Thirteen-year-old Shirley has history third period, and there's a test today. She's deciding between B and C for a question on Spanish explorers when the teacher decides to take a trip to the bathroom. The door clicks shut. A few kids around her pull out their cell phones. Fingers fly; so do answers.
It's not an unusual scenario. In fact, cheating is commonplace, with over 70 percent of students owning up to the deed. A recent survey by Common Sense Media shows that one in three middle- and high-school students have cheated using cell phones, and over half have used the Internet to cheat. Cheating scandals are numerous, the most recent at Florida State, where athletes were supplied with exam answers and pre-written papers.
Furthermore, many cheaters don't even believe that anything's wrong, instead finding ways to rationalize their behavior. The permission statement: No big deal, because everybody else is doing it. Or: Only suckers play by the rules. Just a shortcut to get things done. The smart way to move through the system. Carl Pickhardt, a psychologist in private counseling, believes this kind of thinking leads to bigger problems down the road. "When adolescents think academic cheating is OK, they are probably going to be more influenced to think other kinds of life cheating and unethical behavior are OK."
After handing in her exam, Shirley debates turning her classmates in and risking alienation and other forms of peer retaliation. No contest.
"The number of incidents that gets reported is miniscule. A student doesn't want to be identified as a narc, a rat, and many just say it's not their business," says Don McCabe, Professor of Organization Management at Rutgers and founding president of the Center for Academic Integrity. Other factors, like whether the cheater is a friend or one of the cool kids, play into the decision as well.
Pickhardt attributes the negligible rate of reporting to the anti-system mindset of adolescents; kids are loyal to each other, held together by an unspoken bond that unites them against the system. And in the few cases where they do blow the whistle, contrary to what teachers and parents believe, it's more likely to be out of spite or self-interest than integrity—"I don't like this person," "the test is graded on a curve," "I'm expected to, or else."
Instead of relying on young informants to fix the problem—using the threat of being caught and turned in by the kid to your left as a deterrent—the way for adults to curb cheating is by addressing the root of the problem and affecting change from the inside out, creating new norms in a community dedicated to academic integrity. "Basically, teaching kids to police themselves. Supporting individual integrity," Pickhardt says.
Honor systems, which involve student judiciaries and pledges signed by the student body, aim to create such a climate, a culture where students don't cheat in the first place because they understand that it's wrong, that it hurts others and robs themselves. While they aren't a cure-all, student-run honor systems do tend to lower rates.
"Kids are embarrassed to be identified by others as a cheater," says McCabe. "Another part of it is tradition. At schools like the University of Virginia, whose system dates back to the 1840s, students are proud to be a part of that tradition of integrity and academic honesty and they don't want to screw it up by cheating."
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