Cheaters Prosper, Risk Is Small, Say Brazen Students

Do cheaters win?

Maybe not, but plenty of winners cheat. At least that’s what a lot of high school students are saying.

“Cheating gives you an edge,” said Jason Levine, 17. “It’s like steroids.”

Levine, a junior at University High School in West Los Angeles, was among dozens of students who surprised a reporter in a series of recent classroom visits by admitting--right there in front of the teacher and everybody--that they cheat on tests whenever they can.

The experience would probably jolt anyone old enough to remember high school cheating as a whispered-about crime committed by the campus lowlifes. Today’s cheaters aren’t just the dregs. They include college-bound student leaders.

“Everybody cheats,” said Mark Cates, student vice president at Taft High School in the San Fernando Valley.

Showed Crib Notes

He showed a reporter, the teacher, an assistant principal and the rest of his fourth-period leadership class the crib notes that he had used for a science test that day. The admission didn’t cause much of a stir. The students, mostly elected officers earning top grades, said they and nearly everyone they know at the Woodland Hills school cheats.

“Sure they cheat; they cheat like dogs,” Taft dean Howard Reisbord said.

The students say cheating is widespread and carries little penalty. But many principals and teachers say it really isn’t much of a problem.

As school disciplinarian, Reisbord generally just chews out the ones caught cheating. “My job is not necessarily to punish them, but to make them understand right from wrong,” he said.

But apparently students in general aren’t learning those lessons very well. William Damon, author of “The Moral Child” and chairman of the graduate education department at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., said he is convinced that “there has been a real degeneration of children’s values in the last 30 to 40 years, and cheating is part of that.”

It’s enough to start a person grumbling about old-fashioned virtues. Is anyone deeply bothered by rampant cheating?

Study Done

At least one high-ranking educator is: Bill Honig, the state superintendent of public instruction. In 1985, he ordered a statewide survey of student cheating. Its findings were disturbing, at least to Honig, and so has been the aftermath--near-total inaction by school districts.

In the survey, done with classroom questionnaires, 73% of California high school students admitted that they had cheated on at least one test. More than half said they regularly peeked at their classmates’ answers.

Honig said he had hoped that the survey would light a fire under local school officials. At his request, the state School Boards Assn. drafted a sample policy on cheating and sent it to districts statewide.

“There should be policies, and it should be clear that if you cheat, some penalty will be paid,” Honig said.

Yet the typical California school district, like the ones in Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego, still has no written rule against cheating.

A Los Angeles school board member thinks that the state’s suggestion was justified but was pushed aside by more urgent matters. The board was busy negotiating with teachers and seeking a new superintendent. “It was a very tough time,” board President Roberta Weintraub said.

Board member Jackie Goldberg, a longtime teacher, said penalties for cheating should be left to teachers, not enacted into a districtwide policy. She isn’t convinced that there’s a cheating epidemic.

“By and large, kids grow up and know that cheating is wrong and, by and large, they don’t cheat,” Goldberg said. “Sure, everybody knows somebody who has cheated on a particular test, just as everybody knows somebody who has cheated on their income tax. But does that mean everybody cheats on their income tax? I don’t think so.”

Despite Goldberg’s views, district administrators are considering a policy on cheating, said Supt. Leonard Britton. “Cheating is not something that we will tolerate by students or anyone else,” he said.

Scandal Triggered Concern

The present concern didn’t grow out of misbehavior by students but from suspicion that grown-ups have been cheating too. Employees at 24 elementary schools, perhaps teachers or principals, are suspected of changing students’ answers on statewide tests to make the schools look good. The school board has hired a law firm to investigate.

News that scores had been altered came as no surprise to the students interviewed. They said they are constantly urged to succeed at any cost. In the race for the best colleges, grades determine success, they said.

“College admissions people don’t know whether you cheated or not,” University High senior Anna Ortiz said. “All they see is a grade.”

Without a policy that prohibits cheating, school officials say, it isn’t clear that a cheater can be expelled or suspended.

But educators tend to agree that strict penalties reduce the problem.

“If a student thinks, ‘The probability of getting caught is small and, if I do get caught, the penalty isn’t that severe,’ then some will conclude that cheating is the most economical use of their time,” said George E. Stevens, a management professor at the University of Central Florida who has studied cheating among college students.

The Los Angeles district leaves penalties for cheating up to individual teachers. Students say some teachers are easily fooled and others don’t consider it much of an offense. A student who is caught usually risks no worse punishment than an F on that test. Even that seldom happens because few cheaters are caught, students say.

“Some teachers are just begging for it,” said David Saranow, a Taft senior. “They leave the room during tests or just don’t pay attention.”

Alexa Maxwell, a history teacher at University High, said she’s an exception. The pervasive anything-goes attitude makes students new to her class particularly brazen, she said--until they know better.

“I gave 10 kids zeros on a test today,” Maxwell said in a faculty-room interview. “Right in front of me they’re looking at someone else’s paper, pushing their papers so that somebody could see their answers, whispering to each other.”

The School Boards Assn. recommended that teachers give more essay tests and create different versions of multiple-choice tests to spread around the room. Teachers were advised to fight plagiarism by keeping a 5-year file of term papers.

Stevens and others who have studied cheating say that threatening stiff penalties alone doesn’t stop it. “You have to back it up with action,” he said. “When giving tests, teachers have to get off their duffs and see what’s going on.”

Some of them do. Charlotte Shales, voted Teacher of the Year for 1987 at Mark Twain Junior High School in Mar Vista, said she gives F’s on tests if her science students so much as look to their right or left.

“I make them hover over tests because if one student looks on another’s paper, both of their tests get torn up,” Shales said. “I constantly monitor them. If their eyes get tired, they’re allowed to look up at the ceiling.”

Shales said she telephones the parents of cheaters--”it’s the ultimate indignation”--but never suspends them: “Why should they get a vacation for cheating?”

She admits that her approach might be too rigorous for other teachers and is leery of administrators telling teachers how to punish cheaters.

The only national poll on cheating, conducted by the Gallup Organization in 1984, suggests that the problem is not limited to California. Gallup found that 40% of teachers interviewed believe that their students cheat most of the time or fairly often on tests.

No Earlier Studies

Whether that level of cheating is higher or lower than among earlier generations is in question because there is no data to compare to the Gallup findings.

Some teachers, such as Elisabeth Javor, a sixth-grade teacher at Saticoy Elementary School in North Hollywood, said cheating has gotten worse. “They are spending too much time in front of the TV instead of studying,” said Javor, who has taught for 17 years.

What has changed are attitudes about cheating, said Nel Noddings, a former New Jersey high school math teacher during the 1950s and 1960s, now a professor of education at Stanford University. “Most kids in the years I was teaching were really ashamed to get caught cheating; now it’s different,” she said.

A big reason, Noddings said, is that there is less attention by schools to the teaching of morals and ethics than 20 years ago. Students don’t feel guilty about cheating because they haven’t been taught that it’s wrong, she said.

‘Like Being Tardy’

“Now if kids get caught cheating, they just think they have broken a rule like being tardy or skipping class,” Noddings said. “But it’s not just a matter of breaking the rules; cheating is a matter that shatters the foundation of the community. Kids need to learn that professional and community life depends on the trust we put in each other.”

Dave Solkovitz, a Los Angeles social studies teacher, said that when he was in school 30 years ago, the few students who did cheat were considered losers--”kids looking for the easy way out.”

Nowadays cheating is more prevalent among the college-bound, the state survey found. Barbara Brandes, the state Education Department staffer who wrote a report on the study, said cheating is largely a suburban phenomenon.

The pressure to cheat in scholastically competitive schools has prompted the Palos Verdes and Beverly Hills unified school districts to create some of the state’s toughest penalties for cheating. Parents of first offenders get phone calls. Second offenders risk failing the class.

‘Dealing From Strength’

“With a cheating policy, we are dealing from a position of strength,” said Principal Kelly Johnson of Palos Verdes High School. He said students learn their lesson the first time and no one has been caught twice in the 2 years that the policy has been used.

By explicitly outlawing cheating, Beverly Hills and Palos Verdes are rare among California districts.

Honig said he is disappointed that so little has come of the state survey. “The worst thing is to tolerate or ignore cheating,” he said. “If widespread cheating is allowed, it starts to cut at the moral fabric of society.”

After Honig’s study came out, Los Angeles principals were encouraged to develop rules against cheating, said Daniel M. Isaacs, the administrator in charge of high schools.

Only 11 of the district’s 53 high schools have done so. Only one, the Lincoln medical magnet high school in East Los Angeles, took Honig’s suggestion and specified penalties.

The school’s principal, Rosa Maria Hernandez, said the state report “alerted schools that to deal with the problem we needed to have a policy, and that if we didn’t have one we need to work on one.” In response, Hernandez said, students, teachers and parents created the school’s tough cheating policy.

A first offender at Lincoln gets an F on the test or assignment, parents are notified and a record is made. For the second offense, additional penalties include a conference with parents and possibly suspension. The third offense brings automatic suspension and a lower semester grade.

“I can’t say whether cheating has gone down,” Hernandez said. “But I think we’ve at least kept it from increasing to a critical point.”