The Cheating Game
'Everyone's doing it,' from grade school to graduate school
The U.S. News poll found that 1 in 4 adults believes he has to lie and cheat to get ahead, and it seems this mentality is communicated to children. "Students see adults--parents, businessmen, lawyers--violating ethical standards and receiving a slap on the wrist, if anything, and quickly conclude that if that's acceptable behavior in the larger society, what's wrong with a little cheating in high school or college?" says Rutgers Professor McCabe. "Too often the messages from parents and teachers come off as, 'You need to do everything you can, at all costs, to get to the top.' You never see any gratification for being a good person anymore," says Audrey James, a senior at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham. "Once you get to high school, it's all about who has the grades and who's going to get the most scholarships."
Teaching cheating? Some blame schools, not parents or students, for the cheating epidemic. "We should look at the way we run our institutions and the way those institutions tolerate, or at the very least, make cheating easy," says Theodore Sizer, a longtime educator and coauthor of The Students Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract, citing teachers with too large classes and too little time to get to know students or to create new assignments that cannot be pulled off the Internet.
Sometimes the schools are directly responsible. In the midst of March Madness last spring, a former tutor for the University of Minnesota revealed that she had written 400 papers for 20 basketball players between 1993 and 1998; four athletes were suspended, and the team was upset in the first round of the NCAA tournament. "You can talk to any academic adviser [for a sports program], and they will tell you that there have been times when coaches have put pressure on them to do anything it takes to keep an athlete eligible," says Richard Lapchick, director of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University. He claims that in the past year alone, he has counseled tutors and former players at six different schools to report cheating, only to have every athletic director--and one college president--investigate and deny there was a problem.
It's clear that when students really care about learning, they're much less likely to cheat. Take Bob Corbett, for example. Though he details his years of making cheat sheets and paying people to take his AP exams in The Cheater's Handbook: The Naughty Student's Bible, Corbett insists that he never cheated in any subject he really cared about or in classes with inspiring instructors. In fact, he dedicated his book to the 11th-grade teacher who "did such a wonderfully engaging job that he destroyed any shred of desire I may ever have had to cheat in English thereafter. . . ."
Still, the temptation is great. Prof. Gregory Cizek was inspired to write Cheating on Tests: How to Do It, Detect It, and Prevent It, after he caught three of his education graduate students in a clear-cut case of academic fraud a few years back; the would-be teachers apparently broke into his office, stole a copy of a final exam, collaborated, and then subbed pages of prewritten work into their tests.
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