I cheated once on a state French exam. It was only once, a burst of teenage impulsivity. Finally, after having felt guilty for
another 20 years, I apologized to my childhood friend, Steve, for that glance
at his answer sheet.
That was 1959. I didn’t
cheat any other time in school because, well, it
never occurred to me. People like
me didn’t cheat. “Cheating,” my
dad always said was “the worst school crime you could commit, like murder in
the adult world.” The whole
culture of my small Missouri town disapproved. I wouldn’t have cheated any more than I would have gone
shopping uptown naked.
My 20 years of guilt?
Most high school students today
would LOL! Over 80% of high
school kids have cheated. After
all, doesn’t every one -- even, or especially, our heroes? Athletes
use drugs to win, politicians accept personal gifts from lobbyists and
corporations, Wall Street bankers benefit from insider trading, rich socialites
steal from their parents, and singers use illegal drugs. What does their behavior teach kids? . . . but--let’s not just blame the rich and famous; we
ordinary folk litter the streets and exceed speed limits. Rather than the culture of
honesty I grew up in, we now live in a culture of routine cheating.
Why not
cheat in school after all? It’s so
easy. Now, nobody would need to
sneak a peek at Steve’s French exam.
Today a student could get the French test answer sheet texted from
someone three rows behind her or even in a classroom down the hall. Regents’
Exams, SAT’s, and other high-stakes tests are similarly vulnerable. No one needs to borrow a friend’s
homework either; there are places to share homework on Facebook. In fact, any assignment or
local test that’s online is available.
For essays, there’s Wikipedia with easy information and Google for already-written
ones.
The only
people who can stop the students from cheating are the students
themselves. Schools certainly
can’t; like prisons, schools must rely on external controls: rules,
punishments, and supervision.
In a digital world, though, school monitors simply can’t see what the
students do with phones right under their noses in school and they certainly
can’t see what students are doing outside of school, on Google or Facebook or
Wikipedia, at all.
Morality
has to come from the students’ own beliefs. That’s where you come in. You spend so much time teaching your children to look
both ways before crossing the street, to say “thank you,” to their dear old grandmother,
and to clean up their rooms. Why
not spend as much time teaching them a more important lesson? Here’s what you can do:
•
Understand your son’s or daughter’s point of view. If your daughter is a typical high school junior, she spends
2/3 of her weekdays sleeping or learning.
The other 1/3 is eaten up with extracurricular activities (including
sports)d, required community service, work, meals, and
chores. Yet, even though
there are no more hours in the day, she still feels pressured to make good
grades. She probably thinks that
75% is failing and 85% is low; a“4” on an AP exam is not good enough.
Besides, most of
her friends think that cheating is good; it’s a part of a ad hoc kid-club that
helps them all get good grades.
Her friends will expect her to join: to take a picture of a last-minute lab report and text it to
them or to accept their help with an essay on shared Facebook sites.
So, when she gets
that big research project (which may become a major part of the NY Regents’ ELA
next year), won’t she feel she really “has” to lift a few paragraphs from the
internet? Inflated
expectations, too many after-school activities, easy access to cheating, and a
culture of dishonesty surround her.
•
Turn down the pressure and turn up the support: When I took the SAT in the late fifties, I just went in to take
it, no prep, no hassle. My parents
didn’t even know what day it was scheduled. A comparable high school student now worries about the “700”
he needs to get into Amherst; a middle school child frets over his SSAT score
to get into a Deerfield or Stuyvesant. High-risk tests increase the student’s need to cheat, to get the high score necessary to
reach the next step toward success. The entire
system pressures him: the competitive college process, his school, his
peers.
You may,
inadvertently, stoke the fires. Of
course you want him to succeed.
However, maybe he interprets your natural desire to encourage him to
succeed as pressure to make high grades. Tell him, explicitly, that you support
him in what he wants, not what you want.
One way to reduce the possibility of cheating is to let him know that he
has support and approval from home.
•
Stop talking about “grades.” Focus on effort and learning; emphasis
on grades enforces the idea that an “A” in math, rather than understanding
math, is what matters.
Don’t give money
awards for grades. Don’t say, “You
won’t get into Yale with grades like that!” Focus on what he learned -- how
John Proctor’s plight in The Crucible
is connected to some moral issue he has, how it connects to your last family
trip to Salem, Mass, or how it’s like a book you’re reading. If he brings home an “A” in calculus,
ask him to explain some aspect of it to you. If he brings home a low grade, ask him how you can help him
learn better.
Just last week, my
little third-grade student Will said, “I got an 85 on that math test, but only
2 people got any higher.” Will is
only 8! By the time he is 17, he
may have totally forgotten that his goal is learning and he will have learned
to focus entirely on “getting grades” and beating out the competition. When “good grades, ” not learning, is the goal, then cheating seems
sensible to the students.
•
Don’t model cheating. Often we take
short cuts, for what seem like good reasons. If you park in a handicapped space or speed on
the way to school, you have modeled cheating. You can always mention “We’d get
there a little faster if I drove faster, but it would endanger others.”
Also don’t cheat
with them on homework. There’s a
line between helping and cheating.
I’ve had parents who faked the amount of the time their second-grade
child spent reading on his reading logs, gave middle schoolers answers outright
on multiple choice questions, and virtually wrote their high school children’s
essays. Those violations,
and any others, teach lessons you don’t want to teach. Most children turn out to be like their
parents. Model the person you want
them to become.
•
Teach them not to cheat--explicitly and frequently.
There is considerable evidence
that parents today don’t emphasize honor, respect for authority and obedience
so much as my father did in the 40‘s and 50‘s; they emphasize happiness and
financial success more.
Start early. Young children,
first and second graders, have trouble understanding why cheating is wrong;
sometimes they don’t even recognize that that’s what they are doing. By third grade they know it’s wrong but
start thinking that some things, like copying homework, are OK. Since young children care how
significant adults feel, you can focus on how cheating makes the teacher lose
“trust.” Teenagers are half child,
half adult. They often can’t see
the bigger picture; they also need you to guide them.
The newspaper, the
neighborhood, and the school are bursting with chances to teach honesty. Your son, for example, mentions
“someone took Frank’s Iphone out of his backpack in calculus.” You can ask how Frank felt or how the
other kids feel knowing there’s a there’s a thief in calculus; you can tell how
you felt once when someone took money from your locker in high school. Start establishing a sense that
breaking rules often damages everyone: the victim, the rule breaker and the
whole community.
Students cheat for four reasons. They feel pressure to get high
“grades” in classes and on high-stakes tests; they are too busy; cheating is easy; and cheating is
acceptable. Neither the
parent nor the school can stop them.
But we parents can, and must, teach them the values and give them the strength to stop
themselves.
Best,
Joan Barickman
Tutor for Tests, Study Skills, and Academic Class Work
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