Cheating at School: Start the Discussion Early

Lisa, from Grown and Flown, writes:

The first few weeks of school are special ones. Kids are still finding their way among classmates while trying to gauge their teachers’ approach and expectations. Slates are clean and possibilities hang in the air.  Parents often take the time to express to their children their own hopes and concerns for the school year.

I start every September giving one son the you-must-do-your-best talk.  Another son has just outgrown the annual you-need-to-be-more-organized talk and the third I prodded to move out of his comfort zone socially and extra curricularly.

But I can say with some certainty that I never kicked off a school year with a conversation about academic dishonesty. And in the wake of cheating scandals this year at Harvard University, Stuyvesant High School, and a Long Island SAT testing center, I am pretty sure I missed an important opportunity here.  Did I fail to discuss cheating because I didn’t think it was a problem at their school or was it because I didn’t think it would be a problem for my child? 

Truth: it just never came up.

Academic cheating is a pervasive problem and if, as a parent, you have left the conversation until high school, or even middle school, it may be getting late. The number of students who cheat is simply staggering. According to the Educational Testing Service, between 75 and 98 percent of college students report having cheated in high school.

And among middle schoolers, two-thirds admitted to cheating while 90% said they had copied another student’s homework. Cheating occurs among both weak and strong students, male and female students and part of the rise in incidence is blamed on increase pressure for good grades and the decreased stigma associated with academic dishonesty.

Cheating in school is not new, but the number of students engaging in such practice and the means with which to do so, are rising steadily.  Technology is part of the problem.  Facilitated means of communication and ease of reproducing work means that students can move large quantities of information with stealth and the lines between helping, collaborating, and cheating become even more difficult to define.  Like any crime, there are means and there is motive and while technology provides the means, increased academic pressure is widely viewed as the motive.

Conventional wisdom suggests that we need to tell our children that cheating is wrong, that cheaters will probably get caught and certainly never prosper and that grades are not that important.  Yet here I believe the conventional wisdom is wrong.  In this as in all parenting activities it is important to retain credibility.  By telling our children that classmates who cheat will get caught and will not benefit by their deceit, we will simply be seen as naive and hopelessly out of touch with the 21st century classroom.  

They don’t think cheaters fail to prosper, they think we fail to understand.

To continue reading this post click here.

Do you talk about cheating with your kids? Let us know in the comments.