The Cheating Game
'Everyone's doing it,' from grade school to graduate school
Most alarming to researchers is the pervasiveness of cheating among adolescents. What begins as penny-ante dishonesty in elementary school--stealing Pokemon cards or glancing at a neighbor's spelling test--snowballs into more serious cheating in middle and high school, as enrollments swell and students start moving from class to class, teacher to teacher. Professor Davis, who has gathered data on more than 17,000 students, notes that 50 years ago, only about 1 in 5 college students admitted to having cheated in high school. Today, a range of studies shows that figure has exploded, to anywhere from three quarters of students to an astonishing 98 percent.
SAM, A JUNIOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ALabama, can barely recall the first time he cheated. He thinks it must have started back in middle school, copying the occasional math assignment or printing a key formula on his forearm. (Like other current cheaters quoted in this article, Sam asked that his real name be withheld.) A decade later he is still at it, most recently lifting a paper on post-Civil War racism off the Internet. "I realize that it's wrong, but I don't feel bad about it, either, partly because I know everyone else is doing it," says Sam in a deep Southern drawl. "If I ever stole a test or something to that degree, I'd feel guilty. But just getting a couple of answers here and there doesn't bother me."
Competition for admission to elite colleges has transformed the high school years into a high-stakes race where top students compete for a spot on the sweet end of the curve. It has also spawned a new breed of perpetrator: the smart cheater. In the Who's Who survey, the country's top juniors and seniors talked about copying homework, plagiarizing, or otherwise cheating their way to the head of the class. "Grades are so important to these kids," sighs RevaBeth Russell, an advanced-placement biology teacher at Lehi High School in Utah, who has seen copying incidents skyrocket as collegebound students from prosperous families settle in the rural area.
What's going on. The notion that schools are awash with cheaters doesn't always square with what administrators say goes on in their classrooms and corridors. "My goodness, the students are 12-, 13-, 14-year-old kids, and sometimes they make a bad decision," says Gary McGuigan, principal of the H. E. Huntington Middle School in San Marino, Calif. "But [cheating] isn't rampant." Sunny Hills High School in nearby Fullerton weathered two major cheating scandals in two years involving more than a dozen honor-roll students, yet principal Loring Davies insists these are "isolated" incidents.
But in scores of interviews in a cross section of communities nationwide, students gave U.S. News a strikingly different reading of the situation. "We all know that cheating is cheating, and we shouldn't do it," says Melissa, a student at Duke University. "But there are times that you cheat because there aren't enough hours in the day." Case in point: last month, Melissa found herself with a computer programming assignment due in a few hours--and several hours of driving to do at the same time. So she had a friend copy his program and turn it in for her. "It's not a big deal because it's just a mindless assignment," rationalizes Melissa. "It's not a final or a midterm. I mean, I understood how to do it; I just didn't have the time."
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