In 2001, a 37-year-old Barry Bonds hit a record-breaking 73 home runs. He had never hit more than 49, even during the "prime" of his baseball career, and this Ruthian total was well out of a statistical confidence interval based on Bonds' past numbers. Four years later, Barry Bonds went through rehab for nearly the entire season.
The numbers alone paint a suspicious picture in this example, but in other walks of life, it is not always so obvious. While Major League Baseball has begun to crack down on the use of performance-enhancing drugs, the battle in schools continues -- the battle against the steroids of academia: Adderall.
Many people are prescribed Adderall, a central-nervous stimulant used to counteract the effects of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder by improving concentration. But for every legitimate prescription of Adderall and other "study enhancing" drugs, there are other people who abuse them for recreational or scholastic purposes. I will not criticize the use of Adderall as a leisure drug in this forum, but when students are using the drug to get a leg up in school over "fair players," something is not right.
The black market for the drug is commonly supplied by legitimate users who were given a generous dosage and want to make extra money. Unfortunately, each pill can go for only a few dollars depending on the time and location of the school, making Adderall both affordable and accessible.
Around finals week, you can always hear the buzz coming from the Adderall and Ritalin markets in the halls of dormitories. Yet don't those demanding the drugs, in an attempt to improve their academic performance, realize they are gaining an unfair advantage?
Taking Adderall to pull an all-nighter is commonplace, but it seems that few in the Penn community actually see this as cheating. The University's Code of Academic Integrity defines one form of academic dishonesty in the category "Unfair Advantage: attempting to gain unauthorized advantage over fellow students in an academic exercise." While the language here is fairly clear, otherwise honest students refuse to acknowledge that taking Adderall in an attempt to enhance academic performance is indeed cheating.
Study-enhancing drugs are different from caffeine because they are more potent and require a prescription. Their effects, while disputable, are significant. Though there can be negative side effects from use, a student on Adderall usually is able to concentrate more clearly and study longer, thus gaining an advantage over those who are constrained by natural human limitations.
In the eyes of the University, it is more than just an issue of fairness, since the responsibility of a school should be to ensure that students learn how to work and think independently.
Those who rely on drugs, not natural performance, cheat themselves out of a premier education. As they move on to further challenges in their lives, it is questionable whether they will be prepared to handle these "tests" on their own without taking the easy way out. The continual reliance on a miracle drug is bound to fail when deadlines need to be constantly met in the real world.
The sad fact is that is that the misuse of Adderall at the nation's colleges is a difficult issue to address, especially because we do not comprehend the gravity of the problem. According to Myrna Cohen, director of Penn's Weingarten Learning Resources Center, "the information we have right now is largely anecdotal; there is no controlled study of the information we have at Penn." The case is the same at colleges nationwide.
The situation, while occasionally talked about, still lingers as a fringe concern in the scheme of things, but any observant student who travels around Van Pelt or the Quad late at night knows how serious the issue truly has become. It is hard to comprehend the number of students cheating with these types of drugs and even trickier to try to prevent their abuse.
The next time I walk into a finance exam, I doubt I will be subject to a urine test like Barry Bonds is sure to be next year. However, while the situation is hard to confront, it still needs to be confronted. Perhaps the University even has to go so far as to re-examine those with prescriptions to Adderall and somehow monitor dosages. For the sake of those who play by the rules, it is time for the administration to step up to the plate.Mark Littmann is a senior, finance concentrator from New York. Case of the Mondays appears on Mondays.
