Break cheating pattern early
Break cheating pattern early
60 Minutes, The New York Times and National Public Radio have all recently reported on the culture of cheating that prevails in our nation's colleges. But what about cheating in our high schools? That is where the pattern often is established, where it is much worse than a decade ago and where it should be broken.
High schoolers who cheat and get away with it carry their bad habits over to college. There also is increasing pressure on these teenagers to cheat to get better grades for when they apply for college. That, in turn, makes scores more important than learning. Perhaps worst of all, kids increasingly don't seem to see a problem with cheating. The stigma is gone.
Not long ago, I asked a group of 11 high school students during a discussion on religion and ethics whether they had cheated on a test in the past year. Nine responded "yes." I then asked them whether they'd plagiarized from the Internet when writing a term paper. Seven had.
Seeing my look of consternation, a 17-year-old gave me a quick reality lesson: "Don't you know, rabbi, cheating is pretty much the norm in high school? Besides, most of the teachers really don't care."
Cheating increases
That teenager's hard-nosed attitude corresponds with the findings of two recent surveys that found a spike in cheating in America's high schools: The Josephson Institute of Ethics in California studied the ethical behavior of 12,000 high school students. The study found a sharp increase in most categories, including cheating, compared with 10 years ago: 74% of respondents said they had cheated on a test compared with 61% in 1992. Cheating in private religious schools was even higher: 78% compared with 72% in 1992. Don McCabe, a professor of management at Rutgers University and founder of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University, surveyed 4,500 students in 25 high schools. His study corroborates this growth in cheating. It also cites specific factors for the increase. One is the Internet, which has made cheating both easier and its boundaries more ambiguous. "Copying a few lines from an obscure Web site into one's own term paper is not defined by many students as plagiarism," McCabe explains. The percentage of students who consider that "serious cheating" dropped from 68% just two years ago to 27%.
A will and a way
Other methods used to cheat or plagiarize range from getting the questions and answers from a student who has already taken a test to cribbing notes written on the inside of the labels on water bottles to Web sites that sell ready-made term papers on any topic.
Educators and religious leaders often push programs on character education as methods to change bad behaviors such as cheating. But such programs will not turn the tide unless there are two other underlying changes.
First, the initiative for change must be student-driven rather than imposed by teachers and religious leaders. Take, for example, the experiment in peer influence occurring in Des Moines public schools. Teenagers selected by Drake University are fanning out to elementary and high schools to promote greater moral behavior, including the elimination of cheating on tests and homework. The students, nominated by their peers, were trained for 60 hours last summer. They employ games, exercises and group discussions among students and faculty to reverse the culture of cheating.
Honesty's advocates
Emily Shine, a senior and honor student at Des Moines' Urbandale High School, says the program is "having a slow but sure ripple effect on many of the students. At first, everyone is quiet, but by the end, they really get into it." A similar student initiative is underway in the 11th and 12th grade of the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham. "We have already failed when trying to impose standards from above, so now it is students who are spearheading this," acknowledges Steve Warshaw, director of the school's academic programs.
Second, school administrators need to penalize those who cheat. At many colleges, the penalty for cheating is expulsion. But in high schools, the punishment is often a zero on the test or term paper; sometimes the assignment can be made up.
The Washington Post reported on 118 seniors caught copying from the Internet last year at Bardstown High School in Kentucky. Their penalty was simply to write an essay on plagiarism. One of those caught even remained class valedictorian. Why not instead have teachers give a failing grade to the students in that particular course, forcing the teenagers to make up the class during summer school when they would rather be doing something more fun?
Only a combination of increased peer influence and tougher penalties meted out with the support of parents will clean up this moral morass in our high schools.