Is Your Kid a Cheat? Do You Even Want to Know?

If you’re a parent, you’re doubtless thinking “Not my kid!” which is probably what the parents of the Steubenville onlookers thought before they had to confront the ugly truth about how social media and the culture hijacked whatever sense of social responsibility their kids might have had. It seems to take something really ugly like the Steubenville rape or the one in Torrington, Connecticut to get parents thinking about the downside of technology and how it’s affecting their children. So what about cheating —the pandemic that only gets media attention when half of the students cheat on a take-home exam at Harvard—and how does it connect to larger issues of integrity, of which social responsibility is a part?

Integrity: it’s an old-fashioned word with a kind of high-waisted, lace-collared dignity about it. Is it even compatible with a keyboard and an iPhone? Does it have a place in a fame-driven culture where attention-getting matters more than substance and where the ends justify the means? (I’m talking to you, Lance Armstrong, and your kind of cheaters.)

Cheating isn’t new, of course, nor is its cousin, plagiarism, but both have been greatly facilitated by the culture’s easy acceptance of the appropriation of words and ideas and the smorgasbord of items ripe for the taking offered by Google, the Internet, and the cut-and-paste function. The withdrawal of Jane Goodall’s new book tells us much about the culture and I’ll get to that shortly, but lets talk about the kids first.

So, here are the numbers. Keep saying “not my kid” and let the statistics sink in and then ask yourself how sure you are that your kid isn’t represented..

• The Josephson Institute reports that, according to their survey of 22,000 high school students published in November 2012, 51% of students cheated on an exam.

This is supposedly good news since 59% reported cheating in 2010. 32% said they turned in work copied from the Internet as their own; this too is down from 34% in 2010.

Is it really good news that “only” half of high school students cheated and “only”one-third plagiarized?

A closer look at the Institute’s data reveals other sobering news. The survey is in the form of questions, and the ultimate one is “How many questions on this survey did you answer with complete honesty?” Keep in mind that only 70% answered “all.”

• Only 25% said they’d never copied someone’s homework; 23% admitted to doing it once; 51% to two or more times.
• Only 24% of kids said they’d never lied to a parent about something significant. 28% confessed to doing it once; 48% to two or more times.
• 39% of kids thought being famous was important. (I fear they will be disappointed in the long-run.)
• 71% thought being wealthy was important. (Good luck, kids.)
• 56% thought being popular was important. It won’t come as a surprise that if the student played varsity sports, that percentage rose to 73% for boys and 58% for girls.
• A whopping 91% thought being physically attractive was important. Girls and boys were pretty much evenly matched in their opinion.
• Asked if “ a person has to lie or cheat sometimes in order to succeed,” 36% agreed —which broke down to 45% of males and 28% of females.
• Even worse, 57% agreed with the statement “In the real world, successful people do what they have to do, even if others consider it cheating.” That, by the way, broke down to 64% of males and 51% of females.

Is that cynical enough for you?

These numbers are substantiated by other surveys conducted by Donald McCabe at Rutgers who’s been studying cheating for twenty years; 74% of high school juniors and seniors admitted to cheating on a test, and 55% reported they’d plagiarized. Two-thirds of college students self-reported some type of academic dishonesty.

So why aren’t we talking about cheating? Do we as culture, as a society, believe that cheating doesn’t matter? That it doesn’t testify to putting the ends above the means? That it doesn’t foster other kinds of dishonesty? That it doesn’t signal a loss of integrity? Isn’t this something we should be talking and worrying about?

That brings me to Jane Goodall’s new book Seeds of Hope which was pulled from the marketplace after a review in The Washington Post by Steven Levingston uncovered, among other things, evidence of plagiarism as well as lack of attribution. Most important, he wrote that the book —which was about plants and botany, not chimpanzees which are Goodall’s expertise —contained neither a bibliography nor endnotes. As someone who writes books for a living and has been in publishing for over thirty years, this was sufficiently shocking that I emailed Mr. Levingston to confirm that he had a finished book, not a galley, in hand. Indeed, he did. Since he did a fine job of reporting on the book, there’s a link below.

Infidelity Essential Reads

Cheating Is Complicated

The Surprisingly Strong Link Between Genetics and Infidelity

What’s culturally troubling here is that a manuscript passes through many stages and hand before it becomes a book. It’s true enough that book publishers don’t fact-check but how is it possible that no one noticed or cared that the book didn’t contain a bibliography, at the very least, never mind notes? Was it possible that neither Dr. Goodall nor her co-author had ever read another book on the subject? Why didn’t anyone ask why the book had no back matter? Since I admire Dr. Goodall, as does just about everyone, I think this is as much about the culture as anything else.

In the end, will technology make cheating okay? There’s no room for attribution in a 140-character tweet, after all.

http://charactercounts.org/programs/reportcard/

http://www.njea.org/news-and-publications/njea-review/january-2009/curbing-cheating

http://www.business.rutgers.edu/tags/332 http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-03-19/entertainment/37839718_1_web-sites-book-moves-plants