Go, and Sin No More
“Economics is, at root, the study of incentives… An incentive is a bullet, a lever, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation.” – Freakonomics.
When I was in ninth grade, during every single biology test I had the opportunity to witness the most flagrant cheating I have ever heard of students committing. The answers to multiple choice questions would be transmitted via a (rather easily deducible) system of hand signals and pencil taps. Short answer and fill in the blank were no less safe: notes were passed across the room, often quite literally under the teacher’s nose. And lest you, gentle reader, take refuge in the misconception that only the “bad kids” and delinquents engaged in such dishonesty, allow me to report that the ranks of those cheaters include those newly attending such schools as Duke, NYU, and Princeton. This issue is not confined to “bad kids” or “problem children”; it is a pervasive cancer that exists at all levels within the educational system.
What did high school teach us about cheating? It taught us that cheating was easy. It taught us that cheating was lucrative. It taught us that cheating would only rarely be punished in any way more meaningful than a slap on the wrist, because most teachers were loath to go through the formal process of writing up apprehended malefactors. As the authors of Freakonomics explore in their text, people will respond appropriately to their incentives. With all the reason in the world to cheat – a highly competitive high school, the social impetus of publicly posted grades (in that class and many others), and the thrill of getting away with something forbidden – and the only real disincentive being moral in nature, I would venture that close to a hundred percent of students at Ridge High School engaged in some sort of academic dishonesty during their four years (and yes, I include myself. I am not proud of what I did, but the story of how and why this phase both began and ended is outside the scope of this entry).
Where does this road end? In professors stealing their students’ work and presenting it as their own and government agencies plagiarizing publicly available essays to serve as intelligence assessments. By the time one has reached the end of the road, it’s generally too late; the habits of laziness and deception are too firmly entrenched. So plagiarism needs to be killed in the embryonic stages – in our schools – by providing such strong disincentives that no biology class would ever be as overwhelmingly corrupt as mine was.
Granted, there are schools that don’t have it as bad as Ridge did. But with increasing pressure on students to succeed and diminishing levels of moral instruction, I fear that Ridge may no longer be the marginal case, but the base case. If so, society may be in trouble, because our generation is growing up quickly.
This blog entry written while listening to Turmion Kätilöt, because Finnish industrial metal is great background music for writing about things that get you fired up.
Comments
Posted by: franco
Posted on: September 1, 2007 09:30 PM
I have to be honest, I have no idea what Finnish industrial metal sounds like.
I agree, the only real disincentive of cheating that schools teach students is morality. However, there are more reasons not to cheat that the schools could do a better job teaching, such as pride in knowledge and self-confidence in accomplishment. Students need to learn that they need to learn.