But Shouldn’t They Get an “A”

We live in a world where some banks manipulate (read: lie) their financial information to decrease the interest rates they pay – hence the LIBOR scandal. Some banks find ways to hide proscribed dealings with drug cartels and rogue nations like Iran. Lehman Bros. was taken to transferring massive assets and liabilities off their books to convenient controlled entities immediately before filing public information… then transferring them back after the filing. Yeah, I know, they aren’t around anymore, but the damage they precipitated deeply impacts almost everyone on earth, ultimately threatening to continue destabilize entire countries for years.

While it is illegal to trade stocks when you have inside information, so many of the actual decisions are based on stuff not available to you or me… And while Congress men and women cannot trade based on information gleaned in their government operations, their spouses and immediate family can. Politicians lie so frequently (“their lips are moving”) that news operations have things like “fact checkers” and the “Pinocchio Index” actually to measure the relative mendacity. Big corporations and those who can afford it pay fleets of lawyers to see how they can explain away or justify what sometimes is illegal behavior, but as often as not, to take advantage of a loophole that allows unethical or immoral behavior to go unpunished. Our own government created legal documents to tell the world that waterboarding was not torture, even though we executed post-WWII Japanese officers for inflicting the same punishment on our GI’s.

These folks are our leaders and the bastions of our economy. Yet to get ahead, they often put ethics, morality and even the law behind to achieve their vision of greatness. Truth is no longer valued. They spend hundreds of millions to allow them maximum wiggle room in side-stepping doing what’s right, what most Americans expect… under the guise that they don’t need to be regulated… that regulation hurts their earning power. They don’t care about what their actions mean for the world at large; their mandate is immediate money and power. Where do these people come from, and why are they rewarded as the big winners in our society?

It starts with kids intuitively understanding what it takes to make in this world, sometimes by watching their parents, sometimes by watching their peers (“but mom, everyone else is doing it, and if I don’t….”) or just watching the news. Plagerism.org compiled this list of sources on student cheating:

According to surveys in U.S. News and World Report

1. 80% of "high-achieving" high school students admit to cheating.
2. 51% of high school students did not believe cheating was wrong.
3. 95% of cheating high school students said that they had not been detected.
4. 75% of college students admitted cheating, and 90% of college students didn't believe cheaters would be caught.
5. Almost 85% of college students said cheating was necessary to get ahead.

Professor Donald McCabe, leading expert in academic integrity, in a May 2001 study of over 4500 high school students, found the following:

1. 72% of students reported one or more instances of serious cheating on written work
2. 15% had submitted a paper obtained in large part from a term paper mill or website
3. 52% had copied a few sentences from a website w/o citing the source
4. over 45% admitted to collaborating inappropriately with others on assignments

In a sample of 1,800 students at nine state universities:

1. 70% of the students admitted to cheating on exams
2. 84% admitted to cheating on written assignments
3. 52% had copied a few sentences from a website w/o citing the source

It happens everywhere, from our military academies (where candidates caught cheating are shipped off as enlisted men and women) to our highest level colleges and universities. “Harvard University revealed [August 30^th] what could be its largest cheating scandal in memory, saying that about 125 students might have worked in groups on a take-home final exam despite being explicitly required to work alone…. The accusations, related to a single undergraduate class in the spring semester, deal with ‘academic dishonesty, ranging from inappropriate collaboration to outright plagiarism,’ the administration said in a note sent to students.

“Officials said that nearly half of the more than 250 students in the class were under investigation by the Harvard College Administrative Board and that if they were found to have cheated, they could be suspended for a year. The students have been notified that they are suspected and will be called to give their accounts in investigative hearings.” New York Times, August 30^th. Even what constitutes cheating is being called into question. Rutgers University Professor Donald McCabe, noted above, found that “[O]ne practice to which at least half of students admit--copying homework or working with others when they aren’t supposed to--is not viewed by many undergraduates as real cheating. For example, more than 40% of undergraduates and 30% of graduate students (and almost 20% of faculty) do not think that ‘cut and paste’ plagiarism on homework is moderate or serious cheating.

“That brings us to the new MIT study, conducted by Physics Professor David E. Pritchard of MIT, Assistant Professor Young-Jin Lee of the University of Kansas, and two other researchers… According to the study, students who copy homework problems requiring algebraic responses wound up performing poorly on problems that required similar work on the final exam—by as much as two letter grades.” Washington Post, March 17, 2010. We even get less-capable graduates!

Are we just being hypocrites… telling kids that lying and cheating are bad and then rewarding those who do it well with power and riches beyond imagination? What is the message we are sending our children? And of cheating and lying are the true indices of success, shouldn’t the cheaters be getting A’s?

I’m Peter Dekom, and the Bible maxim of “as ye reap so shall you sow” truly explains the world we live in.