Academic integrity and honesty
The Bible teaches that the evil one will try anything to destroy our homes, marriages, families and every ministry that is honoring the Lord Jesus. His ways are often subtle and we need to be constantly on alert. Today, I received a disturbing briefing from the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. It cited an article about cheating in school. It's long but well worth reading; I will have a closing comment at the end. Here are some excerpts:
Ask a high school or college student about cheating, and before you can finish the sentence, the person will blurt out two things: "Everybody does it," and "It's no big deal." Survey statistics back up the first statement, and the lack of serious consequences and lax enforcement of academic integrity policies in schools support the second.
Not only is cheating on the rise nationally - a 2005 Duke University study found that 75 percent of high school students admit to cheating, and if you include copying another person's homework, that number climbs to 90 percent - but there has also been a cultural shift in who cheats and why.
It used to be that cheating was done by the few, and most often they were the weaker students who couldn't get good grades on their own. Today, it is accepted as a normal part of school life, and is more likely to be done by the good students, who are fully capable of getting high marks without cheating. "It's not the dumb kids who cheat," one Bay Area prep school student told me. "It's the kids with a 4.6 grade-point average who are under so much pressure to keep their grades up and get into the best colleges. They're the ones who are smart enough to figure out how to cheat without getting caught."
...the ones who cheat more are the ones who have the most to lose, which is the honors and AP (advanced placement) students. Eighty percent of honors and AP students cheat on a regular basis.
The other group of students recently revealed to be most like likely to cheat is athletes. In a landmark survey of nearly 5,300 high school athletes conducted in 2005 and 2006 by the Josephson Institute of Ethics in Los Angeles, 65 percent admitted to cheating in the classroom more than once in the previous year, as opposed to 60 percent of nonathletes, a percentage that institute founder Michael Josephson says is statistically significant. And varsity athletes were more likely to cheat than nonvarsity.
The fact that athletes must maintain a minimum GPA to stay on the team is one factor, but Josephson thinks there's something deeper going on. "The major male sports seem to be spawning a win-at-any-cost mentality that carries over into the classroom. Thirty-seven percent of boys and 20 percent of girls said it was proper for a coach to instruct a player to fake an injury. Forty-three percent of boys and 22 percent of girls surveyed said it was proper for a coach to teach basketball players how to illegally hold and push, for example.
...according to one study, less than 2 percent of all academic cheaters get caught, and only half of them get punished. So there's almost a 99 percent chance of getting away with it.
...a popular method of cheating is networking, which he defines as "the easygoing smart kid gives the answers to some other kid."
The Internet has provided all sorts of shortcuts for cheaters. They have Wikipedia at their fingertips, and thousands of ready-made term papers available for downloading...
Some schools have tried to combat plagiarism by using a scanning service such as www.turnItIn.com. The students are instructed to turn each paper in to the service, which uses a computer program to scan it for instances of plagiarism by comparing it against all published materials and previously submitted papers in the company's database. Any phrases in common are then highlighted for the teacher to see. According to the company, significant levels of plagiarism appear in 30 percent of papers submitted.
One of the most disturbing trends is that behavior once considered cheating is no longer thought to be so. Copying homework, for example. An eighth-grader in private school says, "That's not cheating, it's helping."
Top 5 Ways to Cheat
-- Copying from another student
-- Plagiarizing by downloading information or whole papers from the Internet
-- Cell phone cheating - text-messaging answers to another student, taking a picture of the test and e-mailing it to another student, or downloading information from the Internet
-- Getting test questions, answers or a paper from a student in a previous period or from a previous year
-- Bringing a permitted graphing calculator into the test loaded with answer material previously input into the computer portion of the calculator
Top 5 Ways to Curb Cheating
-- Create an honor code with student input so they're invested in it
-- Seriously punish cheaters according the academic integrity policy
-- Create multiple versions of tests to make purloined answer keys useless
-- Ban electronic devices in testing rooms
-- Develop multiple modes of assessment so the grade is not determined primarily on tests
Regan McMahon is The Chronicle's deputy book editor and author of "Revolution in the Bleachers: How Parents Can Take Back Family Life in a World Gone Crazy Over Youth Sports." E-mail her at rmcmahon@sfchronicle.com. http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/09/09/CM59RIBI7.DTL
Has this grieved your heart like it did mine? Thankfully, we enjoy small class sizes which encourages a closer teacher/student relationship. In the high school, this year, we introduced the Turn It In program for submitted work. With this decision, we significantly limited the temptation to plagiarize work.
What can teachers and parents do? We need to pray for our children, keep them accountable and be models of integrity. Every act of righteousness defeats the enemy!
