A Nation of Cheats

Abstract

WHEN I HEARD that John Fremer, a long-time friend and Educational Testing Service psychometrician, had retired and now worked for Caveon.com, a firm dedicated to detecting cheating, I was amused. Snooping for cheats seemed like a trivial pursuit compared to the lofty testing enterprises he had undertaken at ETS. No more. I did not realize how much of a problem cheating has become. On National Public Radio's Diane Rehm Show last March, Howard Gardner of Harvard University observed that 75% of high school students admitted to having cheated on a test. As Gardner noted then, doesn't seem likely that students would admit to cheating if they had not. On the other hand, they might not admit to cheating if they had. That's one possible interpretation of the results of the latest Ethics of American Youth survey by Michael Josephson of the Josephson Institute of Ethics. In Josephson's survey of 24,763 students, the percentage admitting to having cheated dropped from 74% in 2002 to 62% in 2004. Those who admitted to cheating two or more times dropped from 48% in 2002 to 38% in 2004. The results have the researchers at Josephson baffled. None of the other 2004 results shows a dramatic shift. It could be that all the business scandals in the last few years have sensitized people to importance of not cheating. (Equally plausible, though, would be that the endless stream of corporate malefactors has only intensified the everyone does it mentality.) Or could be that cynicism has become more rampant and that students are simply lying about whether or not they cheated. On the phone, Michael Josephson seemed to be leaning toward the latter interpretation, although that is an inference on my part. Still, in the course of our conversation, he noted that, when he tours schools these days, he finds that many teachers and administrators are indifferent to cheating, something he attributes mostly to the juggernaut of high- stakes testing. Gardner, for his part, attributes widespread cheating to boring assignments, the pressure to get into the right college, and teachers' tendency to overlook the problem they don't want to fight with the kids and their parents for five years. He also feels that the prevalence of cheating is a result of the combined failure of teachers and parents to make clear why you shouldn't cheat. Without instruction, is not clear to kids. For me, this brings to mind the old sociological distinction between shame cultures and guilt cultures. In shame cultures, it's bad to get caught doing a prohibited thing because then you get publicly shamed; guilt cultures rely on that still small voice that tells you not to do wrong. When I learned this distinction 45 years ago, was clear that America was a guilt culture. During the intervening decades, I'd guess we have shifted a long way toward shame. Another finding in the Josephson results that is difficult to explain is that students in private religious high schools admit to the most cheating (66%, down from 78% in 2002), while those in private secular high schools admit to the least (46%, down from 54% in 2002). The responses to other questions about cheating stand in stark contrast to the percentage who admit to having cheated. Only 22% agreed that people who lie, cheat, or break the rules are more likely to get ahead; only 6% thought their parents would prefer them to cheat rather than get bad grades; 84% agreed with the statement It's not worth to lie or cheat because hurts your character. A finding that is common to Gardner's work and Josephson's survey is that people want to be moral. Studying young aspirants in journalism, genetics, and acting, Gardner and a team of researchers (Wendy Fischman, Becca Solomon, and Deborah Greenspan) found that their interviewees wanted to be moral people. However, they often yielded to the reality that people around them were cutting ethical corners. …