O.C. Students Say Cheating Is Open Secret

Harried by college requirements, hounded by pushy parents and tempted by new technologies, many high school students nowadays seem hooked on an old way out of work: cheating.

Whether academic dishonesty is actually on the rise is hard to say. But concern about it is. And students are more open about it, educators suggest, than their parents ever were.

College students surveyed nationwide in 1995 and 1996 reported a profound level of academic abuse in high schools, said Donald McCabe, a professor of management at Rutgers University who has studied ethics at institutions of higher learning.

“The essence of their comments is that cheating in high school is a joke,” McCabe said. “Everybody does it; everybody knows that everybody is doing it.”

Many students echoed that view this month in an informal Times survey of 10 Orange County high schools.

Michael Tan, an Irvine High senior and president of the Orange County regional chapter of the California Assn. of Student Councils, said cheating is an open secret.

“Teachers know about it. Schools know about it. It’s just there,” Tan said.

Several Orange County high schools have imposed or rewritten academic honor codes in recent years, seeking to impose the discipline of elite universities on their students.

One such rule forced a dozen students at Fullerton’s Sunny Hills High School out of the National Honor Society last month for cheating on their homework.

Teachers at Fountain Valley High School wrote an honor code four years ago after the top student there was caught helping his peers filch a test from a teacher’s computer. That student’s admission to Stanford University was rescinded as a result, school officials say.

Surveys show cheating has deep roots in high school. In 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, and nearly half said they did it more than once. The state has done no follow-up study.

At Sunny Hills, a student newspaper this year surveyed more than 650 students on academic honesty. Four out of five acknowledged that they have cheated in high school, the Accolade reported.

“Call me an idealist, but I’ve always learned that there’s right and wrong. My parents taught me that,” said Janice Yoon, student editor of the Accolade. “If you don’t learn to take the consequences in the small situations, then what will happen to you when you face larger problems?”

So how do students cheat these days?

According to high school students, first there are the cutting-edge cheaters. This crowd makes full use of computers, modems, high-tech calculators and even faxes.

“Computers make everything easier and faster--so obviously they would help cheating also,” said Michelle Wang, a Sunny Hills senior.

Many students think a lot about type size. “The new thing is making cheat sheets on computers and printing them out in the smallest font that you can,” said one senior at Fountain Valley High.

Several students said computers help those who recycle old term papers or need an extra paragraph or two to flesh out a new one. By swapping diskettes with friends, they said, cheaters can doctor their essays quickly with a bit of cutting and pasting. An apparently growing number also are ripping off Internet sites. “As long as the words aren’t too big, you’re fine,” advised one junior at Irvine High.

Programmable calculators are another favored tool.

“Going into a chemistry test, you can have 10 sample problems in your calculator,” said Benjamin Springer, who graduated last year from Brea Olinda High and now attends UC Santa Barbara, “and all you have to do is plug and chug. There’s really no way they can stop that.” A critic of cheating, Springer acknowledged that he cheated once on a high school geography test, without a calculator.

But time-honored techniques persist too. During tests, students still flash hand signals, tap pencils on desks in prearranged code and crane their necks when teachers aren’t looking. Outside class, they still share answers to last period’s quiz and pass around problem sets.

Nguoc Thien, a sophomore at Bolsa Grande High in Garden Grove, said it’s common to see knots of students sharing homework answers, especially on Monday mornings.

“People get sidetracked on the weekend,” Thien said. “They’re out doing stuff and then you don’t have time to do your work.”

Many students who would never cheat on a test said they see nothing wrong with copying homework once in awhile--the offense that tripped up 24 Sunny Hills students in February in an honors philosophy course, including the top officers of the school’s chapter of the honor society.

A junior at Capistrano Valley High was copying two pages of math homework from a friend at lunch one recent day. “This is busywork. When you don’t have time, it isn’t really important,” he said. “I would feel guilty about big stuff, but not this.”

While they are mobilizing to curb cheating, educators say it’s a problem that will never go away. One told the Times: “Do students cheat? Yes! I cheated. Now, don’t you print that.”

Nonetheless, veteran teachers are adapting their methods to meet what they say seems to be a stiffer challenge. Several said they give more than one version of a test to discourage rubber-neckers. Some ask students to roll up their sleeves, take off their hats and flash the soles of their shoes in a check for forbidden notes.

Fountain Valley teachers review their school’s new honor code with students at the beginning of the year. First offense: an F on the assignment, parent notification, a note in the student file and possible loss of academic honors. Second offense: an F in the class and possible school suspension.

Striking back against computer-aided plagiarism, Fountain Valley social studies teacher Dave Fitzpatrick said he now asks students for more handwritten essays on take-home assignments. “The bottom line is, we’re trying to make an effort to curtail things at this school,” he said.

Other schools in Orange County with explicit honor codes include Sunny Hills High, Irvine High, Ocean View High in Huntington Beach and La Quinta High in Westminster. Some require students to sign a statement acknowledging that they understand the code; La Quinta also asks parents to do so.

Many administrators still prefer to work without an explicit honor code, saying they handle cheating cases individually. But even many of those schools are taking extra steps.

Orange High a few years ago began a campaign to improve morals among its students.

Posters in every classroom in the high school list eight values--compassion, integrity, initiative, hard work, responsibility, respect, perseverance and positive attitude--that “say what Orange High people are made of,” said assistant principal Brent Bailey.

Each month, teachers demonstrate a particular “value” with quotes or readings. At the end of the month, one student is honored with a $50 shopping gift certificate for acts demonstrating that month’s value.

Bailey said his impression is that cheating is on the rise, fueled by a general decay in society’s values.

“I remember when I was in school you were really ashamed when you were caught cheating,” Bailey said. “There was a sense of ‘Oh man, how embarrassing.’ Now it isn’t like that. When you catch some kids there is a sense of ‘Oh man, I got caught,’ but not the shame and embarrassment.”

One element in the cheating equation might be the pressure for high achievement. Experts say many students are overwhelmed by college applications, extracurricular activities and a full plate of honors courses.

Barbara Brandes, who led the 1985 state study, said many of those who admitted cheating appeared to be having trouble standing out in strong academic schools, where grade-point averages these days often reach above 4.0. “These are kids whose parents have high expectations, and their achieving pattern isn’t quite up to the level of their peers,” Brandes said.

But James S. Catterall, a professor of education at UCLA, said contemporary cheaters may have other motives. Students, he said, routinely see their parents question authority and see elected leaders under attack for ethical lapses.

“All of this sort of piles up to kids saying, wait a minute, you’ve got to take the adult world with a grain of salt,” Catterall said. “If the rule maker’s illegitimate, why listen to the rules themselves?”

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High-Tech Hi Jinks

Here are some methods used to cheat in today’s high schools, according to students and teachers:

Calculator: Formulas and sample problems are stored in programmable calculators and retrieved surreptitiously during tests.

Computer Disks: Floppy diskettes make it easy to swap reports and other writing projects, enabling students to use work that is not their own.

Internet: Some students raid Web sites when they are desperate for information for term papers and fail to cite the source.

Source: Times reports