A few years ago, I taught at a private school. One of our biggest problems among the older students was cheating. On test days, students would regularly congregate in the bathrooms to share answers with one another. It was very common to read homework assignments and essays that sounded almost exactly alike -- one group of students even had a sharing program of sorts worked out, such that one person would do Monday's homework, the next person, Tuesday's, and so on.
What was really shocking was not how prevalent the cheating was, but how many of the parents reacted when we brought it to their attention. One person was caught with a crib sheet in his lap during a test, and his parents insisted that he hadn't actually been "using" it -- that he had just accidentally left it there after some last-minute studying. One student was using a teacher's edition of a physics textbook to memorize answers for the tests -- when the teacher caught him (by producing his own slightly modified test), the parents admitted that they bought the student the textbook and maintained that there was nothing wrong with that.
Some of those kids are probably in college or grad school right now. It's no wonder they don't think cheating is wrong, that they think it's just the way things are done -- their parents encouraged them to do it while they were growing up.
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A few years ago, I taught at a private school. One of our biggest problems among the older students was cheating. On test days, students would regularly congregate in the bathrooms to share answers with one another. It was very common to read homework assignments and essays that sounded almost exactly alike -- one group of students even had a sharing program of sorts worked out, such that one person would do Monday's homework, the next person, Tuesday's, and so on. What was really shocking was not how prevalent the cheating was, but how many of the parents reacted when we brought it to their attention. One person was caught with a crib sheet in his lap during a test, and his parents insisted that he hadn't actually been "using" it -- that he had just accidentally left it there after some last-minute studying. One student was using a teacher's edition of a physics textbook to memorize answers for the tests -- when the teacher caught him (by producing his own slightly modified test), the parents admitted that they bought the student the textbook and maintained that there was nothing wrong with that. Some of those kids are probably in college or grad school right now. It's no wonder they don't think cheating is wrong, that they think it's just the way things are done -- their parents encouraged them to do it while they were growing up.