Reflection Paper on How I Falsified a Medical Excuse to Avoid Coursework

Why I'm Not an "Ethical" Person

Thinking about it now, I find it hard to believe that I am the person who falsified a medical excuse to avoid classwork. I do not say this as a way of evading my own sense of responsibility, or to claim that there was some kind of "altered state" that led me to take the steps I did. I simply mean that it is hard to understand, looking back, how I became so caught up in a logic that made it seem reasonable to do such a strange and clearly unethical thing. There are many lessons I take away from this incident, but the overarching one is that, when pressures mount to "fix" a situation, it is critical to sit back and take time to reflect on who you are and how you want to fix it-because there is always more than one way to face a tough situation.

At the time NST 10 was coming to a close, I knew that I would not make through the course. I was struggling with the coursework, but more importantly, I was struggling with college, with finding my place and with understanding how to live a more independent life. I am not sure if I was clinically depressed...I know that I felt unwell, all the time. I felt tired, stressed, unsure how to get up in the mornings and unsure how I should go through the day. I was eating all the wrong foods, gave up the sports I really love, and stopped going to social activities-except for the kind I would get dragged into late at night (which is almost always the wrong kind of social activity).

As the semester was drawing to a close I began to panic. I first got the idea of getting a doctor's excuse from a rumor that circulated around my circle of friends of a doctor who would hand out excuses for a fee. I remember the first time I heard it thinking that this was a crazy thing to do-why would you seek a false doctor's excuse for a course that you were paying to take? But the thought reemerged one night when I was inebriated, depressed and panicked. It began to seem to me that somehow this was actually a "real" way out because the truth was that I wasn't feeling well. My logic seemed to be that all a doctor's excuse would do is reflect how I really was feeling-that it wasn't a "lie" in this sense. Again, looking back, this seems like very bizarre and distorted logic. But at the time it felt like very sound logic, that I was really just taking matters into my own hands to give myself the excuse I needed and felt I somehow deserved. I was far too ashamed and embarrassed to track down the source of the rumors-this alone should have been enough to signal to me that what I was doing was way out of the bounds of ethical behavior. Instead it just began to feel clearer and clearer in my own mind that I needed to make my own document in order to represent to the University something that I believed was real and true.

There are, of course, so many other courses of action I could have taken. I could have gotten actual help, for one. I believe that had I seen a doctor or a therapist, I might have benefited from anti-depressants or at least from therapy. That way, ironically, I would not simply have had an "excuse"-I would have had the help I needed that might have allowed me to actually finish the course with at least a passing grade. However, this course of action did not feel feasible to me at the time. Instead, deep down it felt to me that I had created this problem by not eating right, not exercising, not managing my time, and that I needed to "fix" the problem that I had created and then, with the time it bought me, just pick up the pieces and force myself to do better next time.

Another obvious course of action would have been to consult the professor early in the term and explain how much I was struggling and the fact that I felt I would never make it through the course. I had an inking very early on that I was "in way over my head." However, one thing that happens when you are not doing well in college-at least it seems to me-is that you think you need to bluff your way through until everything falls into place. Sometimes in class I felt like I was on the moon, like nothing made sense and that it couldn't be making sense to anyone. I took notes in a rote way, just expecting that if I went through the motions eventually a light would shine and everything would click into place. It honestly never occurred to me that the thing to do would be to admit I was struggling and seek out guidance and help. As the semester wore on things became worse and worse; because I did not understand the fundamentals, I could not understand anything that built on the fundamentals. By the time I realized that the light was never going to suddenly shine on me, it seemed excruciatingly embarrassing to go back and admit to anyone I had been lost from the very beginning.

If I did not consult a doctor/therapist or the professor, at very least, I know now that I could have gone to any number of other sources of support that exist at Berkeley-peer tutoring groups, resident assistants in the dorms, or even a campus chaplain. I suspect now that if I had consulted any of these sources of support, I would have been led to the same kinds of answers: encouragement to seek medical and therapeutic advice; encouragement to understand that I was not the only student who hits rough patches; guidance on managing my time and friendships more wisely. I believe the University does a very impressive job of trying to make us aware of these various sources of support, but it always felt to me that these sources existed for "other" students. I think I was blocked from seeking help in that respect not just by embarrassment-but by pride.

It would be hard to overstate the discomfort that my choices eventually did cause. When I first was called in to explain the documents, everything felt surreal. I shrugged it off to my roommate and just said there must be some misunderstanding. At first I did not own up to anyone that I had done anything wrong. I kept telling people that I was caught up in some crazy bureaucratic nightmare that would soon be resolved. Friends gave me support and understanding.

When finally I started to tell a few people what I had done, I had this somewhat delusional idea that they would laugh it off-as if everyone cuts corners in this way sometimes. Instead, it was like a wall of silence went up. I think it was shock on their part, combined with extreme discomfort. There was nothing comforting they could say to me-no one could look me in the eye and say, "that's all right, we all do stupid things." Because they all felt that what I had done went way beyond stupid. It was stupid and also unethical. More than this perhaps, it violated their sense that they had to struggle with the same pressures but they did not take shortcuts like this. This is also an issue I did not understand or appreciate before this incident: that college is a community. It is something different than just a bunch of friends and acquaintances who also happen to go to class. Everyone finds it tough at some point, but there are expectations concerning how you deal with it when things are tough. Cheating makes other people feel that you think you live outside the rules that they have to obey, and this is hard for people to get past. What I experienced, I am starting to understand, was a kind of community censure-and it was not comfortable.

If I am able to stay in school, I look forward more than I can say to starting over. I think it will truly have to be a total start from scratch. I will have to find new friends and new activities, and have to approach everything I do in a new way. I am determined to make a fresh start by instituting a schedule for myself that includes a good diet and regular exercise so that I keep my body healthy while I push my mind. I have discovered that studying late at night, like most students do, does not work for me. My mind operates best in the early morning; moreover, at night, there are too many temptations to go and have a beer or sit and just talk and goof off. Therefore, my goal is to begin getting up early every morning-something I do very naturally when I am feeling healthy-and put in a couple of hours of study before I really even get going with my day.

Beyond this plan, I know now that if I start to fall behind-either in a specific class or in college in general-I need to seek help. This entire episode has caused me to reassess why I feel pride at certain things and not others. I felt too much pride to seek help, but I did not feel too proud to take such a stupid action? It is very strange to me that my pride could operate this way, but now I feel very aware of it, and aware that I need to ask myself very consciously about when I need help and why I might be avoiding seeking it.

Academic integrity can feel like a slogan, detached from the course of every day life. My guess is that this is true for many ethical principles in life. One of the reasons that it can be easy to act in an unethical way, I believe, is that once you have convinced yourself you are an "ethical" person, deviations from ethical behavior feel less bad, as if they were just minor detours you were taking on an essentially well-intentioned journey. What I understand now is that ethical principles like this are meant to be guides for daily decision- making. It is particularly important to consider the nature of integrity and ethics when you are feeling most pressured and most like there are no good ways out, because that is when you are most likely to delude yourself and make haphazard decisions without thinking through their meaning.

Therefore, if there is one overarching lesson I take from this incident, it is that if I want to be an ethical person going forward, I have to stop and ask myself tough questions every time I am faced with a potential shortcut. The fact that I would never have told someone else what I was doing should have been a warning bell telling me that what I was doing was wrong. Instead I got caught up in a logic that told me I was a "good" student who was just using a handy shortcut to help represent what felt like the truth: that I was not well and not coping. I think and very much hope that this entire incident has given me a new way of thinking about things, so that if ever such a suspect kind of logic begins to look persuasive again, I will stop and ask myself tough questions about who I am and what an ethical choice would look like. I cannot promise that I will always be successful, at every stage of life, in making just the right ethical choice. But I can certainly promise that I will never, ever cheat in a class again.