A friend wrote me last week to say how troubled she was by this stunner from her 19-year-old: The freshman at a private liberal-arts college told her mom that cheating on exams was standard operating procedure at school, and that she fully expected that cheating would be an everyday thing once she got into the workplace, too.
"To really get ahead, and get what you want in the business world, it is absolutely necessary to cheat," the student told her horrified mother. Forgo a chance to cheat and you're foolishly transferring a perfectly good opportunity to some other cheater who will reap the benefits, she said.
Though she's years from gainful employment, the young woman has something in common with lots of people already securing a paycheck in the job world.
In a survey of 500 financial professionals in the United States and the United Kingdom released Monday, one-quarter said they believed "that the rules may have to be broken in order to be successful." Asked whether they thought their competitors would break the law to get ahead, nearly 40 percent in the survey sponsored by New York law firm Labaton Sucharow said yes.
Though it's tempting to minimize these dysfunctional ethics as just a sleazy financial industry thing, the problem, of course, infects business on Wall Street and off. In January, the not-for-profit Ethics Research Center said that 13 percent of the 4,600 employees it surveyed across a range of industries last September perceived pressure to compromise standards at their jobs. That was a five percentage-point increase from 2010. Don't expect any miraculous turnaround. Boding poorly for the future is that more employees are reporting retaliation after they speak up, and thus are increasingly afraid to expose unscrupulous practices.
So when you think about it, no mom or dad should be shocked that young people look upon dishonesty as a tool in a go-getter's quest for success.
And parents themselves play a part in the messages they send about attaining goals at any cost. New York City officials said Monday that 70 students at Stuyvesant High School had been involved in a cheating scheme last month. During a foreign-language exam on June 18, the principal confiscated a cell-phone from a student who was texting messages to fellow students. Using data found on the student's phone, a subsequent investigation uncovered additional cheating during previous tests, including three Regents exams.
In the ensuing press coverage, much was made of the stressful demands on Stuyvesant teenagers to meet expectations in a school that sends graduates to places like MIT and Brown. "Most of the students come from families where the goal is 'Ivy League school or bust'; you either go to an Ivy League school or you haven't lived up to your potential," one Stuyvesant grad told the New York Times.
Feel sorry for the Stuyvesant kids if you want, but I don't. At some point, people in charge have to come down hard on cheating, whether it happens in the classroom or in the corner office. Now wouldn't be a bad time to start.
Sadly, the school hasn't taken the opportunity to expel the student/cheaters, much the way many businesses let rogues stay in their jobs. Our executives-of-the-future must wonder what planet we're on when we give those sermons about ethics.
On Long Island last fall, seven high school students -- and young people who posed as those students -- were arrested. Kids who were trying to get into college paid brainiacs to pose as them and take the SAT and ACT exams. The imposters pocketed between $1,500 and $2,500 apiece for their labors.
Schools try lots of things to keep students on the straight and narrow. Some insist that students sign a promise not to cheat before they begin an exam. Others, like Princeton University, require ethics training before freshmen begin their Fall classes.
Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University who recently published The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, says both measures are useful, but that many people need constant prompting to do the right thing. In his experiments, which for the most part use college students, the professor learned that cheating can be so contagious that even subjects who think they are wearing fake designer sunglasses are more inclined to cheat than those who think they're wearing the real thing. (In fact, in Ariely's experiment, all were wearing the same glasses.)
He also found that, after he gave some subjects the chance to cheat on a test and exaggerate their results, they quickly persuaded themselves that they'd actually earned the score. It's hard not to be reminded of the self-puffery we see from some of the more mediocre players in finance.
A policy that solves at least part of the cheating problem can be found on Wall Street, of all places. The brokerage industry has a self-regulatory organization, The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc., that has often been too soft on its members over the years, but does get one thing right. When brokers cheat on a licensing test administered by Finra, they get kicked out of the industry.
Brokers try to challenge that, of course. One guy who impersonated his boss at a Finra exam -- the impersonator presumably was the smarter of the two -- got caught, and appealed to the regulator that his stressful life had included an abduction by terrorists and the looting of all his assets.
A Finra hearing panel said it was sympathetic to the man's pressures. But the rules are the rules, Finra said, and the broker was history. CEOs and school principals would do well to be just as uncompromising. Our kids have caught on that anything less is an invitation to game the system.
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It's also a reflection of our U.S. value system, where money is worshipped above all else.
There is no more learning for the sake of learning or curiosity for the joy of it. That is killed in elementary school after a few years of standardized testing.
I'm surprised students are even going to college anymore. After all, their teachers went to college and many have masters degrees and look where that got them? Lousy pay and disrespect on all sides. Hardly recommends higher education as a means to be successful, I.E. earn lots of money.
And these teachers are never fired as they are protected by the union. And the kids pick up on this level of corruption in our schools........
Change will come. I have no idea in what form, but I do know it won't be easy.
It pains me to say how correctly I believe you have summed up the state of things in our country except it has been going on for longer. It is just that the economic pie available to the totality of the nation has shrunk relative to the population, which spurs people to be more brazen about their abandonment of ethics. Is it any wonder that our nation's voters believed the lies that politicians like Nixon peddled so many years ago? And continue to get fooled by GOPers peddling austerity as the key to creating jobs? And Dems peddling protection of the public K-12 school education cartel as the key to reforming our nation's public school system? Both are peddling sewage as the sweet wine of prosperity but too many voters can't smell the stench of what they are drinking even though it is making our nation sick.
And I wonder how many of those cheating CLAIM to be conservative Christians?
Then again, even the leaders of various big churches are as bad or worse than many non-believers.
Corruption from the top on down....from politics, finance, religion.....
All I can see come of it is the rich keep getting richer and the rest of the people keep getting poorer due to all the financial corruption UNTIL the lower classes start social and political unrest that will get ugly.
This is not the America we thought we would have when we got older.
And the younger generation doesn't know anything else.
Sad.
It is not uncommon for people with less than ideal education background to rise to prominence, make valuable contribution to the society, or achieve tough goals, for example, they can be the people who are less well-rounded but excel at a particular field.
Despite competition from students from prestigious schools, they can find their own way and eventually outperforming the cheaters who have no solid foundation (which is just an end result, desirable, but not the main goal), even though the initial stages might be more difficult. Hence, finding good mentors is important, especially for those who wish to exploit the abundance of information and knowledge on the internet, and running the risk of being suck into the wormhole of its negativity.
Fortunately, good mentors can be found almost everywhere.
"Not uncommon"? Sure, it happens. Rarely. Think of the people with "less than ideal" education or personal circumstances. It is, indeed, VERY uncommon for those people to end up successful. The system we live in is not set up to make it easy.
You aren't going to become CEO with a high school diploma. Not unless you create your own company and are very successful. Bill Gates is an outlier, not the norm.
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I don't feel sorry for them, but they were just doing what they had to do, and getting caught was a risk they had no choice but to take. That's the problem when dishonesty becomes generalized throughout society. If you wish even basic success, you have no choice but to lie because everyone else is lying too. Even just getting a job requires that you fiddle with the truth on your resume, turning the molehills of everyday tasks into mountains of accomplishment.
Perhaps other people are cheating to get answers on a test right; that doesn't mean you can't learn the subject well enough to get the answers right without cheating. And padding your resume isn't necessary if you've actually accomplished something.
Is it harder? Yes. But it's certainly not impossible. They have a choice.