Cheating

Between elections, bailouts and octuplets, short shrift has been paid to another highly deserving national travesty: A recent survey found that ninety percent of our high schoolers confessed to cheating on exams. This data can only make adults shake their heads and wonder: What kind of kid talks to a stranger and freely admits to cheating?

In 1963, a similar survey of Baby Boomers revealed only twenty-six percent of students owned up to copying off another student's paper. Just think: In post-war America under the leadership of a handsome, young president, a full seventy-four percent of our high schoolers, when confronted by a pollster, had the common decency to lie. Boy, Camelot was awesome.

What happened to our nation? Where did it all go wrong? It's anyone's guess but whatever the cause, this most recent poll will surely have a chilling effect on the futures of all unprepared, unmotivated students. Why? Here's why:

After a whopping three quarters of students chose to lie in the 1963 poll, there was little urgency on the part of adults to take action against such good kids. Hence, the respectful shiftiness of Baby Boomers effectively freed up the next 45 years worth of students to peek on multiple choice exams, smuggle crib sheets for essay tests and and devise elaborate hand signals for true and false questions. Among it's many contributions to the American culture, it's quite possible the selfless fraudulence of the Baby Boom generation enabled more listless students to gain acceptance to college than the GI Bill, Pell Grants and The United Negro College Fund combined.

But in the wake of the 2008 poll in which all but a paltry ten percent of our sons and daughters mystifyingly chose honesty over expedience, educators everywhere will undoubtedly mobilize to curtail classroom malfeasance. Their reforms can conceivably hamstring millions of future high schoolers in their efforts to achieve good grades without studying or paying attention in class. Many of these youngsters will miss out on higher education and even though the only tangible impact of attending college lies in meeting a lot of people who will haunt you for the rest of your life, this is still a catastrophic situation.

Again, we can only surmise why one generation responds to a nosy pollster one way and another generation in an entirely different way. The French, among their many silly adages, like to say: Autre temps, autre mores. Other times, other morals. Well, in this temps, one of our top mores is gone: Deception for the greater good. The golden age of slyly covering up ones own deceitfulness has been replaced by honesty, which is little more than a sneaky way of being devious.

Funny, I recall a teacher Francis Lewis High School in Queens who was blind in his left eye. As was trendy in 1972, he eschewed assigned seating, just letting us pile in everyday and park ourselves anywhere. I mentioned to some classmates that sitting on the left side of the room for exams could be beneficial and sure enough, for the mid-term, twenty-eight kids scrunched along the windows. Most of us fared freakishly well on the exam, after which I was lauded by my classmates as some kind of tactical genius.

Heady times were those. And yet -- yet! -- as much as I wanted to tell the world of my genius, I kept it to myself. In fact, after a few days, my whole class tamped down the genius talk. Modesty and discretion were not lost on the Lewis Class of '73. Somehow, we instinctively knew that maintaining an open and honest society required keeping our elders in the dark.

It's hard to put a value on values and in no way do I mean to imply that our generation of high schooler was superior to today's model. But, in so many ways, we were a lot better.

Comments

[GhostTurdOf America]

I used to like school. I went back to a community colllege here to learn Spanish. It was nothing like the university days or grad school. I was taught to do the exercises and study. All I saw at this college was a bunch or self-absorbed little brats who just wanted to know what would be on the exam. Few had any respect for the professor. They would bring in fast food and eat in class and their cell phones would ring and the little sh#ts would actually answer them. The USA has no culture and is not a society.

[S1m0n]

Wow. If exams were a meaningful measure of anything, this might be a travesty!

[TheNoBullExpress]

The entire trend of moral decline comes from our leaders. Those growing up under Kennedy
are far different than those who were 10-12 years old watching Reagan & Nixon lie repeadedly.
Then Clinton and Monica? There's a distinct trend to look at here.

[GranE]

Society in America rewards do-nothing more than any nation. Singapore's high school students are one grade year ahead of ours. Who will get the jobs? A 50th class reunion will open your eyes when you see the BMOC still driving a truck, and LMOC very rich from having sold his engineering invention to NASA. Which one do you think actually cracked a book? Dumb and soon to be poor Americans.

[kyunschooler]

This is the first comment to look realistically at the real cause of cheating. I raised my own children without tests or grades and they learned just fine. Both are now successful adults and one did "jump through the hoops" at college and graduated magna cum laude. Music students do it all the time in private lessons too.

The fact is that high stakes testing/co­nsequences of any sort leads to cheating in academia just like it does it business. Real learning happens when the learner is interested in learning something and makes a personal decision to acquire knowledge. Students know that the tests consist for a large part in "jumping through hoops" to play an elaborate game. This isn't to say that tests can't be used in a better way to give feedback to students, but the way the antiquated education system we have has been set up just isn't open to such innovation. And most people are so wedded to these antiquated notions (witness most of the comments to this blog) that no one seems able to think outside the box.

Try reading "Dumbing Us Down" by J.T. Gatto for more on these concepts.

[bayside]

Back in my day we got spanked by the school if we acted up ..Then we got it again at home because of what we did at school....­Doesnt happen like that now..

[copestir]

I guess no one has to earn anything any more.

[ChooseLaugh]

I bet corporal punishment was norm back then too

[schmuckufuchs]

It says more about the teachers than anything else. If nine out of ten students are cheating. than what is the person in front at the big desk getting paid to do!

[angharad76]

It says nothing about teachers. It says something about parents though. Teachers are not responsible for teaching honesty and morality. That comes from parents. And many of today's parents are too busy to teach their children that there's value in learning and that reward without work is wrong. There's also a big group of parents who are part of the instant gratificat­ion/rules-­are-for-su­ckers culture themselves.

The problem with schools today is not teachers. It's parent who fail to impart important lessons to their children: education is important for itself, not as just a means to make money and buy stuff; and being honest is worthwhile. "Go to school to earn money" and "Getting away with something makes you smarter than everyone else" are the lessons children learn from our culture. It's the parents' job to help their children make better moral judgments that will affect their character for the rest of their lives.

Teacher have enough to do.

[kathy001]

I absolutely agree. In addition to values and ethics, parents are also responsible for their children's education. Sending them to school and expecting the teachers to do it all is irresponsible as well as impractical. Parents need to be constantly aware of what a child is doing in school, what the child is learning, what the child is interested in, where the child needs help and encouragement.

[ChooseLaugh]

So teachers don't have a role to play in the class room of busting cheaters huh.
If nine out of ten are cheating then they are being allowed to do this or its being ignored. They may not be getting the right lessons at home but at school the class room is the teachers.

[dajuice7]

This generation of kids has been raised in a society of get by however you can. You can put a lot of the blame on parents who fail to instill lessons of self-reliance and integrity within their children. We shouldn't be surprised at these numbers, just ashamed that we haven't done better by our kids.

[Joethepauper]

It sounds to me like they are being honest about being dishonest. I'd rather them lie about cheating than freely admit it. Freely admitting it means that the consensus is that cheating is okay. Cheating on tests, cheating on taxes, cheating on spouses, and cheating in business (and causing the entire world's economy to fail) seem to be accepted or even encouraged. How many of those Wall St. executives cheated their way through college? That would explain their lack of real knowledge that led to this catastrophy. I guess "cooking the books" is also encouraqged in those circles, which we will learn soon enough the hard way. When we find out how bad the banks are really doing, we will regret TARP 1 and 2. Mark my words. My Grandparents were some of the most honest, trustworthy, and generous people I've ever known. Maybe a great depression once per generation builds character.

[kathy001]

That's a truly scary thought, made even more frightening by my sense that it's dead-on correct.

[DiogenesOfAlaska]

I'm not sure I understood your post, because I don't see how you know how many really did cheat in 1963.

Be that as it may, I can assure you that a rhetoric in professional life and its representation in the media which is full of the revelation that unless you cheat you are duped, certainly doesn't help.

It's time for old Edmund Burke's law: 'all it takes for evil to prevail is for good people to say nothing'

[CharmiO]

How many students cheated in 1963, indeed.

In 1963 at age 13 I was an 8th grader, and took the government test for entrance to high school in central California. My class had 26 students, as I recall, and I knew of no one who cheated ever on any classwork or test in my entire school, least of all the eighth grade high school entrance exam.

It wasn't until I was in my third year at university, 1971, that I actually saw students cheat, that instance being when I proctored an examination in an earth science course. I told the professor of the cheating, and he asked who the students were. I told him and he laughed. He said they were flunking anyway.

But this article has me scratching my head about 1963.

[magen]

Accountability is gone.

So why even try to lie and hide your discrepancies??

I already got away with it and I will again. Right?????

If there's no price to pay, its the idiot who wastes time studying. Right??????

Always using the short term solution, while ignoring the fact that in the long term (the rest of your life) you'll lose out to the people who did study.

Chinese, Russian, and Indian kids ARE studying, and their countries are investing in education.

American kids are cheating and we are constantly CUTTING funds for education.

Who's gonna be ahead of the game a few years from now???

I'm not puttin my money on America.

[johnsopinion]

Reading this, I was overtaken by a vision.
The visions was of a multiple choice exam where students were
not only allowed to see others papers but to debate others answers!

i.e., individually answer all questions on the exam, then gather in
groups of six or seven and exchange papers, examine the answers
of others, question the answers of others, debate them.
Then let the entire room, as one group, do the same.

The cause of allowing such a scenario? Trick questions.
Deviously trick questions, created by teachers who can think
rather than perform according to some committee's idea of
how learning happens.