Line Between Cheating and Teamwork Trips Students

So what’s the big deal if a bunch of Fullerton students get together to divvy up a homework assignment?

Study groups proliferate in high schools. Teachers often encourage kids to work in teams. In the working world, employers demand collaboration. And who ever got through school without sharing the answers to a math problem with a chum?

But teachers and school administrators say a group of 20 or so students at Sunny Hills High School--a school so competitive that many of its students graduate with grade-point averages exceeding 4.0--crossed an important ethical line earlier this year in an assignment for a senior honors class in philosophy:

They handed in the work of others under their own names, on an assignment meant to be done individually.

Asked to outline 10 scientific and philosophical texts, by such authors as Galileo and Thoreau, students in a course called Theory of Knowledge split up the labor and shared whole sections of their reports with each other, verbatim.

In the fallout from the incident, 13 of the students were booted last month from the National Honor Society, including the president, vice president and treasurer of the Sunny Hills chapter.

The episode falls precisely at the nexus of two issues on the front lines of teaching. Education experts are pushing what is known as “cooperative learning”--encouraging students to work more in groups and less on their own. At the same time, schools are cracking down on cheating in response to reports that the age-old vice is thriving among teenagers.

“We are sending mixed signals,” said Dennis Evans, head of teacher credentialing at UC Irvine and a former principal in Newport Beach. “Where does collaboration end and cheating begin?”

Some educators suggest that unless teachers spell out clear rules, students used to working in teams might have trouble understanding the difference between cooperation and cheating.

Said Cynthia Martini, a career and academic counselor at Sunny Hills: “It is wrong any time you copy or take something from another student. But students work together all the time. That’s the difficulty. Our society says that if you can’t collaborate, you can’t function.”

The balance between the two issues has taken on political overtones.

Some conservative educational critics deride the scholastic teamwork method, saying public schools fail to put enough emphasis on individual work. They pounce on stories of cheating as evidence of the evils of cooperative learning, said one prominent education professor in Southern California, who asked not to be named because the issue pushes so many political buttons.

Liberal educators say learning cooperation is the key to success in the workaday world beyond school.

As word spread Thursday of the Fullerton episode, teachers elsewhere said they encounter similar dilemmas in their daily classes--balancing the twin objectives of student teamwork and individual responsibility.

Dan Shepard, a biology teacher at Westminster High School, said he routinely divides his students into groups of three, four and five. They work in laboratories together, designing experiments and sharing data.

“That’s the way research is done in real life,” Shepard said. “Teamwork is important. When all is said and done, they’re going to have the same data. But the discussion of the results should be each kids’ own work. It’s always an effort to encourage them to do that. Obviously, if one kid transcribes another kid’s work, I can catch it.”

In Irvine, the principal of University High School--which, like Sunny Hills, sends many students to top-notch colleges--said she encourages students to work in teams. “The key is that students do their own work when they’re turning something in, speak with their own voice, use their own language and their own knowledge,” said the principal, Diana Schmelzer.

The Fullerton students involved in the cheating episode have acknowledged that they were in the wrong, school officials say. But some of them were apparently confused about the rules. One student involved said cheating never crossed their minds.

Certainly, they took few steps to cover their tracks. School officials said the students lifted major segments of each others’ work, word for word, not bothering to rewrite sections to make it look like their own doing.

“We didn’t think it through, this not being a major assignment,” the student said. “It’s not a test or a term paper or anything like that.”

But the teacher of the course, Patrick Lampman, points out that students who work together must share credit together.

“What you need to be is very forthright: If you did [the work] with someone else, put both names on it,” Lampman said. “If your name goes on it, then clearly you’re the one that assumes responsibility for it.”

Lampman, who teaches about 70 students in the honors course, said he made clear to his students all year that he expected them to do their own work, unless he specifically allowed them to work in a team. When he assigned the outline in February, Lampman said, it was meant to be done by each student alone.

According to sources familiar with the assignment, the outline was expected to be at least 15 printed pages long.

It remained unclear Thursday exactly how many students were caught cheating. Sunny Hills is on break this week. Lampman put the total at “approximately 20.” Principal Loring Davies said Wednesday evening he did not know the exact number. A student in the class said 24 were disciplined.

Officials said it was a first violation for all of them, resulting in a zero on the assignment, a mark on their school record and a letter to their parents.

Thirteen of those students were in the National Honor Society, which would ave allowed them the distinction of wearing a special blue and gold cord around their gowns at graduation.