Exposing the Cheat Sheet, With the Students' Aid (School Cheating Pandemic)

WESTPORT, Conn., Nov. 19 — A Crystal Rock water bottle is Exhibit A in a campaign to reduce cheating here at Staples High School, a bastion of affluence, academic achievement and unrelenting pressure to succeed.

The label of the bottle had been peeled off, the history of atomic theory printed on the back and the label restored in preparation for a chemistry test. The test taker hoped for a handy crib sheet — indeed, it was even magnified by the water. But it also turned out to be easily visible to the teacher, who was more alert than he was at this time last year and gave the student a failing grade.

Cheating was not often discussed here until last spring, when two incidents forced Westport to confront a problem that exists all over the country and is growing worse every year. First, the school newspaper ran a student essay denouncing "epidemic cheating."

"It's part of the routine," the essay said. "Wake up, come to school, cheat." A day later, two students were caught cheating on an Advanced Placement history exam, one by opening the test booklet early and the other by peeking at a neighbor's work.

John J. Brady, the high school principal, decided to make a campaign against cheating a centerpiece of the academic year, expecting resistance from all quarters. But to his surprise, he found students relieved to have the subject out in the open, eager to help him stamp out behavior that they said was driven by a frenzied competition to get into an Ivy League school.

"The students used the word `contagious,' " Dr. Brady said. "If they knew the kid next to them was doing it, and winding up with a higher grade-point average, it was difficult not to participate. If you look at it a certain way, it's a reasonable response to a set of unreasonable expectations. But the students told me they'd had enough of it. They want it to stop. They need adults to take it seriously."

At first, parents and teachers doubted the extent of the problem, Dr. Brady said. But he is chipping away at that resistance, with help from the students who have joined him at PTA and faculty meetings to explain how it all works: calculators loaded with computerized study guides like CliffsNotes, electronic messages exchanged between students taking the same exam during different periods, and physics homework parceled out between friends.

The meetings have been emotional, with long debates about the reasons and remedies for cheating. Are parents' expectations unreasonably high and thus a goad to dishonesty? Are the students overscheduled with a full load of Advanced Placement classes, extracurricular activities and community service?

What about a Board of Education that wants more and more Advanced Placement offerings and posts schoolwide SAT scores on its Internet home page? Or a student newspaper that lists graduating seniors and the colleges they will attend?

Glenn Thrope, a senior, wrote the newspaper essay in May, expressing disgust with what he described as his classmates' "upside down" priorities, their "ruthless" pursuit of grades "over knowledge."

His indignation was shared by Aaron Eisman, also a senior, who said the rampant cheating was "illegitimizing what I do." Aaron, with no prompting, prepared an analysis of the problem for the principal: what sort of Staples student is a hard-core cheater, what sort is just going along for the ride and how can the school turn around the much larger second group?

Aaron's computerized slide-show was shown to the school's governing committee late last spring. Next he gathered friends to research honor codes and devise one of their own, to supplement the existing academic integrity policy, which kicks in only on the rare occasion a cheater is caught. That draft code, and many other remedies for cheating, are under discussion by a committee of students, teachers, administrators and parents.

Aaron — well groomed, well spoken and already planning for medical school — said that catching all cheaters and punishing them is unrealistic. Rather he hoped to change the attitude of "students on the fence" and "make it socially unacceptable." Even that, he said, may be hard. "Expectations are set here, externally and internally. In Westport, getting a B is like getting an F. So if you don't feel you can achieve it on your own, you find another way."

Some students said the adults around them willingly turned a blind eye to the problem. "The biggest problem is that the adults don't want to believe it," said Clayton Goodgame, a junior.

Students describe unrelenting pressure to achieve. Alicia Berenyi, a junior, cited the annual list of seniors and where they were headed. "If it's not Harvard, Yale or Princeton, you get that look," she said, less from fellow students than from parents or other adults. "It's almost like they think it's proof of what kind of person you are."

There is ample statistical evidence of the explosion of cheating in high school. Michael S. Josephson, who runs an ethics institute in Los Angeles, found in 2002 that 74 percent of 10,000 high school students surveyed nationwide had cheated on a test in the previous 12 months, up from 61 percent 10 years earlier. Donald McCabe, a Rutgers University professor, published similar findings in 2001: of 4,500 high school students, 75 percent had cheated at least once on a test, up from 50 percent in 1993 and 25 percent in 1963.

Neither of these researchers had data that isolated rich teenagers from poor. Yet both were convinced of a correlation. "There is no doubt in my mind that students who come from privileged backgrounds develop a certain entitlement mentality," Mr. McCabe said. "Also they are under much greater pressure from their parents on the college admissions issue."

Mr. Josephson, who said high-end schools generally turn a blind eye to cheating, agreed. "I don't think this is a generation of moral mutants," he said. "What's changed is parenting. If you catch their kid cheating they threaten a lawsuit."

One researcher, Suniya S. Luthar, a developmental psychologist at Teachers College at Columbia University, has made a specialty of affluent teenagers, whom she describes sympathetically as "a truly miserable group of kids." Dr. Luthar has spent the last several years surveying students in Westport, where the median family income is $152,894 and the town's one high school, with 1,400 students, is among the top-ranked in the country. Her recent papers, published in the journal Child Development, report higher rates of depression, anxiety, binge drinking and cheating in the children of the rich, which she attributes to two causes: pressure to achieve and a lack of meaningful contact with adults.

Dr. Brady, the principal at Staples, said he proceeded gingerly with the parents, taking articles about corporate dishonesty and college-level cheating to a recent PTA meeting to show this was not only Westport's problem. The subject drew two dozen parents to the library, the same two dozen who Dr. Brady says always show up, whether the topic is school construction or substance abuse.

One parent asked, "Am I doing something wrong if I proofread a paper?" Another wondered if the cooperative work the school encouraged was confusing students about helping one another with homework. A third suggested the restoration of ethics in the curriculum, eliminated "when politically correct things came into play."

This group was thoughtful and not the least defensive. And Dr. Brady was careful not to criticize the no-shows. But one psychologist who works in the district said that perhaps 20 percent of the parents here resist all suggestions that anything is amiss with their children and that some threaten to sue over any disciplinary measure that might mar a college transcript.

The response from teachers, Dr. Brady said, has been more lethargic, and he is not sure why. But there are some encouraging developments. One sophomore English teacher recently assigned Ethan Canin's short story "The Palace Thief," the basis for the movie "The Emperor's Club," which deals with cheating. The math teachers met last week to discuss the possibility of having a set of classroom calculators, so students cannot load them with inappropriate software. Many teachers have stopped giving the same tests in different periods.

The committee considering an honor code has mixed views about whether it is a good idea. The members are going slowly, setting an agenda. But the student members are excited by the prospect of being pioneers, an example for schools in Scarsdale, Greenwich or Short Hills.

"The idea that we could catalyze change in other communities made a big impression on me," said Alicia, the junior. "More schools should openly admit what's going on. I think it paints a great picture of our town that we're doing this."

There is a difference between rote memorizing and a synthetic learning that grasps the contextual meaning of the material.

I agree with you totally. If what the students learn (memorized or not) is not within a context, it creates problems with being able to apply it in the future.

I do think total understanding involves the complete package...developing the context, understanding the applications, and, yes, many things need to be memorized. With good skills, less memorization is necessary, as it is possible to quickly derive some formulas from others.

We were allowed a 3X5 card in College Physics. If you didn't understand the formulas, it wouldn't help anyway, because the questions were set up in such a way that you only got the things you needed to figure out the things you needed to figure out the things you needed to figure out.

I did learn a lot setting up my card, and that understanding of the material got me through the course, not the card in class.

If the tests are so easy to cheat on, the prof/teacher needs to move away from multiple guess and simplistic problems to more challenging exams. Six foot spacing, no cell phones or wireless communications.

Your post was a good top to bottom on the subject. I am also of the class of '63, got into one of the good schools, and have had two careers, one in aerospace as an engineer, the other as a high school teacher.

I did not permit open cheating, (copy other's work, pass notes, etc. Calculators were invented while I was teaching, but were not large storage devices for many years later. (I remember my slide rule had a set of formulas on the back, eventually I knew them by heart, but it was always reassuring to have the law of sines and cosines available. I don't know if the teacher knew or not.

My point is that a good teacher is all that is required to turn this situation around. As you indicated, when group work is required, the lesson should be in doing the work well, so that everyone benefits. It should not be the primary mode of a classe's learning. My son experienced too much of this "support your fellow student" approach to learning, and I believe it supports Ayn Rand's form of mooching. In one class, a student who was artistically inclined always volunteered to do the display board, as long as others did the research and typing. What Cr*p.

When I wanted a clean test, I asked to see the students work. Level of dificulty can change, and required detail can become too comples to copy easily. I taught math and science but the same could be applicable anywhere. No detailed solution, (less score). I have used the device of multiple tests, and even once made each student's problem unique. If all use calculators, the simple math solution would not be enough, students would need to show intermediate steps. This means many scan type tests could not be used, but I enjoyed the job well enough to stay up late grading the papers so I could get them back the next class meeting. ( I did schedule tests so I could do this.)

The bottom line, is that if the students are cheating, they are only learning to cheat. If the teacher is charged with teaching, they must step in and ensure students are doing the work. Lazy teaching facilitates cheating.

Thanks. I agree with you.

You mentioned showing work: I don't ever remember taking a math or science test (other than the standardized tests like the SAT, GRE, LSAT and GMAT) where I wasn't required to show work. Starting in 8th grade with Algebra, we had to show virtually all our steps for full credit. (Sometimes if we were right and skipped one or two levels of simplification but it was clear how we'd proceeded, it would be OK) Same in high school and college. When I was in graduate school in economics, taking mathematical economics and graduate mathematics courses like topology and measure theory, we spend most of our time proving theorems. In seminar, we took turns each week presenting sections with half a dozen theorems or so. Any other seminar member could ask for any part of any proof, even the theorems listed among the assumptions -- talk about have to have all your work laid out!

As I worked with my kids doing math homework, I found it very curious that they were not expected to show their work. But, when I would work through stuff with them, I found that they were being taught different methods than I had been. Surprisingly, very cook-book-y, emphasizing whichever special cases they were studying, whereas my training was all aimed at moving quickly to the general cases and the most mathematically rigorous and powerful theorems. Harder 'til you get used to it, but much better training for further work. Of course, at that level, cheating is virtually impossible: some of the proofs are published (usually in outline), and you're welcome to use them if you understand them and can work out the steps. Then, of course, you're working on problems of your own devising or new applications. Fun stuff.

The new calculators are a problem. The teaching of analytic geometry and calculus today emphasizes the use of graphing calculators which have significant memory. The result is the kids can visualze better than we could quickly, but they have more trouble manipulating equations and 'seeing through' to the ultimate solution. (You remember, when you knew the answer, but it would take ten minutes or so to go back and actually work the problem out step by step).

Oh, well. Happy Thanksgiving!

My daughter is at a "highly rated" IB pre-med high school in Florida.Most subjects test DAILY. She's taking college level Algebra and Chemistry in her sophomore year and not doing well - she has great work habits and has always been a "A" student.
When the kids get back a test all the teacher does is show them their grade at the top. They don't get the test back to see what they did well or badly on - they just have a grade.

Ostensibly this is to prevent tests from "floating" around and encourage cheating. In my book its lazy a$$ teachers that don't want to have to draw up original tests.

How can I help, how can she help herself if she doesn't know what she got right or missed? GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!

She even started typing in her reading and class notes in outline form to help her study and her math and government teachers said "No!" - might be copied for others to use to study. ARRRRRRRRRRRGGGHHHH!

;-(

Same to you, the sad thing is that I lost my teaching - coaching job because the district had to lay of 60 teachers. I found that even though I had worked 10 years, I was still one of the most recent hirees. Thats when I went back to aerospace and there I was asked to continue teaching as part of my job. It seem that the engineers we hired needed a few courses to learn what was expected of them. I even heard that we were the best educated high school class ever, it peaked in the late '60s and went down hill from there.

I blame the rise of the teacher's union on the fall of education. I wanted to be a professional teacher, but I was just a union lackey. Oh well. By nagging and working with our son, we managed to get him through his education and into a first rate college (Auburn - Alabama). Had to supplement a lot for him because as you point out, teachers today ask more that students have a visual idea rather than a detailed understanding.

Have a good holiday.

If I were in your position, I would get my daughter out of that school immediately, before more damage is done.

As much as I favor rigor in high school, I'm not sure that most sophomores should be doing university level work: if it's really given at the university level, very few kids can do well, and if a lot of the kids are doing well, I doubt it's really at university level. I would be exceptionally wary of having a high school student doing college level Algebra and Chemistry under the circumstances you describe: that is to say inadequate feedback or explanation of where the student has failed to master the material. Children with IQ's of 150 and north can probably survive that relatively intact, but your normally bright (120-135 IQ) probably aren't ready for it. Those kids can do the work with a lot of feedback and explanation, but not without it. Good work habits aren't enough.

In order to get a handle on the situation, I'd get your daughter independently tested (NOT by the school system, by a private expert) and I'd be in the teacher's office trying to understand exactly what was going on, soonest.

In high school there is often a great sorting out: many kids who worked hard and got straight A's through middle school find that the level of work has increased and they don't learn the material as easily as some other students. Some kids who don't study, start getting A's (because they're really bright) and others have to work very hard to get B's or even C's (especially in honors). You need to be certain your (and your daughter's) expectations are realistic. If they are, and there are still problems, then you need to change schools, even home school. I would thing a good private school, with small classes and individual attention would be a good idea. If you have to stay where you are for school, you need to get her outstanding tutoring on a regular basis.

The peak for the SAT was the high school class of 1965, with my class of 1966 a few points lower (but the difference was not statistically significant). It's all been downhill since then.

I think you are absolutely correct that the unions have been the death of public education (just as they have destroyed quality public service wherever they are powerful). It was in the late '60s and early '70s that the unions were first permitted and that's when things really started going to hell in a handbasket. Of course, this was also the time of the counterculture: you missed it in high school, and my class was on the cusp -- in my class (in the San Francisco Bay Area), perhaps a dozen or so kids had smoked pot before we graduated. A year later probably 2/3 of the class had tried it, and the class behind us had even higher use. Big changes, which we can't blame on the unions. Still, I think the unions have changed the mindset of teachers from that of independent professionals to that of time-serving trade unionists. No longer are kids and their education the prime focus, rather it's pay, benefits, more jobs for members, and keeping control of the system.

Wow, drugs didn't hit San Mateo until '75? Amazing. We were in the North Bay, lower Sonoma County, and drugs hit during '66-67, by the end of the Summer of Love ('67) it was almost universal. That was pretty much true also for my cousins in Marin and in San Francisco, and my friends in SF and on the Peninsula (Hillsborough, Menlo Park, Atherton, etc.) I had a girlfiend in grad school who was from out towards the Delta past Livermore, she said drugs hit there and the world changed around '68-'69.

By '68 or so, the lethargy about sports had hit, pretty much as you described it: only the athletes and their parents cared about sports, plus the girls in their clique who were the cheerleaders. Dramatic changes from our day.

You know, those were what the Chinese call "interesting times" -- good and bad. I had a lot of fun in those years, and did a lot of things I hope my daughters don't do. I marvel that I and most of my friends survived more or less intact.

Yes, I was at Cal ain '67 and we had one guy in the dorm who used MJ. (We shunned him (engineering students do that) and called him a pusher. Drugs were around since then, but San Mateo HS was a hold out til bands like Pablo Cruz came into vogue. The school had so much spirit till '75 it was a breeze to be a teacher then, even if I had no room of my own, and had to coach after school too. There were probably a few druggies earlier, and they joined the smokers out by the bleachers. The mainstream was into alcohol, but not the other stuff. My wife and I went to a high school football party and the adults were drinking upstairs while the kids had a keg in the basement. Because of my position, I made an excuse and left the party.

Yeah, we all did things then that I had to confess later to the FBI for my clearence. All they wanted to know was was I clean now?

I grew up in Concord, (out by the delta). The town had a rep for unmarried pregnancies. You had some class friends in the towns you named. My HS drew from Hillsborough and Burlingame as well as Foster City. The sad thing is that even though my friends survived, they did not move to the conservative side, so we talk a lot less now. I dated a Hillsborough girl, she said on a teacher's salary, I could possibly take her out once a month, she had other friends who could party every other night, so I lost out.

I have a question for you. My current thing is Math remedation in connection with tutoring (fill in the spaces causing the problems). The vast majority of HS students (all levels) I encounter can "do" percents, but they don't know per cent means per hundred. Do you see this lack of fundamental comprehension?

First, I'm glad to hear (though not surprised) that you agree with me about the importance of understanding the concepts behind the formulas. Too many math teachers teach formulas without really teaching the concepts.

Regarding your question: Yes, I see this lack of comprehension with my students. I teach college students, mostly sophomores. They are very bright kids, but they are often handicapped by a general lack of fundamental comprehension. They can do formulas, perform the basic skills of math, often without understanding the meaning behind these operations. So, a lot of my work involves drilling students on fundamental concepts. When I give exams, most of the questions are conceptual, and only a small fraction of the exams involve working out problems. They find the latter easy, but the former much more difficult.

Very interesting, and thanks for the insight. As to the proclivities of Hillsborough girls, I know them well -- I had a cousin who grew up there. She was a sweetheart, very natural and humble despite being beautiful and brilliant (Stanford Phi Beta Kappa -- our extended family were all either UC or Stanford (but in the Stanford branches the few who couldn't get it went to USC)), but a lot of the girls she grew up with were real materialistic snots. I can visualize one of them making a stupid judgement and comment like you described.

Concord, eh? My girlfrient was from Brentwood. Small town, that. Very Delta, almost San Joaquin Vally orientation. She was a real exception (I think it may have been her allergy to horses).

Best!

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