[url=http://www.cnn.com/2002/fyi/teachers.ednews/04/05/highschool.cheating/index.html]Many students say cheating's OK[/url]

A national survey by Rutgers' Management Education Center of 4,500 high school students found that [b]75 percent of them engage in serious cheating[/b].

More than half have plagiarized work they found on the Internet.

Perhaps most disturbing, many of them don't see anything wrong with cheating:

Some [b]50 percent of those responding to the survey said they don't think copying questions and answers from a test is even cheating[/b].[:O]

"[b]Students today find it so much easier to rationalize their cheating,[/b]" says Donald McCabe, the Rutgers professor who conducted the nationwide survey on high school cheating.

Some student comments:
"I actually think cheating is good. A person who has an entirely honest life can't succeed these days."

"I believe cheating is not wrong. People expect us to attend 7 classes a day, keep a 4.0 GPA, not go crazy and turn in all of our work the next day. What are we supposed to do, fail?"
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From a personal standpoint, this is not just restricted to High School kids. Surprisingly (or not) this is what I see at the University level also.

As pathetically watered-down public education is, it's astounding that most kids still have to cheat to keep from failing.

Just shows how ignorant, dull-witted and feeble-minded most of today's teenagers are. Most are SO dim and uneducated they don't even have a clue how poorly educated they are.

The future's not looking any brighter I'm afraid. [:(]

The lovely decay of society. At this rate we will all have the chance to see its end.

At the high school level, atleast NY has the Regents exams, which seperate the cheaters from the doers.  Back in my HS days, this is how I seperated myself from Jerome and Shantiqua who would position themselves behind me every test because they knew that I knew what I was doing.  When they took the standardized (for NY) regents exam and failed it, my hard work paid off.  Can't say the same about college though, cheaters walked free and noone gave a shit.  I guess the only saving grace is that I'm in law school and they are still "figuring out life."

There are some of us that do care and want to reward those who do not cheat. Some of us use a grading system that requires a minimal level of test performance on tests to receive a "C", "B" etc; project grades are necessary, but not sufficient. We use multiple versions of tests and other techniques to eliminate, or at least greatly reduce cheating during tests.

Wait till they get to the real world! [:O]



Edited because I did not CHEAT and use spell check! [:D]

The issue of cheating is primarily a manifestation of social values.  Some international students at my university do not think very much of the "honor code".  Coming from a more collectivist culture, the emphasis on learning is memorization, and cheating is thought of along the lines of "helping each other".

This does not jive very well with our very individualistic culture.  I for one, do not cheat, and report cheating when I see it.  But the cheaters pay, either in the short term or the long term.

Viper Out

They do?

[img]http://www.startingpage.com/images/clinton%20cover.jpg[/img]

While I'm not condoning it, this one kid has a point.  The pressure to keep a high GPA is overwhelming, and professors assign work like their class is the only one you're taking.

Last semester I was in school, I was taking a calculus class, and an Engineering Design Drafting class.  Both were tuesday-thursday evening classes.  The drafting instructor assigned an average of six assignments a week, half of which were assigned tuesday, due thursday.  He also assigned a class group project, requiring about 5 hours (minimum) of work per week, outside of class, without easing up on the above requirements.

I spent so much time trying not to fail the drafting class (Got a B-) that I had NO TIME to study for the calc class, and totally screwed it up (got a C+) and I am not exactly a slouch when it comes to mathematics!

Again, while not condoning what these kids do, I can understand why.

I've noticed this too.  There is a group of 5-6 oriental kids in a couple of my computer science classes.  They openly cheat and I think the only reason no one does anything is because it would be "racist" to do so.  "Have you finished four through six yet?  I'm done with one through three."

And so onto the slippery slope of dumbing-down our children you step.

This is how tolerance of idiocy begins... by first "understanding" the idiocy.

How bout using your logic here:
"While I don't condone gun confiscation, I certainly [u]understand[/u] their side."

... This topic frosts my hide.  I maintain a 4.0 and always apply my very best to college.

However, I see on a regular basis where students get away with cheating by "missing" class the day of exams so the school provides retakes and make-ups on the day following.

Well duh, all class idiots show up then, trade notes and have even taken in other classmates tests to score perfect scores. All right under the noses of the instructors.

... Needless to say, I was pissed when one of "these" girls came into class stating she got an "A" in the last class.  WTF? She is an absolute bimbo.

... The only possible reason this happens is that there is no profit in kicking students out of class!

[rolleyes][rolleyes][rolleyes]

Way back in the olden days, when I went to university, you really couldn't cheat – even if you wanted to. Even getting into university was a matter of national competition and enrolement was rigidly limited – but your university education did not cost you a dime. About 10% could buy their way in, but it was very expensive and it certainly didn't ensure you a degree.

By the time you reached university, your 11 years in the lower levels of the system were supposed to have provided you with a rounded education. A further two years of studying just two or three subjects were designed to steer you to a particular subject. If then, through national competition, you got accepted into university, you specialized in that subject. If you were reading English Literature, that's what you did, Eng. Lit. – no supplementary BS courses like needlework or navigation.

Term papers were student specific – your professor gave you your own term paper to write based on his judgement of where you, individually, most needed to concentrate your efforts. These were not exams as we now know them: They would take the form of writing a paper (7/8k words) each term like: "Discuss Skakespeare's use of supporting characters to enhance viewpoint or actions of main characters in his Tragedies" – for example. Since you would likely be the only student with that specific task, it was tough to cheat.

Classes were never larger than 20 students and you had one-on-one sessions (3 hours long) with your Prof. at least once per month.

Of course, since the papers were graded by the same Prof., objectivity/subjectivity were integral to the system and did not make it  immune from corruption, but, I never witnessed any.

I think that today, many students are cheated out of getting good education by the system itself – it is a business, no more, no less. And any national education system that becomes a business will inevitably behave as one. It will correctly deduce that mass production is the way to go and use every device it can to cut costs. Since it is a monopoly with an insatiable demand for its products, it has little interest in the standard of the raw materials it uses and even less in the quality of its output. About the only thing it does care about is charging whatever the market will bear.

I do not condone cheating. But in my opinion, it's the system that is cheating the students (and their parents). If the students recognize their education system for what it has become, I can understand them trying to "beat the system".

I don't support the dumbing down of our children.  I agree with the old cliche that "you're only cheating yourself" by not learning what you're paying to be there for in the first place.  I merely pointed out that it's REALLY EASY to see why these kids do cheat--the workload placed upon them (and the pressure to succeed--lots of jobs these days require TRANSCRIPTS along with your resume!) is something no reasonable person can handle.

When faced with the ethical dilema of cheating in that comp-sci class, and getting an A (attractive to employers) or not cheating, and not being able to finish your assignments because there are litterally not enough hours in the day--and getting a C, or failing, I can see really easily how they stray.

By the way, I DO understand the anti's point of view--and just like this case, I don't agree with it.  Both are possible, you know.

I am presently in college.  One of my friends is studying physical theorapy, so he is obviously in medical school.  A guy he sometimes hangs out with is literally cheating his way through med school.  I find this to be a pretty bad situation considering he can really mess someone up later on because he doesn't know what the hell he is doing.  If I had a way to prove his unethical behavior I would definately notify the school.

Amen Brother!

Well shit, why don't we just euthanise the current younger generations and start over? Give up on them. Great idea!

So you don't think that a child's ability to pass exams is a function of how well they've been taught? Do you really believe a young person's ability to pass exams is entirely of their own making? And of course, cheating is an entirely new phenoma...........

Instead of whining about how stupid the younger generation is and putting the blame entirely on them, suggest possible alternatives after identifying where the source of the the problems are. Of course people are a function of their abilities but learning how to pass exams by wrote (a flawed and antiquated method of assessment, in my opinion) says FUCK-ALL about someone's intelligence. People learn by different methods these days (not just out of dusty old textbooks) so testing people using exams considering the myriad ways people learn is anachronistic.

I think the public school systems are piss-weak too but remember, that's not the fault of the students. It's from piss-weak people from the previous generations who found the learning tough and decided to change it. So kid's uneducated ways (notiec I said uneducated, NOT unintelligent) is because of the actions of the people who came before them.

Just be careful who you blame and your stigmatising of the current crop of students does nothing but make us young'uns think that YOU are threatened by us. It may or may not be the case but you come across like someone who harks back to the old days because it is YOU who cannot keep up.

while a lot of people do cheat and there have been past cheating scandals in my school. There is one good thing which is that a proven cheater is promptly expelled from school, no execptions. I think that's what all schools should do, expel students who cheat and plagarize and note it on their permanent record. I for one have never sacrificed my personal integrity for grades. I get a B+ grade (A these days because I'm taking all math and science this semester). Personally, I also think there's too much pressure and the misplaced notion that there's a direct correlation between school grades and future potential in life. The system isn't designed to reward creativity and ingenuity, but memory capacity. Neither does it reward a strong sense of morality and ethics, when those are the very traits are are most important to later success in life. This is why we have Enron.

I wouldn't trade my C+ average for a dishonest 4.0.


Ever.

I'm not in school, I run a business. So tell me-
How do I cheat on my business lease if I don't have the cash to pay next month's rent?

Best be crackin' the books, young 'uns.

Despite what the saying says cheaters DO prosper. I see it EVERY day. Does that make it right? No it does not.
But the honest hard working little guy is always the first to get the brown end of the stick. While the ass kissers, back stabbers and cheaters almost always win.

I hate to say it but dishonesty and cheating are almost a necessity to get anywhere in life.

Hmmm...

"I graduated in the top 3% of my class [b]form[/b] a damn good college."

"it was funny as hell when my [b]firends[/b] carried pagers into one exam..."

[:D]

No silly. That's illegal.
When it comes to cheating to pass a test - yes, their behavior is ENTIRELY indicative of their own ability (or lack thereof).

Suggestion #1: Flush the Dept. of Education down the toilet.
Suggestion #2: Allow FULL parental control of curricula.
Suggestion #3: Test all teachers at least every other year to ensure THEY know the basics they purport to teach.
Suggestion #4: Expel disruptive and unruly students.
Suggestion #5: Fail students who don't learn.

By "wrote"?!?
"a flawed and antiquated method of assessment, in my opinion"?? In YOUR opinion?? Who are you?? Do you teach inarticulate functional illiterates at the College level who argue that they always got As in school and can't understand why their only pulling a 33% in "hard" science classes?

Some do. Many don't learn by ANY methods.

Learning by ANY method takes self-discipline, the ability to focus and somewhat average intelligence. MANY people who fall backwards out of high school these days lack EVERYTHING needed to learn.
So cheating makes up for that????

Son, you don't even know what the "old days" were like.

Schools used to breed and expect self-discipline, honesty, honor and excellence.

Now they're just happy if the little mooks and midriffs aren't openly conjugating in the hallways.

I cheated some in high school. My subjects were pre-cal and spanish. The pre-cal teacher was the worst I had in high school, so I thought it was easier to cheat. (It was.) I was just too damn lazy to work in spanish.
After I got in college, there is no way I would even consider it. I was not about to risk ruining the rest of my life for a few points. I did hear of several students purchasing papers off of the internet though. The idea of personalized papers does cut down on cheating, but the true cheaters just spend more money. Alot of the paper websites have a custom paper service. You can have a master or a doctor in your subject write your paper for about $20-30 per page.
In medical school, I haven't even heard of anyone cheating. I am sure it happens occasionally, but no one would dare tell anyone else. The national boards will definately weed out those that cheated.
tony

...or shooting each other..

Rubbish. Kids are more perceptive than you give them credit for. A lot of kids cheat (successfully) because they realise that their teachers are incompetant and do so just to get through. They're not learning anything from most public school teachers so cheat just to get the class out of the way because a lot of them don't see the point in trying hard with some of the intellectual midgets teaching in most public schools. The students who genuinely struggle because they're not smart enough generally aren't smart enough to cheat successfully either.

And how about those who are in schools but are dyslexic, autistic or otherwise afflicted and are too embarrassed to tell anyone about it? They may be smart but have afflictions; what do you propose to do about them? Your blanket 'solutions' completely ignore their needs but I'll get to them in time.

Oh and let's not forget that a cheating kid's behaviour can be partly indicative of a bad example set by the previous generation, which according to your assertions didn't cheat..............

Y'know what, I'm sick and fucking tired of the older generation telling me just how bad/stupid I am purely because I'm:

a)Young.
b)Part of this generation.

Everything I hear in complaints about the current times from the old fogeys happened back in the good old days too. You can argue scale if you wish but it certainly DID happen. People have cheated since the first written test and always will. We're just hearing about it today. How many chief justices, vascular surgeons, Presidents or airline pilots cheated their way through exams back then? More than you know I'm sure, with the operative word being 'know'.

And now for your 'suggestions':



Major change is needed, yes.



If you're talking about home schooling, sure. If you're talking about intervention in a school, you MUST be yanking my chain. I mean, it'd be terrible if you say had parents on school legislative councils who made decisions for your child that weren't up to your lofty standards. Certainly, control your child's progress in school but that's as far as it goes.



I disagree. Make it every year. I can guarantee, as a teacher, I won't fail so I have nothing to worry about.



Expel them to where? Or is it a case of 'out of sight, out of mind'?



Students not willing to learn isn't the whole problem. Teachers not willing AND not able to teach is a bigger problem.

A typo. I didn't proof-read my post. So sue me.



Yes. I teach chemistry at my local Looniversity, actually. Thanks for asking. :D

I certainly don't call them 'functionally illiterate'. They wouldn't know what I meant anyway. :D



And that's fine but once again, who's responsible for that? Other than intelligence, self-disclipline and focus (in terms of learning for exams) etc. are skills that are learnt, not innate. There's where the problem is I believe; students aren't being taught these skills. So my solution isn't just to fail them and wash my hands clean of them. It is to actually make my best attempt at teaching them how to practise these skills.




Of course not. A good education makes up for that. It's something quite a few schools are abdicting their responsibility to provide.

I know you've already tried to discredit this line of thinking but you DO need to understand where the need to cheat stems from and it's not even in the majority of cases where the person cheats just to get ahead. If you remove the atmosphere which virtually encourages cheating, there'd be no need to cheat and students just wouldn't bother. Of course there ARE people who still will cheat but that's their problem.

In short, stigmatise cheating, not the student.



That's true. Do you honestly believe blaming the students is the solution? The ability to learn in an institutionalised environment is a learned skill, hence if a decent example is shown, a student won't know how to learn in order to pass assessments. As I said, this is the area in desperate need of repair.

You know,The_Macallan,I agree with you;kids today have no decent upbringing at home.The parents don't teach thier kids any values....or maybe just all the wrong and bad ones.No disipline(spanking)GASP!!!;or the consequences of thier actions.
The schools/teachers can't do thier job because of all the PARENTS that won't let them.And it's
the PARENTS that BITCH about the schools not doing enough for thier kids,when it's the PARENTS who do NOTHING to RAISE THIER KIDS.
Ask a teacher when was the last time they SPANKED a student?They will probably respond
with:"Oh,we aren't ALLOWED to do THAT anymore"


what a JOKE.

BTWelders,say"yes/no ma'am/sir,and are on the honor
roll every 6 weeks.

IT'S ALL IN HOW YOU RAISE THEM!!!!



Edited to say that I agreed with you.

Rote learning an anachronism?  Perhaps, but there are some subjects that MUST be learned in just such a fashion.  What worries me is that the art of "critical thinking" seems to be falling by the wayside...  

A useful modification to the current testing/evaluation system - I think - would be to replace the simple parroting of facts with questions whose answers require at least SOME analytical thought.  

"Explain the actual underlying cause of the American Civil War.  How could the American Civil War have been avoided, or at least mitigated?  Discuss a possible non-military solution..."

Don't parrot out the simple facts of the dates and locations involved in the war, but look into the war and analyse it.

"Expound upon the workings of the Otto cycle internal combusion engine.  Compare with the Diesel cycle IC engine.  Question - are the fuel interchangeable?  Discuss.  Bonus marks, compare the Otto cycle gasoline engine with the Wankel cycle rotary engine, comparing advantages and disadvanteges of both."

"What is the root cause of death by electrocution?  Explain the physiological effects of electrical current upon the human body."

We know that electricity can kill - but why?  What CAUSES death?

"Explain possible psychological motivations which would compel an individual to enlist in the armed forces?  Internal motivations only, please."

Questions like these would cause an individual to actually THINK, but could still produce quantifiable answers.  Analyses of occurences following major historical events would also be interesting, exploring the relationships between various events (causality is important to understand.)  It's not enough to know when the Great Depression was, but what events led up to it and what followed as a direct result?

This is the sort of thinking that needs to be fostered.  I remember taking tests like this when I was in high school not that very long ago...

FFZ

The cheaters will fit right into (and probably excel) the corporate environment which I despise so much. Where good brown nosing skills are more valuable than college degrees and rewards for hard work is stolen by back stabbing co-workers.

What? Do I sound bitter? You bet your ass I am.

I cheated exactly once during college.  The professor was piss-poor and an absolute bastard who personally hated me -- the feeling was mutual -- and the textbook he picked had absolutely no relevance to what he was doing in class.  Not that it mattered, since neither of them had any relevance to the assignments he was handing out.  Cheating allowed me to learn what the idiot professor was talking about -- it turned out that he expected people to have taken a completely separate graduate-level class (compiler theory) before taking his graduate-level class (formal languages).

On the final, the only way I could get into the 'B' range was to get a perfect score, and I did.  I even got the extra-credit problem down cold.

Special situations call for special solutions.  The zero-tolerance policy that most of you advocate would have meant I would have been expelled;  instead, I learned what I had to in order to pass.

What sort of cheating did you do that allowed you to learn?  As a general rule, I would say that the point of cheating is to get a good grade [i]without[/i] learning.

Funny, you don't sound ANYTHING like a University Professor. You sound like a 17-22year old underachiever with delusions of Professorhood.

"the [b]need[/b] to cheat"?!?

So tell me, what does credibility look like from so far away?

[>:/]

Whatever you say "Professor". [rolleyes]

Copying others' homework assignments two or three times.  Going through their thought processes gave me enough information to ramp up on my own after that.

I agree. With the rest of your post, too. Well said.



I never said I was a professor. The University system works differently here. The only professors here are heads of departments. It's more of a professional qualification than an academic one.

And yes I teach chemistry. I'm a post-doctoral researcher who lectures on heterocyclic aromatic chemistry with some organo metallics Thrown in for good measure.

I did my undergraduate science degree in Canberra (two year accelerated degree; most undergraduate degrees take 3 years here), honours in Adelaide and just finished my Ph.D recently so technically I'm a post-doc now.

Oh and I'm 23.



Okay, so 'need' was a bad choice of words. Maybe 'propensity'?

Just to make one thing clear, I abhor cheating as much as anybody. I never did and was never even tempted. So in that, I'm sure we're on the same page but I think, although the action is the responsibility of the person who cheats, where it stems from is somewhere else. Maybe they heard their parents bragging about cheating in high school or maybe even their teachers at school told them how they cheated once. Either way, in a lot of cases, the idea of cheating to get ahead starts somewhere else.



Another typo. Geez what was wrong with me yesterday? Replace "is" with "isn't".

Agreed.  But how does it make you feel knowing that many of the people beating you are doing so without any effort other than making the cheat sheet?  After seeing it for awhile, you might end up jumping off the bridge like the others around you.  

I made many enemies out of friends after I told them to fuck off and study on their own.  There is nothing more disheartening than earning cheaters and risk getting in deep shit in the process!  

During my undergrad days, a friend cheated off me in my Mexican history class.  I didn't know he was doing it, but he was.  After the teacher caught US, he told us that we were dumb greasy Italians and that "your guinie parents were probably right off the boat" and that we probably weren't accostomed to American ways.  I beat him in court because of that statement.  I also managed to beat the charges for my friend and myself (had to clear him to clear my own name).  Luckily the teacher was a discriminating Jew, who couldn't hold his mouth, which got us off and took him out of contention for tenure.  Otherwise, I would not be in law school today.

(I'm actually happy my friend did what he did, otherwise I wouldn't have gotten the taste of blood and applied to law school!)