Article in today's NY Times: Are More People Cheating? Here's a piece from the article that relates to cheating by students: Donald L. McCabe, a professor of management at Rutgers in Newark, has become known as a "cheating guru" for his widely reported surveys in the last 10 years of how and why high school and college students cheat. He has also looked at data going back to the 1960's. Not only is cheating significantly up since then, Mr. McCabe has found, but many students do not consider it a big deal, saying it was just a modern fact of life. His study this year of 16,000 undergraduates at 23 colleges and universities found that 38 percent had taken material from the Internet and passed it off as their own. Forty-four percent of all the students surveyed said it was no big deal. In a 2000 survey only 10 percent of students admitted to Internet cheating. Some ethicists argue that student cheating — whether using the Internet to plagiarize or finding a rogue way to ace a classroom exam — is the "canary in the mine," about the extent of wider cheating now and in the future. "There is no question that students point to things in the larger society as rationale and justification for their cheating, whether its Michael Milken, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Bill Clinton or Enron or their parents cheating on taxes," Mr. McCabe said. Mr. Josephson said his institute surveyed 12,000 high school students in 2002 and found that 74 percent admitted cheating on an exam at least once in the past year, compared with 61 percent in a 1992 survey. In 2000, 34 percent of high school students agreed with the statement that "A person has to lie or cheat sometimes in order to succeed," compared with 43 percent who agreed in a 2002 survey.
This is why we now have degrees such as "Character Education" and schools incorporating Global Ethics into the curriculum. The K-12 consensus is that ethics are no longer being taught at home; therefore, the schools must teach them lessons in morality.
Which is a bit dangerous in itself, since the government is doing the educating for most children and the government has its own problems with ethics to address before they try to teach others about it. It is a disturbing part about society. It is part of the 'whatever it takes', 'me first', or 'the ends justify the means' aspect in general society. The rest of us who want to be honest and try to do the right thing often feel like we are losing to those who are willing to cut corners and do not feel bound to any personal code of ethics.
