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Suggestion for reducing academic cheating in (American) high schools |
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Score
50%
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4 votes,
Feasibility
65%
Originality
50%
Humour
55% |
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The Problem:
Problem of academic cheating in high schools
The Social Invention:
Academic cheating is a distasteful subject and therefore is not often discussed or even acknowledged, in part because educators like to see themselves as emphasizing positive, creative, life-enhancing themes. Someone who says that cheating should be discouraged is likely to be looked upon as someone suggesting a sour or negative or punative or possibly even paranoid outlook.
It has seemed to me most reasonable to recognize that while obsession with cheating is proabably ill-advised, the contrary policy of ignoring it or mnaking only minimal efforts to reduce it is equally irresponsible.
Therefore my suggestion is that an academic entity--a county, or a school, or even, I suppose, a state--appoint a facilitator, a kind of chairman, hopefully a respected and reasonable person, who believes in developing a policy that will reduce academic cheating significantly.
The tasks of this person will be to read a good deal in the journals and be able to summarize what is known about cheating--its frequency, its etiology, as far as this can be surmised, its consequences, as far as these can be established, and policies in effect in various places to control it.
This person must also develop plans for a kind of in-service on the subject of cheating,in which each participant is asked, prior to attending the meeting or meetings, to present his or her thoughts about the subject. These should be read and categorized before the actual meeting. I am going to guess that at least half of these responses will be categorizable as dismissive, in that about half the teachers will claim that cheating only hurts the cheater, that efforts to control cheating only catch the least imaginative, that efforts to prevent cheating may actually encourage it, and so forth. At the general meeting the general types of response should be summarized.
In my opinion, dismissive attitudes are the ones that allow cheating to continue and to poison, if this is not too strong a word, the atmosphere in which students learn. Thus my suggestion is really a suggestion for mobilizing, if possible, this large group of teachers who have thus far resisted, and indeed, may continue to resist, suggestions that they have some responsibility to reduce the cheating that goes on in their classrooms.
In order to change the outlook of some of these teachers, I suspect that several meetings should be held. I would leave the actual procedure at these meetings to the creativity of those involved. I would suggest, though, that it is useless to tell teachers things that the teachers themselves reject. After all, all these teachers have been told by at least one person and probably by more than one, that they have the responsibility to control or try to control cheating, but they have dismissed this suggestion.
Thus what we seek is some kind of real, authentic, integral revision within the psyche of each convert, analogous probably to giving up booze or drugs or to getting religion or any similar genuinely transformative event. The conditions most likely to result in such an important change are not any kind of heavy handed pressure from without, but a comprehensive, reasoned, non-alarmist, non-judgmental approach which allows for dissidence at the same time that it encourages open-mindedness.
Any suggestion that controlling cheating will be easy will probably be met with well deserved contempt. It is much harder to teach with an idea of controlling cheating than without shouldering such a burden. That would have to be acknowledged, and suggestions for reducing the burden would have to be made available. Extreme suggestions would have to be labeled, gently, as extreme, or by using some less objectionable but still functional euphemism.
The fears that teachers have of offending students, their parents, and yes, administrators would need to be aired, so that when a teacher says that after he caught a student cheating the parent became so indignant that the parent placed a letter of protest in the personnel file of the teacher, the moderator of the group can direct this contribution in the right way: it is not an excuse for not reporting cheaters; it is rather an instance where having done the right thing has caused the teacher some possible embarrassment, but that is very often the case whenever someone does something from principle. I think there are quite a few concerns that move teachers to reject the notion that cheating should be one of their concerns, not the least of which is that their superiors show no more interest in this problem than in any other substantive one. Somehow the notion that teachers have of themselves as warm and caring people must be shown to be compatible with an intelligent, purposeful, hopefully school-wide and certainly humane policy which discourages cheating.
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Small town person, former teacher, now retired, hoping for a better world for all.
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