The Role of Honor

Several years ago, one of the Valley’s leading high schools had to deal with an attempt by a few students to change grades by gaining access to a teacher’s laptop computer. Looking back, Ron Bauer, principal of El Camino Real High School, recalls the unsettling rounds of debate and denial that followed. Today the school reports that incidents of cheating and plagiarism have been few and far between.

But some weeks back, another leading Southern California high school, Sunny Hills High in Fullerton, was roiled by its second major cheating scandal within a few years. The ready availability of information through the digital tools now available to secondary school students has left a kind of uneasy calm in the realm of academic integrity. The new technology and its tempting shortcuts exist in an atmosphere of extraordinary pressure on students to achieve. Bauer acknowledges that even when a school has a clear policy in place for dealing with cheating, as his school does, it still can be dependent to some extent on a continued wave of good fortune.

Sunny Hills has not been so lucky. Two years ago, it tossed 13 top students from the National Honor Society for cheating in a high school philosophy course. The same school was back in the news recently with the disclosure that about a dozen honors students had been disciplined for using e-mail to share information on a history final.

Sunny Hills and other schools already had toughened their policies to prevent cheating, but they still found a culture of student cheating firmly rooted and difficult to dislodge.

For all students, the Internet has increased temptation. It has made it possible to recycle old term papers, exchange diskettes and move material around to crib the work of others. Students even can bring calculators into tests with sample problems worked out. All of this argues for updating policies. At North Hollywood High School, for example, policies on copyrights and the use of online material are being formulated now in anticipation of an increasingly digital campus.

At the same time, it’s too easy to say that student cheating is a problem brought on by the computer chip. Computers facilitate a problem that already exists. The real culprit is a pervasive culture that allows students to think that cheating is OK, and even necessary to compete.

Several years ago, reporters asked some Southern California students about the Sunny Hills philosophy course incident, and many said that they saw nothing wrong with copying homework occasionally. The justification amounted to a kind of hierarchy of offenses: Cheating on homework did not constitute the same level of offense as cheating on a test. This was excusable because homework was viewed as busywork, and people were occupied with other things on weekends that did not allow sufficient time for school exercises.

This pattern of thinking is well established. As far back as 1985, a study by the state Department of Education found that three-quarters of students surveyed acknowledged using crib notes on a test at least once.

So how is it that we have allowed this cheapened view of the value of independent work to become so pervasive that even a school-based reform can’t root it out? On a very basic level, the idea that cheating is morally wrong has to be communicated and reinforced to students more effectively.

Perhaps some parents have too casual a grasp on the principles to provide direction from the earliest grades on academic honesty. There has to be a role in the formative years for early school teachers, clergy and care providers.

It is also clear that we are now at a time when people don’t know what the purpose of homework is. It’s time to communicate some clearer direction on that subject. It’s not busywork. It’s an academic exercise both to learn the material at hand and to develop patterns of problem solving that are the basis for a lifetime.

The question at this point is as much about how to root out the cultural problem as it is how to identify and discipline individual violators of academic codes. Those in area schools who are tightening guidelines and imposing discipline deserve support and encouragement in their efforts. The rest of us need to do more and sooner to root out an attitude that allows some students to conclude it’s OK to cheat.