Cheating Among U.S. Students--Making the Grade At Any Cost

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines cheating as "to violate rules dishonestly". This seems like a simple, straightforward definition, but judging from recent statistics, many U.S. high school students are working from an entirely different definition. A study done at Rutgers University in 2001 found that fifty-seven percent of U.S. high school students didn’t think that copying a few sentences without proper credit, sharing test answers, or getting answers from someone who had taken the test constituted cheating. So if those behaviors are not considered cheating, then what is?

Twenty to thirty years ago, cheating consisted of writing the answers to a test on your arm and then wearing a long-sleeved shirt to cover them up until they were needed, but cheating behaviors in American schools today have grown increasingly sophisticated. Some of the more low-tech, but still common, methods students try in the classroom are leaving an open textbook or notebook on the floor during a test (for classrooms with less vigilant teachers); or, a more easily camouflaged method, writing the answers on the back of a water-bottle label and then gluing it back on the bottle. What teacher would think to look inside the water bottle for hidden test answers?

The real explosion in ways that students cheat has occurred, as with so many other fields, in the area of technology. With so many students having MP3 players, digital cameras, and camera phones, it’s easy for students to pack notes or test answers into a portable, discrete gadget. There are also a number of websites available where students can, rather than completing the work themselves, purchase complete research papers. For the less devious-minded students out there, there are even websites that are exclusively dedicated to helping fellow students learn all about the the fine "art" of cheating, listing detailed instructions for all of the latest methods, rating them in terms of user-friendliness and the likelihood of being caught, and posting new methods submitted by visitors to the site.

With all of these reources now available to them, are U.S. students becoming more likely to cheat? Sadly, the numbers are not encouraging: an October 2006 report by the Josephson Institute revealed the following:
--62% of high school students lied to a teacher within the past twelve months about something significant
--33% copied an internet document within the past twelve months
--60% cheated during a test at school within the past twelve months

So where does all of this cheating begin? Sheryll L. Smith, of the Department of Psychology at Missouri Western, conducted a study in the 1990s to try to discover just when students begin to see particular behaviors as "cheating". When she questioned groups of first graders, she found that a large percentage of that age group believed that it was acceptable to engage in specific behaviors (some of which would be considered some form of "cheating" behavior). Asked about those same behaviors, groups of second and third graders whom Smith questioned considered those behaviors to be clearly "cheating" behaviors. The truly interesting thing about her study was this: students continued to consider those behaviors cheating from about the second grade on up, until they reached the sixth grade; that was the age group in which Smith found that, suddenly, those same behaviors were once again considered to be acceptable and no longer considered to be cheating.

Why is there a spike in the sixth grade in what students consider cheating, and why has there been such an increase in the acceptability of cheating as students move on to higher levels of schooling? One could certainly surmise that the shift in the acceptability of "cheating" behaviors is linked to more being demanded of students as they advance from grade level to grade level. American students report being under more pressure than ever to achieve high grades, especially those students bound for college. In a 2006 article for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Education, Jason M. Stephens considers several possible factors that may be contributing to the rise in cheating: first, that as more and more students do attend college, the competition for admission to colleges has increased, creating a corresponding increase in the pressure to attain ever-higher grades; students today suffer from a shortage of time needed to do their work carefully, perhaps due to increased participation in extracurricular activities (also related to creating a desirable college-application). In recent years, there has also been a great deal of publicity about the amount of homework which is assigned to U.S. students nightly.

But do U.S. students have to cheat in order to compete? There are things that parents can do to encourage honesty and integrity in their children’s schoolwork:
--Provide examples of role models for your children of those who do not cut corners in their work (brain surgeons, software developers, etc.), and serve as a role model yourself.
--Talk with your child openly and frankly about your expectations of them and what the consequences of cheating will be.
--Be an advocate at your child’s school to see that effective teaching methods are used; question unnecessary or overly restrictive rules (a motivating factor cited by the students in the various studies). Occasionally allowing collaborative work on homework or projects can help promote more effective learning, which leads to less cheating.
--Check your child’s homework regularly. This serves two purposes: first, it allows you to ensure that the work being assigned is meaningful, reasonable in quantity, relevant, and has real-world value. If it doesn’t, speak with the teacher or the school about it. Second, it allows you to have a true idea of the level at which your child is working, so that any sudden rise or drop in the quality of your child’s work can be dealt with before it becomes a long-term problem.
--Keep yourself up-to-date about the capabilities of the technological gadgets your child has and what the school’s policies are concerning the use of those gadgets at school. Monitor what they do on their computers at home.
--Do some exploring yourself on those "cheating tutorial" websites; it’s enlightening and can help you to be alert to cheating behaviors in your child.
--Help your child to maintain a proper balance between school demands and extracurricular activities. Make his or her academic work the priority and ensure that his/her daily schedule reflects that. Don’t be afraid to set limits on activities.

Most importantly, help your children to understand that cheating isn’t just about getting a good grade on a single test or project. If they’ll cheat on their schoolwork now, where will they draw the line later? Being willing to cheat is revealing of who they are as people, and of what is most important to them. The novelist John D. MacDonald wrote, "Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn’t blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won’t cheat, then you know he never will." Help them to create that rock-solid image for themselves, and they will find that they do not have to cheat in order to achieve their greatest potential.