Rationalamerican: Cheating Epidemic

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A Cheating Epidemic

Last edited September 2007

You may remember in school as a child the temptation to glance over at your desk mate's paper. This is much bigger than that transgression. Just as years of corporate scandals have opened our eyes to what is possible when ethically corrupt business people apply themselves, we are now learning that a culture of cheating and dishonesty exists in our schools. How bad is the cheating and why does this problem exist? Can we fix what is broken?

National surveys show majority percentages of children in middle school and high school regularly engaging in forms of cheating, plagiarism and other dishonesty. Rutgers management professor Donald McCabe has published large scale surveys of middle school and high school students. One study published in 2005 involved 18,000 students in 61 schools. In that study 70 percent of students admitted cheating at least once on a test and 60 percent admitted plagiarism. In a previous McCabe study, 64 percent of seventh graders admitted collaborating with other students when they were charged with working alone, 87 percent admitted sharing homework with other students and 48 percent admitted copying homework from someone else. A 2006 survey of 36,122 students released by the Josephson Institute found that 60% of high school students cheated on a test, yet 92 percent said that they were satisfied with their personal ethics. A 2004 Carnegie Foundation report said that 90 percent of high school students cheat on homework and two thirds cheat on tests.

Whatever the exact numbers, it is certain that a lot of students are cheating and not feeling all that guilty about it either. The means to engage in cheating has become far more sophisticated and widespread that it was in years past. Tom Lickona, professor of education at the State University of New York noted in an article on Scholastic.com that:

“Kids cut and paste from the Internet with abandon. The information doesn't seem to be linked to a particular source or author like a magazine article or a book — it just seems there for the picking, like fruit off a tree."

It started with the CD-ROMs holding entire encyclopedias, allowing children to plagiarize quickly and it only became easier when the internet expanded that information and added sophisticated search tools to boot. Email and fax machines add another dimension to “sharing” of answers. Stacey Conradson and Pedro Hernández-Ramos of Santa Clara University conclude in an article published in the peer reviewed electronic journal Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation that:

“…the preponderance of statistical and anecdotal evidence underscores several disturbing trends, indicating that cheating at the secondary level is not only occurring more frequently, but that students are using much more sophisticated methods for their transgressions...there is little dispute that the accessibility of computers, the Internet, and other electronic resources such as CD-ROM encyclopedias has made cheating quicker and easier for our current generation of technology-savvy teenagers. ‘Cybercheating,’ meaning the use of technology tools in inappropriate ways for academic work, is on the rise.”

These authors may even be underestimating the extent of cybercheating. Websites catering to cheaters exist in wide numbers, some purportedly designed to “help” with homework, some advocating cheating and some even designed to profit from the phenomena. For example, websites like http://hotmath.com allow students to get homework answers organized by math textbook, chapter and page number. A picture of the textbook cover is even provided to make selection easier and most nationally sold textbooks are available. That particular site provides answers down to the seventh grade level. Other sites like http://cheathouse.com offer essays on every imaginable subject without apology. There are many sites that specifically advocate cheating, and they offer tips and reader-suggested methods. Any student with an internet connection and a search engine can find about as much assistance cheating as he or she could want.

Aside from plagiarism, methods of cheating on tests and other activities even right in class are effortless to discover on the web. Some methods are high tech, some rely on simple ingenuity. They range from answers recorded in an MP3 file and played back through an inconspicuous earbud to answers written on the back of a water bottle label which has been reapplied. Other technical methods have included cell phone texting and calculator and watch memory, but those are already old hat. Boys hide cribsheets inside their baseball caps which are removed and placed on the desk at test time. Girls write answers high on their thighs and lift their skirts for test time. Cribsheets are also hidden inside a front pocket which can be pulled slightly open, or inside the compartment of mechanical pencils. Groups of students can get together and agree on tapping or coughing signals or even different colored M&M candies placed on a desk to indicate multiple choice answers. West coast students call East coast students for answers on standardized tests and benefit from the difference in time.

Cheating is also subtly encouraged by parents who are simply trying to cope with homework assignments that require too much time from children and parents alike. An October 8, 2006 editorial by Mathew Futterman in the Star Ledger amusingly pointed out the often necessary duplicity by parents:

“…my second-grader comes home with assignments like, ‘Spend 30 minutes reading to your parent,’ or math worksheets asking her to figure out the ‘basic fact product’ for a series of numbers. Since they haven't covered ‘basic fact products’ in class, guess who has to figure out what they are.

Among my kindergartner's various assignments recently was an exercise that involved cutting up the class list and arranging the names shortest to longest. She also had to find every letter in her name in the newspaper, cut them out and spell her name with them. My kindergartner is not yet 5. She manipulates a scissors with the precision of a meat cleaver. So, guess who does the cutting, and guess who turns the newspaper pages, and, since we're being truthful here, guess who pretty much points out each letter one-by-one-by-one?”

Every modern parent can sympathize with this problem, and every modern parent has given his or her offspring the answers in order to prevent melt-down or simply to leave enough time to put dinner on the table. Every modern parent has signed off on a reading log (many set up as a quota system) or musical instrument practice session even though the pages read or time spent was actually less than required. So, if cheating of every kind is so rampant and even accepted—what are we to do about it? For that matter, why does it even exist at the level it does today?

The response of some educators has been to fight fire with fire. Conradson and Hernández-Ramos find that:

“With the proliferation of web-based content and the online paper mill businesses, technology savvy teachers and administrators have fought back by seeking electronic methods for catching offenders. In response to educators’ needs, commercial offerings for detecting web-based cheating have evolved. Currently, the available tools range from free, mainstream search engines such as Google or AltaVista, to the deployment of services such as TurnItIn.com, a sophisticated offering that does text string matching against approximately 1.5 billion web pages. Some of the more popular detection services, in addition to TurnItIn, include IntegriGuard, WordCheck Software, and Essay Verification Engine.”

Less technologically oriented responses are to monitor the difference between in-class work and homework, to search for patterns in test scores, and to implement classroom layouts and practices which minimize opportunities for cheating.

Rather than encouraging an escalating arms war between cheaters and educators, though, more thoughtful analysts are asking deeper questions about why this level of cheating exists in the first place. For many, high on the list of potential causes are the extreme pressures students today face to post high grades, to achieve high test scores, and to get through piles of homework. Experts like Donald McCabe say that parents and teachers may be fostering a mentality that the end justifies the means with their intense emphasis on grades and getting into the best colleges. Others point out that with homework, teachers should be looking to see what students know, not what parents know.

Hand in hand with pressures of test scores and time is a declining level of quality in homework assignments and classroom lessons, some say. Students who are intellectually engaged and stimulated by interesting lessons and meaningful homework are not seeking shortcuts. It is students who are bored with busywork assignments, who have not been taught new material well, or who lack the necessary time to complete homework who are tempted to cheat.

The well recognized economic phenomena of black markets offers a comparable principle. When the price of goods in a market becomes too high because of government intervention in the form of taxes or producer requirements, or when the price is too high due to markets distorted by hyper-inflation, war or other factors, consumers seek alternate means of obtaining those goods. The price point isn’t always predictable, but at some level consumers will engage in illegal activity to obtain the goods that they cannot afford or find through established legal channels. Similarly, when students reach a certain level of disgust or pressure they will cheat in order to complete homework, essays or tests.

Author Alexandria Robbins followed a group of wealthy, high achieving students and reported what she found in her recent book The Overachievers. In that book, students say that they cheat because they are assigned “busywork…you don’t feel you need to learn the material because it is not important.” One student noted that if a teacher he respects makes the effort to teach him something useful, he isn’t going to cheat. Robbins quotes a John Hopkins study that compared the children of parents who measure success by things like grades and college admissions to the children of parents who stressed, instead, authentic learning for understanding. The children of parents obsessed with performance measures:

“…were significantly more likely to exhibit dysfunctional perfectionism than children of learning goal parents, reporting a combination of high concern about mistakes, doubts about actions, parental expectations, and parental criticism.”

The study found that 39 percent of sixth graders felt a lot of pressure from parents to always be an exceptional student. Students feel such pressure to get perfect grades and scores that they come to perceive the whole school experience as a game—a kind of reality show that must be “played” correctly to win. Writes Robbins:

“Instead of learning how to develop into independent, self aware adults, many children are being taught by parents how to game the system. Some parents have sued schools for expelling their children for cheating, claiming that teachers were at fault for leaving out tests that were too easy for students to steal.”

From the perspective of many students—in middle school on up—classroom activities are boring and irrelevant, homework is time-consuming busywork, and school is a game that is won or lost by grade point averages and test scores. Meanwhile, some parents and educators reinforce this unfortunate view by turning the screws to get good grades or to score well on standardized tests that rank the school by district, county, state and country. The cheating phenomenon becomes easier to understand in this atmosphere.

Solving this problem in the long term is more about reevaluating the efforts of educators and parents than it is about fighting the efforts of students to cheat. Conradson and Hernández-Ramos conclude:

“The tension between teachers and students, between those who assess and those being assessed, will continue as long as attitudes toward the assessment process continue to emphasize individual performance in what students perceive to be irrelevant tasks and products created for an audience of one—the teacher. The prevalence of student cheating on term papers beginning so early in the current education system suggests that teaching strategies and the social and cultural values have been deeply influenced by technology, particularly the ease with which people can now access vast amounts of information. The value of writing a paper for students’ academic, intellectual, cognitive, social, and even moral development did not go away with the increased availability of the Internet and other electronic resources. However, the practice of assigning writing tasks with high-stakes to students who have been (or think that that they have been) ill-prepared to do well in them raises valid issues of fairness and accuracy in assessment.”

McCabe counsels parents to lower the pressure and the focus on grades and to avoid becoming over-involved in homework. In general, the way to avoid turning school into a game of cat and mouse between students and teachers is to do the same things that add value to the rest of the experience. Namely, educators and parents must focus on relevant and interesting lessons, on authentic learning, on homework limited in time and worthy of effort, and on an environment of safe learning where mistakes are opportunities and not faults. What must be avoided are lessons scripted by textbook or program, “jug and mug” style teaching, homework which is meaningless busywork or time intensive, and an environment where mistakes are perceived as a mark of shame carried for all time. It requires educators to put forth a little more effort to connect with students and it requires parents to reexamine what it is that is ultimately important for their children.

These issues are not new. Cheating is probably now more extensive than in previous generations only because the internet and popular culture have provided students with the means to hone cheating skills and the justification to support their behavior. Students “get it” earlier and they are better skilled at cheating. What adults must decide is whether the issue will become another ingrained trouble in American classrooms or whether we are capable and courageous enough to make the changes in our own work and behavior to eliminate the underlying causes.

To cite this article:

Painter, John. Cheating Epidemic. (September 2007). Retrieved month x, 2xxx, from

<http://rationalamerican.com/education>