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.
Cheating is more common when students
experience the academic tasks they’ve been given as boring, irrelevant, or
overwhelming.
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.”
“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]
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.
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]
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.
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.”
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,
when understanding mattered more
than memorizing, and when mistakes were accepted as a natural result of
exploration.[13]
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.
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.
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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