Cheaters Movie

Ethical Decision Making

Cheaters is a movie that was based on Chicago Public Schools competing in a decathlon. Steimetz High School, in which the movie revolved around, ran into quite the dilemma while studying for the National Competition. Dr. Plecki, the man who was in charge of the students on the team, had to face many moments of ethical decision making.

I think that Dr. Plecki was in the Pre-conventional stage of his moral development when it came to the choices that he made when having to decide whether or not for his team to cheat. The reason I think he is in this stage is because he makes his judgments of good on the basis of what will help him. The concept of rules or of obligations to obey them are not of any importance because he feels that winning is more important then being honest. How Dr. Plecki came to this development was because he thinks back to the way his father was treated by a company that he used to work for and how when they found out he was sick they laid him off without benefits and therefore he passed away. He feels that because of the way his father was treated he deserved to win, like it was owed to him. His father lost and so he felt that it was his time to be the victor.

Dr. Plecki goes through the steps of decision making, first with identifying the problem. He saw the problem as no one believing in him or the students. The decision he really had to deal with was when a student presented him with a copy of the test from the decathlon. He them pleaded with himself to justify why he should allow them to use it to win the competition.

The second stage in his decision making process was to gather the facts. The facts were that he had trained teams at the school for the past 2 years and neither of those years did they even qualify to the National competition. The teachers and staff at the school did not believe in him nor his team. The other fact that always came into his thoughts was how unfairly his father was treated. He asked himself whether or not the should let the students use the test and the conclusion that he came up with every time was that cheating will make them winners, not that cheaters never win.

The third stage in the decision making process is to list your alternatives. The alternatives that Dr. Plecki came up with were that without cheating they would lose. All the teachers and staff would have been correct about him and the students not being good enough to win. He really thought that there was no alternative to making them capable of winning.

The fourth stage is to select the course of action. Well, Dr. Plecki chose to allow the students to decide whether or not they wanted to cheat. He told them that they all had to agree to cheat otherwise they wouldn't. When one of the students did not agree in the beginning to go along with the cheating, Dr. Plecki convinced