Caveon's biweekly Cheating in the News page is up. If you work for any sort of testing agency or department and would like to contribute to a survey about test security needs, here's your chance to do so.
Included in Caveon's roundup is a description of an academic integrity pledge that students at Walter Johnson High School (Bethesda, MD) were asked to sign:
According to Assistant Principal Chris Merrill, the policy changes were enacted this year because the committee in charge of school improvement, as well as a group of teachers, realized that it was time to establish a way of both consistently defining plagiarism in addition to regulating actions taken against students caught cheating and plagiarizing.
“[Plagiarism] is harmful to the school; it affects the school negatively…We needed to become more consistent about how we dealt with it,” said Merrill. “Last year, punishment was at the discretion of the teacher.”
Now, because students have signed the code, there is no question about whether what they have done is something they should be persecuted for or not.
This got me wondering about the role that honor codes play in the academic environment. Do educators think they work? How big a part do they play in student behavior? And are such codes ever controversial?
At McKinley High School in Hawaii, for example, an honor code created in 1927 mentions God, which is no longer acceptable:
A Hawaii high school will have to lose its controversial code that mentions the name "God." Tuesday the State settled with a student who sued the McKinley High School in a case dealing with separation of Church and State. McKinley is Oahu's oldest public high school and this code has been a part of the school since 1927. But this settlement puts an end to this part of McKinley High School's history.
"As a student of McKinley, I stand for honesty in all I do and say...For courage to meet lifes every need...For brotherhood of races all combined and love for God and all Mankind."
In the settlement to a lawsuit, McKinley agreed to remove the code from all school materials - save one plaque with the original code. Under the terms of this settlement, the plaque in the McKinley administration building will be allowed to stay. But the school will not allowed to produce any other reproductions of the code of honor.
As far as influence goes, this article suggests that it's not so much what's written in the code as how the adults in students' lives follow it:
''Kids lie more now than I've ever known them to,'' says Charles Sawyer, president of the Itsy Bitsy People Palace, a private school on Chicago's South Side.
Sawyer blames adults. In the past, he says, ''grandparents, uncles, aunts and Mrs. Jones down the street stopped you when you were doing something wrong and corrected you.''
But now, he says, adults tend to be less involved in kids' lives. Plus, adults haven't been on their best behavior lately either.
''Kids don't learn morality from a textbook, they learn it best through watching role models,'' says Michele Borba, author of ''Building Moral Intelligence: The Seven Essential Virtues That Teach Kids to Do the Right Thing'' (Jossey-Bass, $16.95).
But good role models have been harder to find in recent years, with adults such as Martha Stewart, former journalist Jayson Blair and the Enron executives making bad decisions.
''The 40 percent of kids who aren't cheating look around and say, 'Everyone's cheating.' If enough people do it, then kids don't think it's wrong,'' says Michael Josephson, founder and president of the Josephson Institute. He teaches kids that ''no matter how many people do it, it's still wrong.''
At least one study has been done to show that colleges with honor codes have fewer instances of cheating, although the study is from 1998:
[Rutgers University Professor Donald] noted that more than one out of four students in college have cheated more than once. However, in every category, schools with honor codes recorded significantly less cheating than those institutions that do not have codes...
He noted that several institutional factors influence cheating. The largest influence on cheating is that cheating is considered a campus norm...Other institutional factors that influence whether students cheat include that the school has no honor code, penalties for cheating are not severe and students have little chance of being caught. The final influence is that faculty understanding and support of academic integrity policies is low. "Students noted [in the surveys] that some faculty members see cheating, and do nothing about it," he said.
Finally, Miami (FL) Palmetto Senior High recently drafted a pragmatic honor code:
The honor code committee also aims to identify what constitutes academic misconduct and prevent students from gaining an unfair advantage over other students through cheating.
According to its constitution, violations of the honor code include making false claims that work has been submitted, copying another's exam and allowing another to copy one's exam. However, the committee does not discipline students who cheat on homework.
"We don't include homework because we would have 50 people in our conference room everyday," Shosfy said. "We have to start with the big things and work our way down. Right now it would be impossible to enforce it. We acknowledge the fact that cheating on homework is wrong, but aren't punishing for it in the near future."
Makes sense. Hopefully, students will learn that for themselves that while cheating on tests is wrong, regularly cheating on homework is crazy, because you'll never learn anything that way.
Posted by kswygert at October 8, 2004 12:20 PM