“It’s not that they don’t know right from wrong. It’s that they see themselves as having no choice. They’ll say, ‘It’s not cheating, it’s survival.’” – Denise Clark Pope, Stanford University
(MintPress) — Students cheat in school; there’s no real way to dance around that. Statistically, 76 percent of high school students surveyed by Psychology Today admitted to some form of academic dishonesty. But what happened at one of America’s elite universities has baffled school officials for its scale of operation.
Around 125 students are being investigated by Harvard College’s disciplinary board for allegedly plagiarizing answers or collaborating in an introductory government class. With 279 students in the lecture hall class, nearly half allegedly felt compelled to cheat – which very well could be a sign of the times.
To clarify the allegations, students were given a take-home exam that allowed for open books, open notes and open Internet access. The instructions, however, noted that students were not permitted to take the exam with others.
The instructor’s review of the exams found many to be suspicious and nearly reading verbatim. Because of the widespread allegations, Harvard Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay Harris said it was beneficial for the school to go public with its investigation to expose the growing dilemma around academic integrity across the country.
“It’s something that I think was obviously not going to stay secret, clearly, and nor do we want it to,” Harris told the Harvard Crimson. “I think it’s important for us to be able to take an event like this and teach it, treat it as a teaching opportunity.”
Getting ahead
If the students involved are found guilty, they face a forced one year withdrawal from the college. One has to examine the risk/benefit outcome of the actions. Many high school and college students are inundated with a barrage of messages that suggest it is harder now than anytime in the past 60 years to get a job, or that competition now dictates the work force. Because of consistent rhetoric that portrays society as a dog eat dog world, the pressure to succeed for America’s youth can be overbearing.
The result is cheating, and lots of it – almost to the point where it has to be expected at most schools. A survey of 29,760 students at 100 randomly selected high schools nationwide in 2008, the height of America’s economic recession, found that 64 percent of students admitted to cheating during that particular academic year while 38 percent said they had cheated more than twice. Those numbers were dramatically higher when compared to the same questionnaire conducted in 2005, largely because Internet sources have become more widespread as the years go on.
Mel Riddile of the National Association of Secondary School Principals told USA Today that the pressure on kids growing up today is very different than what their parents were up against.
“The competition is greater, the pressures on kids have increased dramatically,” Riddile said. “They have opportunities their predecessors didn’t have (to cheat). The temptation is greater.”
The pressure to succeed in school is made all the more important by the idea that a college degree is one of the biggest indicators of upward social mobility in America, but the job market is now saturated with qualified candidates. When accounting for the unemployed looking for jobs, it is not uncommon to have a nearly 5-to-1 ratio of candidates vying for one open position, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
That’s not to say that students have a free pass to be academically dishonest simply because their job prospects are poor. But many today struggle to sympathize with the current generation of students and job seekers because one has to go back generations for a reminder of how bleak things really are. Morley Winograd, an author who writes about Millennials, said the closest thing today’s students face happened in the 1930s.
“The economic situation (of young adults) is completely parallel and analogous to the (Depression-era) GI generation — raised in relative affluence, and then just as they are to start in that affluent world, it all comes crashing down,” Winograd said. “And so they have to find new ways to persevere. They just have assumed that everything that came before them was a mirage — that it was false, built on unsafe foundations.”
So if academic cheating is partly due to the youths’ circumstances and odds stacked against them, it would make sense that if the employment and societal expectations for the youth were to alleviate, cheating would subside. But that probably wouldn’t be the case, says Texas Tech University Human Development and Family Studies professor Alan Reifman. He noted that students need a moral reasoning to avoid academic dishonesty.
Reifman argued that schools respond to cheating with more supervision or punishment, but never in a way that gives the students a perspective that the cheating could harm them in the long run.
“Teachers and professors’ efforts to combat student cheating are heavily based on deterrence. Deterrence, through proctoring and other means, should be supplemented, in my view, with attempts to convey reasons to students why they should not cheat,” Reifman said. “My concern with a heavy deterrence focus is that some students may feel that if they can avoid getting caught, then there is nothing more to think about.”
Cultural effects?
Some organizations, such as the ethics research organization at the Josephson Institute, worry that the large scale of academic cheating will carry over into potential career fields and positively reinforce those who cheated in school that they can get away with it at their jobs. The institute cites the same demographic that admits to academic dishonesty is the same group that saw 35 percent of boys and 26 percent of girls admitted to stealing from a store within the past year. One-fifth of those surveyed also said they had stolen something from a relative.
“What is the social cost of that — not to mention the implication for the next generation of mortgage brokers?” Josephson Institute said. “In a society drenched with cynicism, young people can look at it and say ‘Why shouldn’t we? Everyone else does it.”‘
Over the past two decades, studies have examined the correlation between students who cheat and career professionals who engage in unethical activity. One survey found that the highest level of academic dishonesty was found among business majors, with 26 percent committing “severe” acts of cheating, according to the International Journal for Educational Integrity. The New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants worry that those pervasive cheating figures have manifested themselves in America’s businesses today and contributed to the economic hardship felt in the country.
“This trend is troubling, especially because our business schools provide the formative training for many of our corporate and professional executives,” the New York organization said. “Even more disturbing is that two studies found that students who committed acts of academic dishonesty in college were more likely to engage in unethical acts in the business environment. This is very disturbing and should not be taken lightly.”