Why Do Students Cheat?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/did-the-melk-man-learn-to_b_1796446.html
Cheating scandals break in the media every day. Finding a competitive edge, even if it
involves bending or breaking rules you consider arbitrary in the first place, is endemic to
American society. Most of us “cheat” when we drive above the posted speed limit. According to
one study, seven out of ten motorists speed. Baseball players “cheat” using performanceenhancing drugs. Cyclists “cheat” by blood doping. The wealthy, including presidential
candidates, “cheat” by finding loopholes that let them avoid paying their fair share of income
taxes. The Republican Party “cheats” by trying to block voting in minority communities.
Apparently, the crime is not cheating, only getting caught.
No, Melky “the Melk Man” Cabrera of the San Francisco Giants did not attend Stuyvesant
High School in Manhattan, an elite institution renowned for Nobel Prize winners and students
who cheat on standardized tests. He grew up in Santo Domingo Oeste, in the Dominican
Republic, and starting playing professional baseball there at age seventeen.
Melky was born in a country where the vast majority of the people who are living below the
official poverty line, which is over 40 percent of the total population, lack indoor plumbing and
running water, 20 percent do not have electricity, and most people do not complete primary
school. Two-dozen United States Major League Baseball teams have training and recruitment
facilities in the Dominican Republic, and the country supplies more Major League Baseball
players than any other country outside the United States, so it is not surprising that Melky and
many of his contemporaries turned to baseball as a way of escaping conditions in the DR.
The story of Melky’s downfall and the test scandal at Stuyvesant have painful similarities. In
both cases, cheating offered a very high payback for relatively low risk and seemed consistent
with the culture of the institution and society.
Cabrera, a former Yankee and current outfielder for the Giants, was suspended for fifty
games starting on August 15, 2012, following a positive test for the performance-enhancing
steroid/hormone testosterone, which is banned by Major League Baseball. Cabrera, an average
player who suddenly blossomed as a star, was the Most Valuable Player in the 2012 All-Star
Game. Cabrera issued a statement acknowledged his guilt and apologizing for using a banned
substance.
Melky joins a long listed of baseball players who have been accused of using performanceenhancing drugs.Alphabetically they include Barry Bonds, the all-time home run champion; Ken
Caminiti, who died of a drug overdose in 2004; Jose Canseco, who has admitted using banned
drugs and testified against other players; Roger Clemons, who was twice tried for lying to
Congress about drug use but never convicted; Jason and Jeremy Giambi; home run champion
and former record holder Mark McGwire; David Ortiz; Rafael Palmeiro; Andy Petite; the twicesuspended Manny Ramirez; Yankee third baseman Alex Rodriguez, a twelve-time All-Star and
three-time most valuable player; and Sammy Sosa, who hit 609 home runs, reaching number
eight on the all-time baseball list.
Melky and these players “cheated” because apparently they believed all their competitors
were, because the rewards for cheating are contracts worth tens of millions dollars (Alex
Rodriguez has a ten-year, $275 million contract with the Yankees), and because even if you are
caught, you still make megabucks. Melky Cabrera was scheduled to be paid $6 million in 2012,
and even with the fifty-game suspension from baseball he will collect over $4 million this year
from the San Francisco Giants. If he had not been caught taking testosterone, Cabrera was in line
to sign a multiyear $50 million contract that would have started next year. (He still signed a twoyear contract with another team, the Toronto Blue jays, for $16 million.)
At Stuyvesant High School in June 2012, a student was caught photographing a statewide
Spanish exam using a cell phone and texting the images to approximately eighty other students.
The incident led to the resignation of the school’s principal. Cheating at Stuyvesant was probably
widespread. In 2010, an editorial in the school’s student newspaper charged that “academic
dishonesty” at Stuyvesant was “firmly entrenched” but rarely punished. Among other things, “If
you walk down any hallway in the building you are almost guaranteed to see students copying
homework.”
Part of the problem is that it may be difficult for Stuyvesant students to distinguish between
legal and illegal forms of cheating. Few would consider it cheating to study for the New York
City Specialized High School Admissions Test using a Barron’s Review book (list price $16.99),
even though it contains three full-length practice tests based on past exams.
But is it cheating when families pay thousands of dollars for private tutors to prepare children
for the test by having them review old tests over and over again? Admission to Stuyvesant is so
competitive because it is seen as an avenue to Ivy League colleges and high-paying careers, so
much that thousands of families pay astronomical sums for the tutoring every year. Prices range
widely. Based on online advertising, New York Academics offers one-on-one instruction at fees
ranging from $100 to $120 per hour; see http://www.tutornewyorkcity.com/fees.htm
The Kaplan company offers individual SHSAT Premier Tutoring starting at $2,599 and
classes at $849. The Princeton Review also has multiple levels of preparation. Its Premier Level
costs $6,300, its Master Level costs $3,879, and its low-cost online offering is a bargain at only
$1,500. The Kuei Luck Enrichment Center in Fresh Meadows, Queens, targets ChineseAmerican students and offers tutoring for only $2,200. Why is it cheating to copy homework or
send your friends a text of the test, but not cheating to review the test questions over and over
again with a paid tutor in advance?
Of course Stuyvesant students are not the only ones who are cheating on tests and homework.
In fact, it seems almost everyone is. In 2009, the Atlanta Constitution discovered that teachers
and principals at forty-four out of fifty-six schools had changed student answers on state
standardized exams.
In 2004, twenty-three Houston, Texas, schools were investigated for possible cheating on the
Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. The Dallas Morning News found “unusual test
score patterns” in nearly 400 schools statewide.
The San Francisco Chronicle revealed actions that compromised the validity of California’s
high-stakes achievement tests in at least 123 public schools between 2004 and 2006; see
http://fairtest.org/cheating-cases-continue-proliferate.
In the affluent Great Neck school district in suburban New York City, students from well-off
families paid as much as $3,600 each for other students to take their college admissions exams.
As many as forty students were implicated in the scam.
Alfie Kohn, who writes and speaks widely on educational issues, offers interesting insights
into the phenomenon of cheating in schools. In an article published in the October 2007 issue of
Phi Delta Kappan, “Who’s Cheating Whom?,” Kohn identified the conditions that promote a
culture of cheating.
1. Teachers in the school have no real connection to students and do not seem to take it
seriously when they cheat on exams.
2. Cheating is more common when students experience academic tasks as “boring,
irrelevant, or overwhelming.”
3. Students cheat when the ultimate goal of education is presented to them as getting good
grades rather than learning.
4. Students feel pressured to improve their performance on standardized tests by any means
necessary, even if they regard the methods as unethical.
5. Students are forced to compete with each other for school rewards and admission to
prestigious colleges.
Kohn believes “competition is perhaps the single most toxic ingredient to be found in a
classroom, and it is also a reliable predictor of cheating . . . a competitive school is to cheating as
a warm, moist environment is to mold.” I believe Kohn is right. As long as schools promote
competition between students, they are establishing the conditions, promoting, even requiring
that students cheat.
Melky did not want to take a chance on returning to poverty in the Dominican Republic when
with a little bit of illicit help he could be on top of the baseball world and very rich. The students
at Stuyvesant did not want to go to second-tier colleges when with a little bit of illicit help they
could go Ivy Leagues and be on the road to wealth, power, and success. In a competitive society
where some people amass great wealth and others are forced to struggle with very little, where
the gap between rich and poor is increasing, everybody is looking for an edge. Melky and the
Stuyvesant students felt like they would be fools not to get their edge by any means necessary.
I am not sure I want baseball players to stop competing. I love the game. But clearly money
has undermined everything that is taking place in the national pastime. But even if baseball
players and teams must compete against each other, schools do not have to be this way—unless
our goal is to promote cheating as a positive value unless you are dumb enough to get caught.
For the record, I always copied homework as a high school student, most of which was
busywork that was not worth doing. I also discussed test questions with friends who had taken
exams earlier in the day. We considered this “research,” not cheating, because teachers, if they
cared, could always just give us different versions of the test. And last, I checked my answers on
a neighboring student’s exam during the French Regents in June 1966. I was worried because I
was weak in French and had a summer job, so I could not afford go to summer school.
But to borrow a phrase from Bill Clinton when he was asked if he had ever smoked
marijuana, I didn’t “inhale.”