Student Ethics at IIT

During my stay in IIT, I have witnessed many ethically objectionable acts by students. The acts are innumerable and I may take liberty to mention a few of them. Students from well to do families manage to get the Merit Cum Means scholarship without feeling that there is anything wrong about their action (what more, they always seem to have valid arguments to justify it), some find it "shrewd" to get away from Nescafe without paying the bill, others will go abroad and use the public transport freely when there is no one around to check (of course failing to understand why the other people (read foreigners) always pay when they can exactly do the same thing?). The acts may in themselves be trivial, unworthy of mention, but in their very trivialness they point to the abysmal lack of moral integrity, an utter indifference to the moral law, and a void, an emptiness that blinds even the "best" of our country. It is indeed appalling that the students, who were a part of the vision that was supposed to see them as the exemplar, are so morally corrupt. I would here like to speak about the most ubiquitous of the unethical acts, the one which I have scrutinized most closely, having shamelessly being a participant in it on many occasions, cheating and copying in assignments. One of my close friends who had been on a student Exchange in France told me something “The students at the university very not that bright, neither more intelligent, but when it came to being upright, there was no exception. Every student attended all the classes and did all the allotted assignments without cheating”. Others have similar stories to tell. This may seem to be an irrelevant point, but it is worthy of being noted. We have distant dreams of being the MITs and Stans of tomorrow. But with our moral standards so low that they do not even come close to some of the lesser known European Universities, can we even place ourselves as rightful competitors?

It would not be an overstatement to