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According to Michael Josephson, president of the Josephson Institute on Ethics, the case in Kansas and McCabe’s study should send a clear message to school administrators that it’s time to treat cheating as a serious violation. Otherwise, Josephson says, cheating will become a “real skill” among students.
More than half of high-school students cheat on tests or homework and most of them aren’t ashamed of it, a recent Rutgers University study has found. The survey of 4,500 pupils nationwide found 74 percent have cheated on a test at least once and another 72 percent have cheated on at least one written assignment. “I think that cheating has become so common that it’s starting to become ‘normal’ in some cases,” wrote one student who participated in the study.
The issue of cheating among high-school students became more evident late last year when a biology teacher in Kansas, Christine Pelton, failed 28 students after suspecting them of plagiarizing a project. The local school board tried to force Pelton to change the students’ grades, but she resigned. “It’s not going to benefit the kids to go back and change their grades,” Pelton told the Associated Press in April.
"Nationwide Poll Catches Students Cheating" Ellen Sorokin Insight on the News, May 20, 2002
“It’s pretty discouraging how students today can rationalize their cheating with such ease,” says Donald McCabe, a Rutgers University professor of management who conducted the survey. He also is the founding president of the Center for Academic Integrity. “Some of these kids said that cheating was the American way of life. They think that cheaters either get ahead quicker or live easier lives.”
Besides academic pressure, most of the students surveyed blame their cheating on time constraints, laziness and poor adult role models. Among the names mentioned in the survey were former President Bill Clinton and former “junk-bond king” and felon Michael Milken.
Fifty percent of those surveyed said they didn’t think copying questions and answers from a test was cheating. Even more, 53 percent, don’t believe turning in work done by parents is cheating. “You do what it takes to succeed in life,” a student wrote on the survey. “We’re afraid to fail.”
