“Cheating themselves”By Leonard Pitts Jr.The Baltimore Sun

June 23, 2002|

WASHINGTON - Last week, school officials in Piper, Kan., adopted an official policy on plagiarism - with punishments ranging from redoing an assignment to expulsion. Unfortunately, all that comes too late to help Christine Pelton.

Last week, school officials in Piper, Kan., adopted an official policy on plagiarism - with punishments ranging from redoing an assignment to expulsion. Unfortunately, all that comes too late to help Christine Pelton.

She used to be a teacher. Taught biology at Piper High, to be exact. Then, last fall, she assigned her students to collect 20 leaves and write a report on them. The kids knew from the classroom syllabus - a document they and their parents both signed - that cheating would not be tolerated. Anyone who plagiarized would receive no credit for the assignment, which counted toward half their semester grade.

Maybe you've heard what happened next. Twenty-eight of Pelton's 118 sophomores turned in work that seemed conspicuously similar. It took only a little Web research for her to confirm that they had indeed cut-and-pasted their papers together.

True to her word, Pelton issued 28 zeroes. What followed was to moral integrity as the Keystone Kops are to law enforcement. Parents rose in outrage, some even making harassing, post-midnight phone calls to her home. Pelton offered the cheaters make-up assignments that would have allowed them to pass the class with D's. They refused. Besieged by angry mothers and fathers, the school board ordered the teacher to soften the punishment.

She went to school the next day and found the kids in a celebratory mood, cheering their victory and crowing that they no longer had to listen to teachers. By lunchtime, Pelton had quit. The school's principal and 13 of 32 teachers have also reportedly resigned. In the months since then, the cheaters have become the target of ridicule and condemnation in media around the world.

In spite of that, the parents of the 28 ethically challenged students continue to rally to their defense. One says it's not plagiarism if you only copy a sentence or two. Another expresses doubt the kids even know what plagiarism means.

To that, I can only say this: Please shut up. Haven't you already done enough damage?

Students have always cheated, yes. Always schemed to see the questions ahead of time, write notes on sweaty palms, peer over the shoulder of the teacher's pet. But what's most troubling here is not the amorality of adolescents, but the fact that parents are so eagerly complicit, so ready to look the other way, so willing to rationalize the fact that their children are, in essence, liars and thieves. Lying about authorship of the work, thieving the grade that results.

Those students, their parents and the school board that caved in like cardboard in the rain are all emblematic of a society in which cheating has become not just epidemic but somehow tolerated, even at the highest levels. As one senior told CBS News, "It probably sounds twisted, but I would say that in this day and age, cheating is almost not wrong."

Who can blame the kid for thinking that way when the news is full of noted historians cribbing from one another, Enron cooking the books well done, Merrill Lynch recommending garbage stock, a Notre Dame football coach falsifying his resume. Whatever works, right? Ours is not to judge, right?

Wrong.

At the risk of being preachy, I'd like to point out the common thread between the historians, the coach, Enron, and Merrill Lynch: they all got caught.

Cheaters almost always do. No, not necessarily in big, splashy stories that make CBS News. Sometimes, it's just in the small, quiet corners of inauthentic lives when they are brought up short by their own inadequacies and forced to acknowledge the hollowness of their achievements. To admit they aren't what others believe them to be.

Reputation, it has been said, is about who you are when people are watching. Character is about who you are when there's nobody in the room but you. Both matter, but of the two, character is far and away the most important. The former can induce others to think well of you. But only the latter allows you to think well of yourself.

This is the lesson of Piper High, for those who have ears to hear.

Turns out Christine Pelton is still teaching after all.

“Slippery Slope For Dishonest? Teen Cheats More Likely To Repeat As Adults, Survey Says”By Carla Rivera

November 1, 2009Tribune Newspapers, Los Angeles, CA

— - "Once a liar, always a liar" is a proverbial parental admonishment.

A national study claims there is truth to the adage: People who cheated on exams in high school are considerably more likely to be dishonest later in life, according to a report released this week by the Josephson Institute of Ethics.

The study, which surveyed nearly 7,000 people in various age groups, offers a sobering assessment of today's youth as cynics who are aware their behavior crosses boundaries but believe it is necessary to succeed. The survey's margin of error for questions ranged from 1 to 2 percentage points.

And the findings suggest that habits formed in childhood persist: Those who cheated in high school are more likely as adults to lie to a customer, inflate an insurance claim, cheat on taxes and lie to their spouse.

"When you see that teens are five times more likely than adults to think it's OK to cheat to get ahead, we have a problem," said Rich Jarc, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Josephson Institute. "Just think if five times the number of people in business, politics and banking hold those beliefs. That's alarming."

The Josephson Institute issues biennial reports on the ethics of American high school students that have charted a steady increase in those admitting to cheating, lying and stealing.

The new study is the first to connect teen behavior to dishonest activities in adulthood.

Among the findings: Teens 17 and younger are nearly four times more likely than adults over 50 to deceive their boss (31 percent versus 8 percent) and three times more likely to keep change mistakenly given to them (49 percent versus 15 percent).

More young adults aged 18 to 24 reported lying to a spouse or partner than did those between 41 and 50 years old (48 percent versus 22 percent), more made an unauthorized copy of music or a video (69 percent versus 27 percent) and more were likely to have misrepresented or omitted a fact in a job interview (14 percent versus 4 percent).

Robert deMayo, a professor of psychology at Pepperdine University, suggested that technology has created a generational shift in the ethics of many activities, such as illegal music downloads and plagiarism.

"The young do that in a widespread fashion and say, yes, they know it's wrong; yes, it's stealing but everybody is doing it," deMayo said. "It becomes normalized; it becomes almost irrelevant that it's against the letter of the law."

51% of teens 17 and younger said lying and cheating are necessary to succeed, in a survey of nearly 7,000 people. 10% of adults over 50 in the same survey agreed.

Fiction: “Honors Track”By Molly Patterson

Atlantic Monthly,June 2012

WE WERE SEDULOUS. We were driven. Our vocabularies were formidable and constantly expanding. We knew the chemical elements by number and properties, the names and dates of battles in the world’s greatest wars.

We arrived at school early and put in twelve-hour days. Exhaustion was routine. Most of us repelled it with Pepsi or Mountain Dew. Others took a more holistic approach. Neil Casey did a series of deep-breathing exercises; May Wang sipped from a thermos of ginseng tea. Dale Gilman, the vice principal’s son, whom none of the rest of us could stand, rolled his ankles and wrists around while he sat through each class. “It really gets the blood flowing,” he said in his high-pitched voice, even though we never asked him to explain.

Most of us had older siblings who’d been there before. We’d watched their hands shake as they tore open letters from Harvard and Stanford, from numerous tiny schools in the New England woods. They’d won Presidential Scholarships and National Merit Awards. Jill Jansen’s older brother went on to get a Rhodes. The pamphlets we took home from the Guidance Office showed photographs of trees in a perpetual state of October, and students’ faces laughing under jaunty knit caps.

At various times throughout the school day, we pictured those offer letters. They were on the pages of our Geometry textbooks and our daily planners, in the overstuffed pockets of our AP class folders. At night when we closed our eyes, they shimmered bright white against the black, with our own names on the page, beneath the raised Latin seal.

Nancy Kim knew what waiting for a letter like that was like. During our freshman year at Truman South in the suburbs of St. Louis, she’d entered her Sonata in D Major in the Young Mozart International Composers Competition. First prize was a trip to New York to hear the piece performed by an eighty-two member semiprofessional orchestra. Nancy had never been to New York, but her two favorite movies were Home Alone 2 and Annie Hall. Everyone knew she was meant for the Big Apple.

She mailed off her sonata in December and waited for the results. That winter we were reading The Great Gatsby in Honors English. Whenever Mrs. Singer read out loud one of Nick Carraway’s descriptions of West Egg or Manhattan, we’d look over and see Nancy sitting with her hands on the back of her head and her elbows folded over her chin like a pelican beak. We couldn’t tell if she was lost in a reverie about life in New York or if she was just succumbing to stress, but sometime in January, she began to question whether she’d sent the right piece. “What do you guys think?” she’d ask us at least once a week. “I should’ve cut the minuet down and sent that one, right?”

“Dude, stop freaking out,” Vikram Sengupta would say. Vikram was a short, skinny Indian guy with huge glasses, who called everyone “dude.”

Maybe Nancy should have sent the minuet. It was hard to tell. But we got tired of hearing about it; each of us had private worries that trumped Nancy’s dilemma. Tran Binh had discovered a slow-growing rash on her stomach. Neil Casey arrived at school one morning with his left arm in a sling after he got cornered behind the tennis courts by two guys from the lacrosse team. They’d dislocated his shoulder holding his hands behind his back while they rifled through the contents of his suede-bottomed JanSport. Both Gretchen Kafka’s and Jill Jansen’s parents were headed for divorce. And every time Vikram went to his locker, he faced the bleached outline of a penis that the janitors’ industrial-strength cleaner had not been able to erase.

By April, the tension of waiting had taken its toll on Nancy. She showed up at school looking more and more haggard. She wasn’t sleeping well. Her class participation dropped to a level just above catatonic. A flinching, bruised look about her would get progressively worse over the course of a day, so that by fifth period, we could barely stand to look at her at all.

One Tuesday, she blazed into American History ten minutes before the morning bell. “Sonata in C Minor,” she spat out, glaring around at us, “by some Chinese kid from New Jersey!” We all glanced over at May Wang, as if she might be culpable. Her family owned a restaurant called Hunan Happy Garden in a strip mall next to a bowling alley.

May shrugged. “You know, what sucks is that he’s from New Jersey, so he’s probably been to New York, like, a million times.”

After that, Nancy gave up writing her symphony. She put Columbia University at the top of her school list and turned full-time to studying.

We studied constantly, but never enough; we always had more to learn, more to cram in. We studied the Latin roots of words and Avogadro’s number. We broke down the structure of the Gettysburg Address, then went straight into the chronology of geologic periods.

Some of us believed in flashcards. Others went in for mnemonic devices. Priya Bhatnagar, in her mother’s Taurus on the way to school each morning, sketched the sodium-potassium pump on the fogged-up windows. Dale Gilman listened to books on tape, strapping on headphones in the six-minute breaks between classes. If his father hadn’t been the vice principal, he would’ve gotten beaten up every day before he even got to first period.

Every quarter, we went to the Guidance Office to check our class rank. Cindy Boranodski was number one, and we hated her. The very first week of freshman year she’d joined the Debate Team, Quiz Bowl, American Youth Leadership Society, Spanish Club, Students Against Destructive Decisions, Mock Trial, Model UN, and the Student-Faculty Colloquium. She started writing for Tiger Tracks—the school newspaper—and editing the Truman Literary Journal. Every other weekend she cleaned cages

at the Humane Society, and once a month she pushed old people around in wheelchairs at St. Margaret’s.

None of us understood how she had earned the highest GPA.

In the first quarter of sophomore year, Cindy got an A-minus in Chemistry, and Paul Takahashi caught up to her. We liked Paul okay, but once he’d won the top spot, we had trouble maintaining our good feelings toward him. By the midway point of second quarter, most of us had added him to our Mono Wish List.

This wasn’t ill will; it was a calculation of survival. Sometimes late at night, writing a paper or studying for an exam, we reflected that if Dmitri Alexandrov should fall ill or slip into a months-long depression, his grades would suffer and we’d move up in the class ranking. We imagined the same thing happening to Cindy and Paul, and to everyone else who was ranked above us. Occasionally, we imagined it happening to our closest friends.

On those nights, we’d close our eyes in the buzzing, 3 a.m. silence of our homes. We’d lay our heads down on the kitchen table or particleboard desk. Was it really worth it? What did we care about geometric proofs or the dystopia novels? Stress clawed at our hearts. It burrowed into our chests. When we slept, it gnawed away at us from the inside. Waking up each morning, we felt an aching hollowness in our bones that could be assuaged only by a perfect test score, an A on a paper, any small assurance that we weren’t falling behind.

We hated the stress, but we couldn’t give it up. It was our most loyal companion. Without it, we wouldn’t have known who we were.

Sophomore year, Vikram and Neil started taking a census. Both of them had gotten a B-plus on their last two papers in British Lit, and they were convinced that Mrs. Santamaria was grading from a severe gender bias. They approached each of us privately, wanting to know how we’d done on both the sonnet comparison and the Macbeth essay. They asked us to produce our graded papers so they could verify the data. A few of us refused. “Maybe I don’t feel like sharing,” Nancy Kim said. No one who’d gotten an A really minded too much, but among the A-minus crowd some grumbling occurred about the ethicality of the research methods. Gretchen Kafka threatened to fill out a report and drop it in the Bully Box outside the Principal’s Office.

There was a reason none of us had ever been able to stand Gretchen Kafka.

One afternoon, Vikram and Neil approached Dale Gilman after Mr. Penney’s Physics class. They weren’t friends with Dale. None of us was. He wore turtlenecks and his hair always stuck to his forehead. His body shape bordered on the feminine: bulbous, hippy, unfortunate in corduroy. In junior high, he’d gotten a compound fracture in his foot by dropping a huge block of Asiago cheese on it. He was constantly hovering at the edge of our conversations, laughing on cue with everyone else, sliding in at the lunch table when no one was paying attention.

“Salutations,” Dale said to Neil and Vikram as he took off his headphones.

“We’ve got something to ask you,” Vikram said.

Dale shifted his shoulders under the weight of his backpack as Neil explained that they were expanding their sample set for the census. They needed Santamaria’s grading sheets from previous years. Dale’s father was vice principal, which meant Dale had to have a way to get into the English Office after hours. “We’ll be a team,” Neil said, taking a step toward him. “We just need to find out what’s going on.”

The six minutes between classes was almost up. Neil and Vikram both had Latin just a few classrooms over, but Dale had to walk all the way down to the other end of the building for Mrs. Benson’s German class. A trio of senior soccer players went by, laughing loudly and taking up most of the hallway. “Okay,” Dale said, hooking thumbs under the straps of his backpack. “Okay, guys, I’ll see what I can do.”

“Cool,” Neil said. “I knew you’d come through.” Dale took off at a sprint down the hall, his

backpack bouncing with every step. Before long, word spread that Dale Gilman was in

possession of a master key to the school. “Dude, I saw it,” Vikram whispered to Tran at Math League one afternoon. He told her that Dale kept the key on a string around his neck. It was a copy he’d made at Central Hardware one Saturday morning while Vice Principal Gilman was out on his weekly ten-mile run.

“You were going to break into school?,” Tran asked.

“It was a joke,” Vikram said. “It’s not like we were ever going to actually do it.” After they both got A’s on the Dickens paper, he and Neil had abandoned their campaign against Santamaria.

“What about the alarm system?,” May asked Tran the next morning, when they were still at their lockers before the first-period warning bell.

Tran stuffed some books into her backpack and zipped up the main pocket. “Well, Vikram said that Dale said that the district hasn’t paid the company for, like, three years, so the alarm isn’t even on.”

Some of us believed the stories. Others were skeptical. In class, we stole glances at Dale, trying to decide whether someone whose daily lunch unfailingly included both a juice box and animal crackers could possibly have the guts to commit a serious crime. For the most part, we were too busy to give it much thought. We were busy playing violin and clarinet and doing tae kwon do. We were working to make Eagle Scout or win the Gold Award. We were traveling to regional math competitions, playing in piano recitals, polishing essays to send off to contests sponsored by the Rotary Club or the Local Business Alliance.

Periodically, we stopped off after school at the Guidance Office to page through the files of model college applications. Books of them lined the shelf, each one having gained the writer admission to the Ivies, Stanford, or MIT. Nancy Kim learned by heart all the vital statistics on the applications to Columbia, and all of us turned our attention to numbers one, two, and three in the national rankings.

We judged. The essays weren’t that good, we decided; we could do better. But then, standing on the gray carpeting before a huge binder propped open like the King

James Bible, we would suddenly realize that we weren’t vice president of anything, and the thick, cold sludge of despair poured down our necks.

Dmitri Alexandrov was a human calculator, and by the beginning of our junior year his mathematical skill had become a community-wide problem. We had all managed to hold our own in Geometry and Pre-Calc/Trig, but Honors Calculus was a whole different ball game. In the library after school, we gathered in groups of three or four around Vikram, Paul, and Tran. They were all in Math League, but even the three of them together were no match for some of the problems assigned by Mr. Everett. We puzzled for hours over derivatives and infinite series. We brought our graphing calculators to bear on them and shot at them wildly with equations from the back of our giant Calculus textbook. When we left in the evening to go home for dinner, our used-up pens littered the floor like artillery shells.

Dmitri rarely went to the library. Even when he did, we didn’t ask him for help. Usually, he was doing work for other classes, but we knew he wouldn’t be able to help us anyway. In Calculus class, he never raised his hand to ask a question. He finished the exams barely ten minutes after Mr. Everett passed them out. He always followed along as Mr. Everett scribbled calculations on the overhead, but we figured that this was simply a formality, a cultural habit bred into him by his Russian heritage.

“Brutal,” we said under our breaths whenever we got back a Calculus quiz. In thick, bold lines at the top, we confronted letters that few of us had ever seen there before: B-minus, C-plus, C for average. But we knew that C was average only for homeless drug addicts and those with learning disabilities.

“He’s throwing the curve,” Neil declared one day. We were at the library after school, gathered in our normal spot—a corner with windows on two sides and a few tables placed close together in a little triangle. On nice days, the sunlight poured in through the windows and heated our corner like a greenhouse, but the sky this day was pewter-dark and heavy with rain. We were all tense. A few hours before, Mr. Everett had handed back our latest quiz; the results were near-catastrophic, and the first big exam was coming up soon.

“Well, yeah,” May said, leaning in over the table, her head sinking down between her raised shoulder blades, “but the point is that all of us are getting punished for taking the harder class.”

“Yeah, we could’ve been like some people and taken the easy way out,” Nancy added.

We all glanced over at Gretchen Kafka. She was sitting alone in a chair across the library, bent over a pink notebook, our Government textbook flipped open on her lap. Gretchen had been scared off by the reputation of Mr. Everett’s class. She was taking Stats instead, so her GPA wouldn’t suffer.

“It’s a problem with the system,” Neil went on, turning back to the table. “Think about it. They didn’t have Dmitri in their class last year, so their grades were all higher.” He paused. “Without the curve, you guys, we’re all getting screwed.”

We fell quiet. In our minds, we lined up rows and columns, plugging low B’s or C’s into our first-quarter

report cards. The results were grim. All across the country, we thought, maybe at this very moment, teachers were scribbling little hat-shaped A’s on the tops of their students’ exams. Thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of perfect, unadulterated report cards were papering the fronts of as many refrigerators in as many homes.

Could the students whose names were on those report cards, we wondered, possibly be trying any harder than us? Did they spend any more hours balancing chemical equations or attempting to memorize the Bill of Rights? Had they even read Absalom, Absalom?

In class, Nancy Kim chewed on the ends of her hair. Tran Binh had the habit of pulling her eyelids. Most of us bit our nails so badly during late study nights that the next morning we woke up to our fingers pulsing with pain. We suffered Vitamin D deficiencies from lack of sunlight, and every one of us had problems with spinal alignment.

If we knew one thing about sacrifice, though, it was this: sacrifice made sense only if you made sure you wouldn’t fail.

Nancy buried her head in her hands. “I don’t know about you,” she mumbled, “but I feel like this class is going to ruin my life.”

Suddenly, out of nowhere, Dale Gilman appeared. He dropped into a chair and pulled off his headphones. “What’re you guys talking about?”

Neil leaned forward, hands pressed on the edge of the table. “Dale,” he said. “You’re our friend, right?”

Dale gave a nervous smile and glanced around at us. “Of course,” he squeaked. “I mean, we’re all friends, aren’t we?”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.” Neil swept his gaze around the group. Unlike Dale’s, his expression was hard, but assured. Many of us noticed right then how entirely his acne medication had finally succeeded in clearing up his complexion. He’d even managed to drop the habit of reaching up to feel the phantom spots on his cheek. “All right, guys. Here’s the deal: Calc is going to take us down unless we do something about it. I happen to know of a way, but if you’re not on board, then say something now or forever hold your peace.”

May squinted at Neil. “What do you mean?” “I mean that if you’re not willing to do whatever

is required to get an A in this class, then maybe you should go.” Neil leaned back in his chair, waiting. “Take a minute to think about it.”

We didn’t need to think. Not about Dmitri, how unfairly he had put us in this position. Not about Cindy and Paul and the distinctions that would be tacked onto their names at graduation—valedictorian and salutatorian—while all the rest of us went unacknowledged. Not about our parents, how they thought we were smarter than all the others and how we knew better, but never corrected them. We didn’t need to think about any of it then, because we were already thinking about it all the time.

“Okay,” May said, finally. “Count me in.” “Me too,” added Vikram. “And me,” Nancy echoed. We all agreed, one after the other. Dale stayed

quiet, a patient, pug-like look of confusion on his face until Neil turned to him and said, “You’ll have to be the one, since you’ve got the key and all.”

Dale’s eyes widened. “What’ll have to be me?” “The one who gets a copy of Everett’s test.

Teachers have to send papers to the copy room two days before they hand them out. The test is next Monday, right? So they should be in the copy room before the weekend for sure.”

Dale’s glasses had slipped down his nose. He reached up and, grabbing them off his face, proceeded to wipe his eyes with the back of his fist. We all held our breath, waiting. Would he protest? Insist that someone else do the job? None of us was up to the challenge. Breaking and entering was a serious offense, and a short stint in juvie wasn’t going to help our chances with the Harvard Admissions Committee.

Replacing the glasses on his nose, Dale sat up straight in his chair. “I’ll do it,” he said solemnly, looking like he might be sick.

That Sunday afternoon, we met in Jill’s basement. While waiting for Dale to arrive, we talked about Gretchen’s presentation in Government on Friday. She’d made color copies of random senators to try to cover up the fact that she had nothing to say about the difference between expressed and implied powers. Somehow, Mr. Wray had eaten it up. Tran had seen him write an A-plus at the top of the comment sheet.

Dale arrived straight from his mission. He was sweaty from riding his bike a mile and a half from school, his shirt darkened at the neck and in giant circles under the arms. “I got it, you guys,” he gasped. He dropped onto a beanbag chair against the wall and, unzipping his backpack, pulled out a few sheets of paper and lined them up on the carpet in front of him. “It’s a copy. I had to turn on the machine and wait for it to warm up. I was freaked out having to wait that long.”

“You turned it off when you were done, right?,” Neil asked, stepping forward from where he’d been leaning against one wall.

“Yeah.” “Good job,” Neil said. “Now let’s split up into

pairs and get to work. When we have it all solved, we can copy it down to take home.”

“Wait a second.” Sitting on the couch, May lifted her hand. “Isn’t Mr. Everett going to think something’s up if we all get perfect scores on the test?”

Neil nodded. “Obviously, some of us are going to have to screw up on a few questions. We’ll just have to take turns.” He looked around at all of us. “Any objections?”

Doubt rippled inside us. We were good students. Every day we strained ourselves to exhaustion to prove it; we worked; we sacrificed. But good students didn’t get bad grades on their tests. Good students, above all, never let themselves fall behind.

“All right,” Neil said. “Let’s get down to business.”

The exam went off without a hitch, and from there, stopping just didn’t make sense.

Before each Calc test, we convened at Jill’s house to work out the answers. Dale was always the last to arrive. By an unspoken rule, we didn’t talk about why we were there until he appeared. Instead, we talked about the kids we looked down on, and the ones who looked down on us.

We talked about the teachers we despised, the mold in the library that we feared might be killing us, the victims of the latest cold or flu that was going around. Only after the basement door squeaked open and Dale ran down, clutching his backpack, did we turn our attention to the business at hand.

Each night as we lay in our beds, we imagined what would happen if we were caught—our prospects breaking up, falling down upon us like a sheaf of snow sliding from the roof to the windshield of a moving car. But by the light of day, we banished these thoughts.

Instead, we worried that Dale would get tired of his role as volunteer goon. Danger hadn’t improved him in our estimation. In Calc class, as we bent confidently over test papers whose equations we’d already solved, we snuck glances at the dandruff that clung in thick flakes to his shirt and hated him for it. Nancy, who sat behind him in Chemistry, was constantly twisting around to examine her own shoulders, horrified to think that she might share his condition.

But we hid our contempt. Every day, we saved a place for Dale at the middle of the table at lunch. We began calling him D-Dawg and invited him to join us for Pizza Night at Vincetti’s. Neil even started giving him rides home in his 1991 Corolla, whose heavy-metal-band bumper stickers he’d never peeled off after buying it used. After a few weeks, no one knew for certain that they weren’t really friends.

“It’s kind of weird,” Jill said to Nancy and May one evening as they headed to her car after a National Honor Society meeting. Neil and Dale had walked into the meeting together, both of them sipping from Jumbo Slurpee cups, just as NHS President Ari Bratz was calling us to order. Even Vikram, who was seated at the front table as treasurer, had looked surprised to see them together.

May snorted. “I honestly don’t see how Neil can stand to be around him.”

“Just as long as it helps me get into Columbia,” Nancy said as she climbed in the backseat, “I don’t really care.”

“Me neither,” Jill said. She turned the ignition and waited, hands on the wheel, while a car passed behind them. “Just as long as nothing goes wrong,” she added.

We were juniors and everything was just getting more intense. In October we’d trooped down to the gym and sat at long tables to take the PSAT with the rest of our class, and our nerves were running high. Our hands left sweaty prints on the papers. Breakfast cereal churned in our stomachs. We knew the results really mattered: National Merit Awards hung in the balance.

The test took three hours. We got tunnel vision staring at the booklets before us, and had to look up every now and then to steady ourselves. The test-taking was lonelier than we’d thought it would be. When time was called, we blinked around at each other and maintained a solemn silence until we were out in the hall. “That could’ve been worse,” we said to each other. “It wasn’t too awful.” Some of us truly felt that way, but most of us didn’t.

We wouldn’t receive our scores until January, but some questions from the test continued to haunt us. Had we calculated area instead of circumference by accident?

In the reading passage on farming techniques, was the author trying to inspire, or merely to educate?

May Wang had gotten a near-perfect score the previous year in her SAT prep class. She knew she’d done well on the PSAT, but wanted to be sure. Jill Jansen had felt pretty solid on Critical Reading, but she’d gotten tripped up on some of the Math questions. Paul Takahashi, we all agreed, would do better than Cindy, who probably wasn’t all that intelligent.

January was taking forever to come. In the meantime, we met with our guidance counselors to discuss college prospects and the current state of our résumés. We began to map tour loops of potential schools. During spring break and over the summer, those of us whose parents could afford it would follow these maps through New England and California and the upper Midwest. We’d finally get to see firsthand the chalky brick buildings where our futures lay waiting for us, the places where we’d forge new friendships, new lives, where we’d forget everything we’d had to do to ensure that we got there.

As fall semester spiraled down to its finish, word went around that Dale was going to demand money for a copy of the Calc final. May told everyone she thought Neil was behind it. Dale wouldn’t try it unless Neil was telling him to, she argued. “It’s like Batman and Robin or something.”

She confronted Neil in the library one afternoon before everyone else had arrived. “I bet you’re taking half that money,” she said, her brows moving toward the center of her forehead.

Neil glanced around the library. It was empty except for Mrs. O’Connor, lost in her giant librarian-sweater, sorting through a stack of books at her desk across the room. “Do you maybe want to be a little more careful, May?”

“I’m being careful,” she hissed. “She can’t hear me over there.”

Neil sighed. “Look, the Calc final’s on a Wednesday, which means that Dale has to get it on Monday.”

“So?” “So breaking into that room is a lot more

dangerous on a weekday. He should be compensated.” “What are you, like, his manager or something?” “I’m his friend, May, which is a lot more than I

can say for you.” Neil sat back in his chair and shrugged. “From now on, no more free handouts.”

After that, the missions expanded in scope. By spring semester, whenever Dale snuck in for Everett’s test, he’d copy whatever else happened to be on the shelves by the machine: Advanced Comp paper topics, French and German and Latin exams. Once, he even copied a Health quiz, though we all could have taken it in our sleep if asked.

It was all about focus. We had no reason to study Beer’s Law if it wasn’t even going to be on Mr. Kipp’s Chemistry exam. Knowing what the essay question would be on our Econ test meant we could streamline our studying, put in a few hours on currency inflation, and then move on.

With SATs and college applications approaching in a few months, our actual schoolwork began to seem like

a distraction. High school wouldn’t last forever. We were looking ahead. “My dad says that Harvard Law won’t even look at you if you don’t do your undergrad someplace that matters,” Gretchen told us. Her father was a lawyer, although as far as we knew he hadn’t gone to Harvard. “What school we get into now determines the rest of our lives.”

The third week of January, we had received our PSAT results. A few of us were overjoyed, but most were disappointed. We sought out one another to discuss our scores, hoping to discover we were smarter than the person we were talking to, or else smarter than the person he or she had spoken with last. Neil found out he’d done better than Vikram. Vikram found out he’d done better than Tran. Priya learned she’d done better than every one of us except May and Paul, and though we tried to act gracious, privately we reflected that we’d never liked her that much.

May and Paul had gotten the exact same score and placed in the ninety-ninth percentile in all three categories. Cindy scored high in Critical Reading, but in Math she was only in the ninety-fourth percentile. Nancy was horrified by her results and wouldn’t share them with anyone. She’d never be a contender for National Merit. “I never win anything,” she said, bitterly. “I don’t even know why I’m still trying.”

By the middle of junior year, we were all run-down. Spring came and exhausted us with its sunshine and flowers. We had been sleep-deprived for nearly three years, and now when we slept, our dreams only wore us down more. In them, we were forever getting lost in the school. The building sometimes expanded to become an infinite labyrinth; other times it was reduced to a solitary desk, a single long hall, the face of someone we recognized but couldn’t quite place.

In the mornings, as we stood in our bathrooms brushing our teeth, we tried to avoid meeting our own eyes in the mirror. Just another few months, we told ourselves, and the worst would be over. No more meetings at Jill’s house. No more filching twenties from our mothers’ purses to hand over to Dale.

The class above us was coasting now: college acceptance letters in hand, their futures sealed. But we’d been surprised by the mediocrity of their prospects; only three of the Top Ten were going Ivy League. Bethany Waters, ranked number five, hadn’t gotten into a single one of her top picks. Come August, she’d be headed to the big state school a few hours down the interstate—four years of toil reduced to powder, to nothing.

What mistakes had she made? We were terrified of repeating them. Data from all the best colleges and universities reported that applications were up, acceptance rates down. We saw no room for error, no redemption for the mediocre.

“This sucks,” Priya complained one morning in late April as were waiting for the second-period bell to ring. Her parents were sending her to India for the summer to visit her relatives. She was worried about the gap in her résumé.

A few people were still missing—Nancy had been absent in first period—and Mr. Everett hadn’t walked in yet to begin Calculus class.

“Maybe you could get a job while you’re there, at an NGO or something,” May suggested.

Dale giggled. “Yeah, like Mother Teresa.” We did our best to laugh, but Priya ignored him.

“I mean, if it’s between me and some girl who did a program or something, who do you think Princeton is going to choose?”

We knew she was right. With the exception of Nancy, who was still waiting to hear back about an internship in the Cancer Center at St. Timothy’s Hospital, the rest of us had all finalized our plans for the summer. Paul was headed to Harvard, Vikram and Dmitri to Michigan; Jill was doing a writing workshop somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Others were doing internships at museums or offices. Both Cindy and May had been nominated for Girls State.

“Seriously,” Priya said, glancing around at all of us. “This could be the thing that brings me down.”

Just then, we heard steps echoing down the hallway. Mr. Everett walked in with Vice Principal Gilman and the two of them stood framed in the doorway, the teacher’s arms crossed over his plaid-shirted chest, the vice principal with his hands hanging limply at his sides. Mr. Everett’s gaze moved slowly over the room with the menace of a raised gun.

“The following students will gather their belongings and come directly to my office,” the vice principal said, lifting a piece of paper from his side and taking a small step forward. A frown latched onto his face as he began to read: “Priya Bhatnagar. Tran Binh. Neil Casey.” He read out each name, a pause after each, each one a sentence. Some of us stopped breathing. Others started panting. When he got to Dale’s name, the vice principal’s face registered nothing. He read it and kept going, on and on down the list, our names falling in a volley like cannon shot.

When he’d finished, we packed up our things and rose to follow him. Our classmates eyed us curiously as we went; Mr. Everett, arms still folded over his chest, snapped his shoulders back another inch. In the hall, we fell into a single-file line. The fear was burning white-hot inside us, but none of us said a word as we followed the vice principal down the hall.

Nancy was the one who had broken. The afternoon before, she’d found a letter in her

mailbox informing her that she hadn’t gotten the internship at St. Timothy’s. At 8:10 the next morning, instead of heading to first period, she went straight to the main office and told the secretary, Mrs. Feather, a jowly woman who favored plum lipsticks and beige clothes, that nearly half of Mr. Everett’s Honors Calculus class had been involved in a cheating scheme for the past six months.

Mrs. Feather told Nancy to take a seat. She got up from her desk and crossed to the half-open door of Principal Brown’s office.

A few minutes later, Nancy was ushered in to repeat her story for the principal and vice principal. She was asked to give more detail, to name names. Who actually broke into the school?, Vice Principal Gilman wanted to know. Who else was involved?

Nancy told them everything. When she’d finished, she asked if she could go home for the day. The principals couldn’t allow that, but they relented and let her lie down in Nurse Nowak’s office, where she spent the next two periods contemplating the ruined landscape of her future.

Whose idea was it? “Neil Casey’s.” Whose idea was it? “Dale Gilman’s.” How long has it been going on? “Five months, maybe six.” “Since, like, October?” And the stealing? “Dale had a key, but I don’t know how he did it.” “I think my parents should be here.” “Are you going to tell my parents?” Who’s the one responsible? “Dale’s the one who broke in.” “Dale had the key.” “Yeah, it was Dale.” Eight years after his expulsion from Truman

South, Dale Gilman, on a Tuesday night in late June, hopped on the interstate headed west—away from the city, out of the suburbs where he still lived with his parents in the ranch-style home he’d grown up in—and forty miles out into flat, scrubby land that seemed to go on forever, nothing on the road but the car he was driving (a green Mazda Miata his father had passed down to him when he upgraded to a newer model four years before), he plowed into the base of a billboard sign going ninety miles an hour: sober, then dead, at the moment of impact.

The story reached everyone at different times. May Wang got a phone call from her sister the next morning as she was studying for the bar at a coffee shop off Harvard Square. Priya, halfway through her doctorate in French literature at Duke, got an e-mail from her mother later that week. Tran heard about it a few months later; half a year after that, Vikram came across an article during an idle Internet search at his job at an investment firm down in Dallas. Jill got the report when she ran into Cindy the following spring in Shanghai. By the time the news reached Neil Casey in Silicon Valley, Dale had already been dead for almost two years.

Nancy was living in Brooklyn when it happened. She shared an apartment with two roommates on Union Street. She walked dogs in the mornings, worked in a cupcake shop afternoons. Her mother saw the story on the news and called her the next day, catching Nancy on her way to the subway. “That boy,” her mother said, “he was trouble for you. But this is too bad.”

After hanging up, Nancy sat down on the curb. Above her were leafy trees and crisscrossing wires; on the street one block over, the honking of cars. She was alone in the city. She couldn’t remember if that was how she’d imagined this life would turn out. Maybe she’d had other plans, but none of them mattered, because back then, we all thought we knew just what we wanted, and who could say now that we hadn’t gotten it?

“Accused”By Emma Teitel

November 8th, 2011Maclean’s

It’s fall, and over 800,000 undergraduate students have just begun classes at universities across Canada. In the next 12 months, 32 per cent are likely to binge drink and smoke marijuana, 14 per cent will probably drop out, and—to introduce a new scholastic rite of passage—more than 1,000 will be accused of plagiarism. Scores will be convicted, but there’s a good chance only a few will be guilty of anything more than oversight. I know this because I am a plagiarist.

I was accused in my third year at Dalhousie University (a mature plagiarist, they would say) by a creative-writing professor a few days before reading week: I had failed to attribute a philosophical term, “category mistake,” to the philosopher who first used it, an omission that put me in direct violation of Dalhousie’s academic dishonesty policy. In addition, I gave an example of the term that was nearly identical to the example used by its originator, Gilbert Ryle, in his 1949 book, The Concept of Mind. Here’s what I wrote: “Such a question is the stuff of a philosophical category mistake. For example, if a small child touring Halifax were to ask his mother and father ‘show me a university,’ the parents might take him on a tour of Dalhousie, showing him all the different faculty and athletic buildings, and confused, he would still ask, ‘show me a university,’ so the same concept applies to the question of film editing.”

I had assumed that Ryle’s phrase and its illustration had entered the academic vernacular, like Kant’s “categorical imperative.” I was wrong. I was also careless and ignorant. But I never thought I had done anything intentionally dishonest, let alone anything that could be called cheating. So how, then, could I have been charged with plagiarism?

The answer was simple. Honesty—or a lack thereof—has nothing to do with a large number of the errors that qualify as academic plagiarism in Canadian universities today. In fact, intent of any kind is often moot. “It doesn’t matter if you intend to plagiarize or not!” notes plagiarism.com (a website that converts academic dishonesty policies into plain English). “Ignorance is never an excuse.”

Except, of course, when it is. Or at least, when it should be. Plagiarism as defined by my alma mater is “the submission or presentation of the work of another as if it were one’s own.” In other words, plagiarism is meant to be an inherently moral error, not a technical one. It should be full of intent. But on university campuses today it’s morphed into a dishonesty policy that you can violate in an honest way. Which means it regularly paints honest (if careless or ignorant) people (like me) as dishonest ones, liars and cheats. When the world at large hears you’re a plagiarist, it doesn’t rush to the academic definition to verify it, it just assumes you’re a shady person. The fine print is forgotten. As American academic Stanley Fish wrote, “The rule that you not use words that were first uttered or written by another without due attribution is less like the rule against stealing, which is at least culturally universal, than it is like the rules of golf.” Technicalities are not commandments.

I’m not suggesting we throw academic standards to the dogs or that errors in citation should go unpunished; only that university officials stop weighing technical transgressions on the same scale as moral ones. That’s dishonest.

It’s also a waste of time. My hearing—for which I prepared a 700-word statement, met multiple times with a student advocate (law student), and spent my entire reading week worrying about—took all of two minutes. And they were a strange two minutes. It was as though everyone other than the professor knew I hadn’t done anything really wrong, but that some larger force (one academic integrity officer later referred to it as a “monolith”) was making them punish me in formal fashion. At one point I asked the dean, “Do you acknowledge that I’ve violated the dishonesty policy honestly?” “Yes,” he said, “but you’ve still violated it.” In the end it was determined that I would attend a 90-minute session on intellectual property, as well as fail the assignment (for which I’d already received a whopping 29 per cent). But at least I wasn’t marooned.

In the summer of 2008, 19-year-old college student Allison Routman was taking the University of Virginia’s “Semester at Sea” course on board a ship touring the Mediterranean, when she was convicted of plagiarism for allegedly copying fragments of three lines from Wikipedia describing the plot of a movie into her global studies essay. Trip administrators immediately expelled her from the program and abandoned her at the

next port, where she ended up sleeping in the airport. The reason: the University of Virginia has one of the strictest plagiarism policies in the academic world, requiring students to sign an honour code pledging not to lie or cheat on their assignments.

But I ask you: which is less honourable—making a citational error in an essay, or marooning someone in a foreign country with nothing more than cab fare? Would you even do that to a real plagiarist? After all, as T.S. Eliot once said, “Mediocre writers borrow; great writers steal.” Or maybe it was Picasso, and he was talking about art.

Someone said something.

Breaking the RulesPaulos, Leah

Scholastic Choices, 04-01-2007

One day last fall, Nina Couch was busily filling in answers on a history test. “I’d spent almost two hours studying for it the night before, so I thought the test was really easy,” Nina, 14, of Franklin, Georgia, tells Choices.

Then Nina glanced up and saw the kid sitting next to her looking at her paper. “He was copying all my answers,” Nina says. Flabbergasted, Nina gave him an angry look and then turned her body to cover her test. “Why should he get a good grade because I studied and he didn’t?” she says. “It’s not fair.”

Unfortunately, the cheating that Nina witnessed is common, A study by the Center for Academic Integrity reported that more than 70 percent of high school students in the United States admitted to serious cheating in 2005. In our own survey, which was in the September 2006 issue of Choices, 66 percent of students reported that cheating is a problem in their school.

What is cheating, exactly? Cheating is when someone misleads, deceives, or acts dishonestly on purpose. “It’s a form of lying,” says J. Angelo Cortlett, professor of philosophy and ethics at San Diego State University. “Often students don’t feel cheating is wrong because it’s so widespread, but ethically, it’s pretty clear that it is wrong.”

Cheating happens in different ways. Here are examples: sharing homework answers, using cheat sheets on tests or quizzes, reading the Cliff Notes version of an assigned book, receiving or sending text-messaged answers during an exam, and swiping someone’s ideas for a project.

Plagiarism is another form of cheating. It happens when someone uses another person’s words or ideas and passes them off as his or her own. For example, say you read your older brother’s book report and use a paragraph from it in your own paper. That is plagiarism.

Then there’s the cheating that Mike M.”, 15, of Dallas, Texas, did. “My friend and I used to ask each other for answers out loud during history tests,” he says. “Everyone in the class thought it was funny.”

Of course, cheating occurs outside of school, too. Looking at someone’s cards when playing a game is cheating. Insisting that a ball was out of bounds when you know it wasn’t is wrong. Claiming the 10-dollar bill someone found on the floor is yours when you know it isn’t is cheating. The list goes on and on.

Adults cheat, too. They can cheat in business, politics, relationships, and other aspects of their lives. In fact, there have been many publicized cases of corporate cheating over the past few years. Ever hear of the companies Enron and WorldCom?

Why is cheating so widespread? “A lot of kids put too much pressure on themselves to get good grades,” says Glenn Kashurba, a child and adolescent psychiatrist in Somerset, Pennsylvania. “Sometimes they feel they can’t do well without cheating. Some students are too lazy to do the work and others fall behind in difficult classes.” Some students cheat only in “emergency” situations-for example, when they forget about an upcoming quiz and don’t want to get a bad grade.

Another reason why so many people cheat is that, well, so many people cheat. “People rationalize it by convincing themselves that everyone else is doing it,” Kashurba says. “They feel they have to cheat in order to keep up.”

Of course, that premise is wrong; not everyone is cheating. Many people don’t ever cheat, and many others do it once or twice, feel bad about it, and then don’t ever do it again.

Some kids don’t believe that cheating hurts anyone. “That’s not true,” Corlett says. “Cheating puts students who don’t cheat at a disadvantage.” And, believe it or not, cheating hurts the cheater too. If you copy someone else’s homework and look at another student’s test answers, you won’t learn skills and facts that you’ll need later in your school life and as an adult. And on top of that, cheating inhibits one’s ability to learn how to study and how to learn.

And then there’s the downside of getting caught. Mike Mesler got a failing grade on the test he cheated on. Sometimes the punishment is worse than getting an F: You can get suspended from school for cheating and the incident can become part of your permanent school record. Cheaters also run the risk of losing the trust of their families and friends.

So how should a teen handle the pressure to cheat? The best way is to seek the help of those you trust. For instance, if you feel overwhelmed in a particular class, consider talking to your parents about getting a tutor to help you handle the workload. If you need extra time to write an essay for class, talk to your teacher. Chances are that he or she will work something out with you? Why? Teachers don’t want their students to fail. If swim-team practice doesn’t leave you enough time to do your homework, brainstorm with your family about how to better balance school and sports.

Finding ways to avoid cheating is worth it. Being honest helps you and others. And besides, cheaters eventually get caught, and when they do, the consequences can be rough. Just ask Mike Mesler. “I didn’t think it was a big deal at the time, but what I did was wrong,” he says.-Leah Paulos

WHAT DO YOU DO?Finding out that a friend or a classmate is cheating can be a big burden. You can always ignore it, but that’s not always the best solution. Here are some better options:

If the person is a pal, consider talking to him or her about the cheating -in a friendly way. You could offer to explain the tough homework assignment or suggest they ask the teacher to repeat the lesson.

You could also confide in a trusted adult (parent, teacher, coach, etc.) without giving up the cheater’s name. “This way, the cheating will be addressed but you don’t get a friend in trouble,” Kashurba says. If someone is bullying kids for answers or cheating on a test, telling an adult is definitely the way to go.

In the September 2006 issue of Choices, we included a survey called “Breaking the Rules.” We wanted to hear your take on cheating. Thanks to all of you who filled out surveys and sent them in. Here are the results:

1. Is cheating a problem in your school?Yes: 66%No: 26%Not sure: 8%

2. Do the adults in your life cheat?Yes: 25%No: 67%Not sure: 8%

3. Do you think you need to cheat to succeed in life?

Yes: 3%No: 95%Not sure: 2%

4. Have you ever cheated on a test?Yes: 47%No: 50%No answer: 3%

5. If you saw your best friend cheating on school work, what would you do?Tell them to stop: 30%

Ignore it: 53%Tell a teacher: 2%

Offer to help them do the work honestly: 6%Not sure: 9%

TEST YOURSELFAnswer the questions and explain your answers.

1 A friend suggests you share your math homework. She says she’ll do it one week and you’ll do it the next. Is this cheating?

Yes No Why?____________________

2 Before writing a report, you research the topic online. You use the same argument that’s in a newspaper article on the topic. In your paper, you don’t give credit for the argument to the newspaper article. Is this cheating?

Yes No Why?____________________

3 You overhear a classmate discussing his idea for a science project and think it’s the best idea you’ve ever heard. You decide to do the same thing. Is this cheating?

Yes No Why?____________________

All three of these cases involve cheating.

1. Both you and your friend are cheating because the two of you are sharing answers instead of doing the work independently.

2. Taking credit for information that someone else came up with is cheating. But if you use the information from the newspaper article and then cite the article as the source of the information in your report, then that is not cheating.

3. Stealing an idea is cheating. The key here is that your classmate came up with the idea first and you know it. If you had come up with the same idea independently, then you would not be cheating.

Copyright Scholastic Inc. Apr/May 2007