Who's Cheating Whom?

Lee Ross attracted some attention (at least within his field) by coining the term “fundamental attribution error.” He defined this as a tendency to “underestimate the impact of situational factors and to overestimate the role of dispositional factors in controlling behavior.”

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or.”

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We frequently pay so much attention to character, personality, and individual responsibility that we overlook how profoundly the social environment affects what we do and who we are.

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Specifically, we’re apt to assume that people who commit crimes are morally deficient, that the have-nots in our midst are lazy (or at least insufficiently resourceful), that children who fail to learn simply aren’t studying hard enough (or have unqualified teachers). In other words, we treat each instance of illegality, poverty, or academic difficulty as if it had never happened before and as if the individual in question was acting out of sheer perversity or incompetence.

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is all about ‘Gotcha!

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This continues to be true even though we’ve known for quite some time that the environment matters at least as much as individual character when trying to predict the occurrence of various types of cheating.

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We’ve learned, first of all, that when teachers don’t seem to have a real connection with their students, or when they don’t seem to care much about them, students are more inclined to cheat.[5] That’s a very straightforward finding, and not a particularly surprising one, but if taken seriously it has the effect of shifting our attention and reshaping the discussion.

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Cheating is more common when students experience the academic tasks they’ve been given as boring, irrelevant, or overwhelming.

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when teachers don’t seem to have a real connection with their students, or when they don’t seem to care much about them, students are more inclined to cheat.

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To put this point positively, cheating is relatively rare in classrooms where the learning is genuinely engaging and meaningful to students and where a commitment to exploring significant ideas hasn’t been eclipsed by a single-minded emphasis on “rigor.”

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Cheating is more common when students experience the academic tasks they’ve been given as boring, irrelevant, or overwhelming.

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Cheating is more common when students experience the academic tasks they’ve been given as boring, irrelevant, or overwhelming.

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cheating is relatively rare in classrooms where the learning is genuinely engaging and meaningful to students and where a commitment to exploring significant ideas hasn’t been eclipsed by a single-minded emphasis on “rig

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cheating is relatively rare in classrooms where the learning is genuinely engaging and meaningful to students and where a commitment to exploring significant ideas hasn’t been eclipsed by a single-minded emphasis on “rigor.”

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“when students perceive that the ultimate goal of learning is to get good grades, they are more likely to see cheating as an acceptable, justifiable behavior,” as one group of researchers summarized their findings in 2001.[9]

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(Interestingly, one of the mostly forgotten findings from that old Teachers College study was that “progressive school experiences are less conducive to deception than conventional school experiences” – a result that persisted even after the researchers controlled for age, IQ, and family background. In fact, the more time students spent in either a progressive school or a traditional school, the greater the difference between the two in terms of cheating.)

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Cheating is particularly likely to flourish if schools use honor rolls and other incentives to heighten the salience of grades, or if parents offer financial inducements for good report cards[10] -- in other words, if students are not merely rewarded for academic success, but are also rewarded for being rewarded.

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when students perceive that the ultimate goal of learning is to get good grades, they are more likely to see cheating as an acceptable, justifiable behavior,”

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“when students perceive that the ultimate goal of learning is to get good grades, they are more likely to see cheating as an acceptable, justifiable behavior,”

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Thus, a recent study of more than 300 students in two California high schools confirmed that the more classrooms drew attention to students’ academic performance, the more students “observed and engaged in various types of cheating.”[11]

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Cheating is particularly likely to flourish if schools use honor rolls and other incentives to heighten the salience of grades, or if parents offer financial inducements for good report cards

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When you look at the kind of schooling that’s all about superior results and “raising the bar,” you tend to find a variety of unwelcome consequences:[12] less interest in learning for its own sake, less willingness to take on challenging tasks (since the point is to produce good results, not to take intellectual risks), more superficial thinking . . . and more cheating.

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If students are led to focus on how well they’re doing more than on what they’re doing, they may do whatever they think is necessary to make it look as though they’re succeeding

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the more classrooms drew attention to students’ academic performance, the more students “observed and engaged in various types of cheating.”[11]

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That is exactly what Eric Anderman, a leading expert on the subject, and his colleagues have found. In a 1998 study of middle school students, those who “perceived that their schools emphasized performance [as opposed to learning] goals were more likely to report engaging in cheating behaviors.”

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More cheating took place when teachers emphasized good grades, high test scores, and being smart. There was less cheating when they made it clear that the point was to enjoy the learning,

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when understanding mattered more than memorizing, and when mistakes were accepted as a natural result of exploration.[13]

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There was less cheating when they made it clear that the point was to enjoy the learning, when understanding mattered more than memorizing, and when mistakes were accepted as a natural result of exploration.[

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There was less cheating when they made it clear that the point was to enjoy the learning, when understanding mattered more than memorizing, and when mistakes were accepted as a natural result of exploration.

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What the data are telling us, like it or not, is that cheating is best understood as a symptom of problems with the priorities of schools and the practices of educators. To lose sight of that fact by condemning the kids who cheat and ignoring the context is to fall into the trap that Lee Ross warned us about.

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Interestingly, these studies found that even students who acknowledged that it’s wrong to cheat were more likely to do so when the school culture placed a premium on results.

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But it would be pointless to cheat if you were interested in the learning itself because cheating can’t help you understand an idea

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it would be pointless to cheat if you were interested in the learning itself because cheating can’t help you understand an idea.

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One major cause of cheating, then, is an academic environment in which students feel pressured to improve their performance even if doing so involves methods that they, themselves, regard as unethical. But when you look carefully at the research that confirms this discovery, you begin to notice that the worst environments are those in which the pressure is experienced in terms of one’s standing relative to others.

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But that environment – the values and policies of a classroom, a school, or a society – is decisive in determining how pervasive cheating will be.

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What the data are telling us, like it or not, is that cheating is best understood as a symptom of problems with the priorities of schools and the practices of educators.

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Competition is perhaps the single most toxic ingredient to be found in a classroom, and it is also a reliable predictor of cheating.

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Competition is perhaps the single most toxic ingredient to be found in a classroom, and it is also a reliable predictor of cheating.

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Competition typically has an adverse impact on relationships because each person comes to look at everyone else as obstacles to his or her own success.

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Competition often erodes academic self-confidence (even for winners) – partly because students come to think of their competence as dependent on how many people they’ve beaten and partly because the dynamics of competition really do interfere with the development of higher-order thinking.[

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In fact, Elliot Turiel compared surveys of students from the 1920s with those conducted today and found that about the same percentage admitted to cheating in both eras – an interesting challenge to those who view the past through a golden haze and seem to take a perverse satisfaction in thinking of our times as the worst ever.[

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In short, a competitive school is to cheating as a warm, moist environment is to mold -- except that in the latter case we don’t content ourselves with condemning the mold spores for growing.

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How ironic, then, that some of the adults who most vociferously deplore cheating also support competitive practices – and confuse competitiveness with excellence – with the result that cheating is more likely to occur.

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Because competition, a relentless focus on achievement, and bad pedagogy aren’t new, it stands to reason that cheating isn’t exactly a recent development either.

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In fact, Elliot Turiel compared surveys of students from the 1920s with those conducted today and found that about the same percentage admitted to cheating in both eras – an interesting challenge to those who view the past through a golden haze and seem to take a perverse satisfaction in thinking of our times as the worst ever.

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If it’s true that cheating, or at least some versions of it, really is at an all-time high, that may well be because pressures to achieve are increasing, competitiveness is more rampant and virulent, and there is a stronger incentive to cut corners or break rules. In fact, we’re currently witnessing just such pressures not only on children but on teachers and administrators who are placed in an environment where everything depends on their students’ standardized test scores.[21]

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In fact, we’re currently witnessing just such pressures not only on children but on teachers and administrators who are placed in an environment where everything depends on their students’ standardized test scores.

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If schools focus on relative achievement and lead students to do the same, it may be because they exist in a society where education is sometimes conceived as little more than a credentialing ritual.

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Cheating could be seen as a rational choice in a culture of warped values.

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Some kinds of cheating involve actions that are indisputably objectionable. Plagiarism is one example.

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we should be able to agree that it’s wrong to use a specific concept or a verbatim passage from another source without giving credit if the objective is to deceive the reader about its origin.

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cheating actually consists of a failure to abide by restrictions that may be arbitrary and difficult to defend

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People who play cooperative games don’t require reminders to be “good sports” because they’re working with one another toward a common goal.)

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By working together, students not only are able to exchange information and divide up tasks but typically end up engaging in more sophisticated problem-solving strategies, which, in turn, results in more impressive learning on a range of measures. Structured cooperation in the classroom also proves beneficial in terms of self-esteem, relationships, and motivation to learn

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Alas, most collaboration is simply classified as cheating.

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“I want to see what you can do, not what your neighbor can do.” (Or, if the implications were spelled out more precisely, “I want to see what you can do all by yourself, deprived of the resources and social support that characterize most well-functioning real-world environments, rather than seeing how much more you and your neighbors could accomplish together.”)

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most collaboration is simply classified as cheating. End of discussion.

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hat does it say about the instructor, and the education system, that assessment is geared largely to students’ ability to memorize?

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s information being collected about students’ capacity to remember what they’ve read or heard for the purpose of helping them to learn more effectively -- or is the exercise more about sorting them (comparing students to one another) or controlling them (by using assessment to elicit compliance)?

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Once we’ve decided that someone’s action is morally wrong, her efforts to challenge that premise, no matter how well-reasoned, merely serve to confirm our view of her immorality.

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Even here, the intent appeared to be foiling cheaters rather than improving the quality of assessment and instruction. Or, to put it differently, the goal was to find ways to prevent students from being able to cheat rather than addressing the reasons they wanted to cheat -- or what the instructors regarded as cheating (and why).

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Maybe a bigger problem is that teachers require students to memorize instead of teaching them how to think.”[

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the goal was to find ways to prevent students from being able to cheat rather than addressing the reasons they wanted to cheat -- or what the instructors regarded as cheating (and why).

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“Maybe a bigger problem is that teachers require students to memorize instead of teaching them how to think.”

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“finally convinced me that the kinds of research papers I had customarily assigned were not accomplishing what I had in mind.”

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suppose that cheating could be at least partly curtailed by tightly monitoring and regulating students or by repeatedly announcing the dire penalties that await anyone who breaks the rules.

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“In our stampede to fight what some call a ‘plague’ of plagiarism, we risk becoming the enemies rather than the mentors of our students; we are replacing the student-teacher relationship with the criminal-police relationship. . . .Worst of all, we risk not recognizing that our own pedagogy needs reform. . . [if it] encourages plagiarism because it discourages learning.”

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It is sometimes said that students who take forbidden shortcuts with their homework will just end up “cheating themselves” because they will not derive any intellectual benefits from doing the assignment. This assertion, too, is often accepted on faith rather than prompting us to ask just how likely it is that the assignment really would prove valuable if it had been completed in accordance with instructions.

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Such a perspective reminds us that how we educate students is the dog; cheating is just the tail.

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Outraged condemnations of cheating, at least in such instances, may turn out to have more to do with power than with either ethics or pedagogy. Perhaps what actually elicits that outrage is not a lack of integrity on the part of students so much as a lack of conformity.

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Such a perspective reminds us that how we educate students is the dog; cheating is just the tail.

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