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Many moons ago, as I preparing for finals in college, I met a friend for a last minute cram session. I was pretty well prepared, but he said he needed help. He brought copies of what he explained were “last year’s test.” Using old exams was not uncommon practice in my classes. Professors even occasionally left hard copies in the library for review (there was no on-line then). So, bringing a test from which to study was no surprise. What was a surprise was that the exam we studied from ended up being the exam we took just two hours later.
Inadvertently, I had become a cheater. I had access in advance to the exam and ended up getting an A on the test. Would I have gotten an A anyway? I’ll never know. What I do know is that I spent weeks, months, and now, years brooding over the situation my “friend” put me in and over the fact that, in the end, I did nothing. I didn’t tell the professor, I didn’t confront my friend. I simply stewed.
These moral moments, I believe, are the building blocks of our humanity. We grow and learn and evolve not just from those times we “win” but also from those times we “fail.” I failed myself back then and learned a lesson about who I was and who I wanted to be. Being a cheater was not one of them.
Cheating, back in the day, seemed rare. Sure you heard of students sharing homework answers but actual cheating on tests? That was for losers.
Now, we are told, cheating is endemic. One report indicated that as many as 86 percent of high school students admitted to cheating. Another said the number is as high at 95 percent. It used to be that the cheaters were the kids who struggled to get by. Kids like my friend who wasn’t a particularly good student. However, according to recent research, it is now our best and brightest who are cheating their way into college.
As the mother of three teenage children, children whom I hope will one day graduate from high school and attend college, I worry about the current dynamic they are facing. The race to nowhere has pushed our children into a constant moral dilemma. If they don’t cheat, will they be at a disadvantage to their peers who do? If they do cheat, what does that say about who they are?
We parents are deeply naive on this issue. I remember when my oldest was a freshman, I attended a meeting for other parents of freshman. I asked advice on how to guide my son. He had seen one of his classmates cheating on a science test. Turns out the boy had written answers on the inside brim of his baseball cap. My son didn’t know if he should turn in his classmate or let it go. When I shared my son’s situation, the parents were aghast. Couldn’t be! Must be an exception! “Must be,” I said, shaking my head in dismay at their denials.
Being somewhat of a Luddite, I was unaware of some of the ways our children can beat the system. “E-Cheating” has become the catch-word for the use of technology to gain an undue advantage. Recently, a student at a high school in a town nearby went online and found the site his science teacher used to make tests. (Am I the only one who sees the irony in this? If the teacher had actually taken the time to create his own test, this wouldn’t have been a problem. But I digress.)
The student downloaded the problems and the solutions into his graphing calculator. During the test he simply had to hit one button and all the answers magically appeared. He was only caught when he provided solutions the teacher hadn’t even taught yet.
With the rise of the Internet, students are able to "cut and paste" in ways never before possible. Insufficient approbation can quickly become plagiarism. Programs such as Turn It In have become all the rage in high schools across the land. The online site checks students papers against a portfolio of 90,000 journals and more than 150 million other papers to confirm that no lifting without attribution has occurred. Students are required to submit their papers to the site for review—if they get a match, they are deemed cheating.
