Parents, Hold the Line

A recent poll in Orange County on academic cheating was more a reminder of a continuing problem than a shocking revelation. Many studies in recent years have reported that cheating in school is pervasive across the nation, and the survey conducted this fall for the Times Orange County Edition found adults concerned with the pervasive culture of academic cheating that they believe exists around them.

There also was evidence in the recent local survey research of a considerable gray area where students are helped by parents to help them get ahead. The interaction between the generations takes place at one of life’s important bridges, where the example set is a message conveyed to a next generation. Setting the right example at these key moments is an important choice parents must make.

Students in California since the mid-1980s have been acknowledging some form of cheating. National studies have found no increase in recent decades in this practice. But while things are not worse, they are not better either. Today, as much as at any time, students and their parents clearly are feeling the pressure to keep up and to get ahead. This pressure in effect has pushed parents who know better to assist their children in getting academic work done, even though parents are concerned with academic honesty.

The recent survey also found that nearly half of the 600 adult respondents said they believed that pressures for success had made people in general behave less ethically. That pressure has created a kind of sliding scale in which judgments are made about where to draw the line in order to get ahead or survive.

The Internet has complicated this decision-making process, with more material available online and a new ease in sharing information. This year, Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton had a student scandal involving the use of computers to pass around material about a test. About a dozen honors students have been disciplined for using e-mail to share information on a history final. Two years ago, the same school tossed 13 top students from the National Honor Society for cheating in a philosophy course.

New technology can be a facilitator for good research, but it should not be used to cut corners or otherwise compromise the integrity of student work. At the root of this recent Sunny Hills incident, and of those that have preceded it at schools in the area, are long-standing questions of commitment to academic integrity. In all these cases, the pressure to compete was a driving force in ethical breaches. Competition being what it is in the society at large, it stands to reason that pressure being felt by parents and others in the workplace also is being felt in the schools.

The schools need to be clear about the ethical standards they want upheld and to make sure they are repeated. Also, the holiday period, where families are together, might provide a time to reflect as a unit on the idea that life is not a series of separate compartments--school, home, workplace--but each is related to the whole. Lessons learned early on carry over into other chapters of life. What is adopted as operating procedure in youth becomes the basis for decision making in adulthood. That’s why the examples set by parents, teachers and administrators have such lasting importance not just for students but for society.

Parents clearly are mindful of putting or launching their kids on the road to success. There is a line between providing the right atmosphere for getting good homework or projects done and actually doing that work for the student. The line should not be that difficult to identify or to uphold.

If parents have developed a philosophy of relativism themselves, it should not be surprising if it rubs off on their offspring. Schools should be receptive to working with parents to explain the aims of homework, to be sure both that students understand what they are supposed to do and that those expectations are realistic. Schools can help by clarifying the role of teachers and parents in the educational process.

The pressure to succeed won’t go away. But how students and parents react is everything. One of the most important parts of the learning process is the acquiring of a sense of honesty about any kind of work. The recent polling suggests how much uncertainty there is about this and how much standards need to be clarified.