Cheating: "But Everybody's Doing It" (page 2 of 2)

Where Are the Parents?

It would be hard to understate technology's role in the current wave of cheating. Students flock to online term-paper mills that sell reports on virtually any topic -- often with bibliographies and appropriate formatting. They use camera phones to send and transmit pictures of tests. Their MP3 players can hold digitized notes. Their graphing calculators can store formulas necessary to solve math problems.

"There is something about the anonymous quality of both the Internet and instant messaging," says Maria Fahey, who chairs the English department at Friends Seminary. "It's fast and quick and allows you to be in total denial about what you're doing."

Jason Stevens, an assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut, links it to today's "grab-and-go" culture, "whether it's downloading music or papers, or cutting and pasting sentences and paragraphs."

For some, the line between right and wrong gets blurred. "I think technology in a way masks the factor of guilt," agrees Jonathan Cross, a senior at Robinson Secondary School in Fairfax County, Virginia. "It used to be that if someone were to cheat, there'd be two of us sitting next to each other passing a note, or me looking at someone else's sheet, very blatant and obvious -- very clear and well-defined cheating. Now people try to hide that guilt by using different forms of technology."

Technological advances may explain the "how" behind today's cheating epidemic. As for the "why"?

"Education has become a commodity to help us gain the material wealth and status that is so prized and paraded in our culture," says Stevens. "The larger message for adolescents is that it's much more important and valuable to be well-off financially than it is to be a moral person."

When that message takes hold, Michael Josephson says, the implications are dire.

"What we're doing is training the next generation of corporate pirates," he says. "If you think that what went on with Enron or WorldCom is bad, just wait. What's missing is some of this righteous indignation and moral outrage, plus a little genuine fear."

What's also missing, say educators, are the voices of parents who can go overboard in providing homework help to their children, but fall short when it comes to clearly articulating the importance of following the rules.

"One of the really big changes that we've seen in the last 20 years is that in the past if students got caught cheating, they would be ashamed. And their parents would be really ticked off at them," says University of San Diego professor Larry Hinman. "Now the parents are, if anything, angry at the institution for doing something that might blot their kids' records."

Says Dana Trevethan: "I have never heard a parent of a student caught cheating say, 'I am totally humiliated. We don't accept or condone this kind of behavior at home.'"

Author David Callahan says parents must be explicit in talking with kids about cheating: "A lot of parents don't do it because they are caught up in it themselves or just working too hard. We hear so often that we should talk to kids about sex, smoking, drunk driving, but do we ever hear about talking to kids about integrity?"

It's not all grim. Some schools have banned cell phones, cameras and other gadgets during school hours. Honor codes have been reinvigorated. And teachers are using technology to turn the tables on cheaters.

A number of institutions now rely on turnitin.com, a website that lets teachers check students' written work for signs of plagiarism. John Barrie, the site's founder, says the company gets more than 50,000 papers per day. About one-third aren't original.

Perhaps most encouraging is the way some kids are taking a stand against cheaters. Megan Schisser, a senior at Robinson Secondary School, is one of them.

Last spring, after studying intensely for an advanced history final, she was pleased when she got an A. Unfortunately, some students in her class had copied down the questions and sent them to friends who were to take the test later. So everyone had to retake the exam. This time, Megan got a B. She and some friends were so upset, they decided to do something. "Our purpose was to say that there are those of us who are doing the best we can, and we're not cheating," she says. "And it is okay not to cheat."

The group formed an honor council, and in November introduced a series of video clips on the school's closed-circuit TV show. Using the Twisted Sister hit "We're Not Gonna Take It" as their theme, the spots discuss the importance of honor and end with a simple tagline, "Robinson Honor Council: Saving Robinson One Cheater At A Time."

It's a message that could play in classrooms across the country.

From Reader's Digest - March 2006

 

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