EDITORIAL – Study uncovers obvious: kids cheat

A new national survey of more than 36,000 high school students found a higher rate of… A new national survey of more than 36,000 high school students found a higher rate of intelligent decision-making. NOT! Actually, this study (which really did happen — we swear) highlighted trends in ethics among high school students with regard to cheating and lying, according to the Associated Press.

Wait — what? You mean to tell us that high schoolers are cheating and lying to their parents? No way!

The Josephson Institute study found that 60 percent of surveyed students have cheated on a test, 82 percent have lied to their parents about major issues, 28 percent admitted that they’ve stolen something from a store and 27 percent of students indicated that they lied on the survey itself. These numbers are about the same as a 2004 study and slightly lower than 2002. At least kids are getting a bit more honest and maintaining it.

Just to clear things up before we launch into a speech about ethics and cheating, we want to emphasize how strongly we feel about plagiarizing. We hate it. There is never a reason to plagiarize. Never ever. Perhaps you’ve heard of attribution? You can never go wrong by telling your reader where you’ve gotten your information and ideas.

With that said, it’s time to tackle this oft-gray area of ethics. The problem, at least when it comes to most instances of cheating, is that students don’t have a clear idea of what cheating is. Many don’t realize that copying your friend’s homework is considered, by most educators, just as serious as forging a term paper. However, we really can’t blame kids for divvying up homework problems among friends or copying answers when the work assigned is, at best, “busy work.”

A majority of students would agree that many of the hoops we were forced to jump through in high school were pretty pointless with respect to our lives now. Some people need to do 20 algebra problems to grasp the concepts. Other students feel like an assignment like that is just a big waste of time. And others are just lazy. However, when you feel as if your efforts will yield a whole lot less than the time you put into it, taking the easy way out — OK, cheating — doesn’t seem so bad.

“Well, if it’s so easy, why not just maintain your integrity and get it done?”

It’s not that easy, according to the AP article. Many point to increased pressures like competitive college applications and heavy workloads as a cause for cheating.

“When you’re up against a deadline, it’s 1 a.m. in the morning and you’ve got five hours of work to do and no way to stay awake, people decide the risk [of cheating] is worth it,” 16-year-old student Danny Fersh said.

So are we asking too much of our students and pushing them into a corner, resulting in a rise in cheating? No. Are these kids inherently bad? No. It’s hard to quantify this data because the definition of cheating is pretty broad and kind of fuzzy for most. The first step to curb cheating is to create a comprehensive set of definitions for students and educate them about ethics. A lot of the older, generic definitions have to be reworked to incorporate the role of technology like the Internet and text messaging in cheating.

Let’s face it. Kids are always going to lie to their parents. Our parents lied to their parents (some still do), and we still lie to our parents on occasion. That’s something that’ll never change. But coming up with a comprehensive way to impart a well-defined sense of ethics in younger students is the only way to keep kids from cheating. Kids will always find new ways to cheat, so it’s not a matter of crushing enabling resources, but rather it’s a matter of making people aware that what they’re doing is defined as cheating. These kids aren’t hopeless. They will listen and act properly if they’re given the right information.