JUSTICE OR JUST US? WHAT TO DO ABOUT CHEATING

FYI. I think key lines in the essay are "The best ways to reduce
cheating are all about good teaching"; "Cutting corners and compromising
principles are habit-forming;" "Finally, as educators, we must do our
best to exemplify intellectual integrity ourselves - in everything from
how we treat students and each other to how we approach the subject
matter...."

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                        JUSTICE OR JUST US? WHAT TO DO ABOUT CHEATING

May 2004

By Jason Stephens

Earlier this year, local papers were full of horrified reports of
cheating in an affluent Silicon Valley high school. Stories like this
are a regular occurrence. Last year cheating at the University of
Virginia made headlines, and before that, it was the military academies.

Adults always seem shocked and surprised to learn of cheating,
especially in high-achieving and high-socioeconomic settings. They
shouldn't be so surprised. Research on cheating has shown over and over
that most students do cheat, at least some of the time. Research in high
schools shows that two thirds of students cheat on tests, and 90 percent
cheat on homework. The figures are almost as high among college
students. Furthermore, it is clear that rates of cheating have gone up
over the past three decades.

Why? Do students fail to understand that cheating is wrong? Well, yes
and no. In a recent study of high school students that I conducted, many
students acknowledged that cheating is wrong but admitted they do it
anyway, seemingly without much remorse. Jane, a tenth-grade honors
student, is typical of these students:

Like people have morals, they don't always go by them. ... So I mean,
even if you get that test and you're like, "Oh yeah, I cheated on this
test," it doesn't lessen that grade. It says an A on the paper and you
don't go, "Oh, but I cheated." You're just kind of like, "Hey, I got
that A." So it doesn't really matter necessarily, if it has to do with
your morals or anything, you just kind of do it.

Like Jane, other students in the study said that they cheat for simple,
pragmatic reasons-to get high grades and because they don't have time to
do the work carefully. Especially for college-bound students, the
pressure for grades is real. According to the Higher Education Research
Institute's annual survey, 47 percent of incoming college freshmen in
2003 reported having earned an A average in high school. As Jane put it:

It's not always necessary (to cheat). I guess if you already have
straight A's, then why cheat? But yet, we still seem to do it. It's kind
of like insurance, like you feel better, you feel safer, if you do it.
... Then I will have that 95 instead of like the 90, because that's
almost like a B or something.

But despite the pressure for consistently high grades, students don't
generally cheat in all of their classes. And somewhat surprisingly, it
is not the difficulty of the course that predicts in which classes they
are more likely to cheat. Instead, I found that high school students
cheat more when they see the teacher as less fair and caring and when
their motivation in the course is more focused on grades and less on
learning and understanding. At least in these classes, they can justify
cheating. They don't claim it is morally acceptable, but they don't seem
to feel that it really matters if they cheat under these circumstances.

In most studies of cheating, the researcher decides which behaviors
constitute cheating, and students are only asked to report how often
they engage in those behaviors. In my survey of high school students, I
asked them to report both their level of engagement in a set of 12
"academic behaviors," as well as their beliefs concerning whether or not
those behaviors were "cheating." Not surprisingly, the vast majority (85
percent or more) indicated that behaviors such as "copying from another
student during a test" and "using banned crib notes or cheat sheets
during a test" were cheating. However, only 18 percent believed that
"working on an assignment with other students when the teacher asked for
individual work" was cheating. Subsequent interviews with a small
sub-sample of these students revealed that students regarded this
forbidden collaboration as furthering their knowledge and understanding,
and therefore saw it as an act of learning rather than a form of
cheating. These!

  findings suggest that students make a distinction between behaviors
that are overtly dishonest (such as copying the work of another, which
effectively serves to misrepresent one's state of knowledge) and
behaviors that are not inherently dishonest (such as working with
others, which can serve to enrich one's interpersonal skills and
academic learning). Educators, too, should be cognizant of this
distinction and be judicious in prohibiting collaboration.

With this pervasiveness of acceptance by students, is it acceptable to
us as a society to tacitly accept cheating as a fact of life and not be
so shocked when it comes to light? I don't think so. Cutting corners and
compromising principles are habit-forming. They don't stop at
graduation, as we have seen in recent scandals in business and
journalism. And cheating or cutting corners in one's professional or
personal life can cause real damage-both to oneself and to others. We
need to care about it.

And I believe we can do something about it. The best ways to reduce
cheating are all about good teaching. In fact, if efforts to deal with
cheating don't emerge from efforts to educate, they won't work-at least
not when vigilance is reduced. These suggestions are easier said than
done, but I believe they point in the right direction, both for academic
integrity and for learning more generally.

    * Help students understand the value of what they're being asked to
learn by creating learning experiences that connect with their interests
and have real-world relevance.

    * Consider whether some of the rules that are frequently broken are
arbitrary or unnecessarily constraining. For example, is individual
effort on homework always so important? Given the evidence that
collaboration in doing homework supports learning, it doesn't seem so.

    * As much as possible, connect assessment integrally with learning.
Create assessments that are fair and meaningful representations of what
students should have learned. Make sure assessments provide informative
feedback and thus contribute to improved performance. When possible,
individualize evaluations of students' progress and offer them
privately. Avoid practices that invite social comparisons of
performance.

    * Give students images of people who don't cut corners: scientists
who discover things they don't expect because they approach their work
with an impeccable respect for truth and a genuinely open mind; business
people who exemplify integrity even when it seems like it might cost
them something. But don't preach. Take seriously the fact that, in some
contexts, being consistently honest can be hard.

Finally, as educators, we must do our best to exemplify intellectual
integrity ourselves-in everything from how we treat students and each
other to how we approach the subject matter, to how we approach
mandatory high stakes testing to how we think and talk about politics.
We need to look for ways to make deep and searching honesty both
palpable and attractive.

About the Author

Jason M. Stephens has been a research assistant at The Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching since 1998, where he has
worked on the Political Engagement Project and the Project on Higher
Education and the Development of Moral and Civic Responsibility. He will
receive his Ph.D. in educational psychology from Stanford University
this June and join the faculty in the Department of Educational
Psychology at the University of Connecticut in August 2004.

Carnegie Perspectives is a series of commentaries that explore different
ways to think about educational issues. These pieces are presented with
the hope that they contribute to the conversation. We invite your
response at CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org.

Join the Carnegie Perspectives email list by sending an email to
CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org with "Subscribe" as the subject
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Received on Wed Aug 25 11:12:47 2004