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Cheating at School Reading Comprehension Exercises - 9097

The document discusses cheating among American high school students. A survey found that 75% of students engage in serious cheating and over 50% have plagiarized work from the internet. Many students do not see cheating as wrong if it helps them get ahead academically. While some blame pressure and access to information online, others argue schools should focus more on promoting integrity.

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Isabel Ramallo
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331 views

Cheating at School Reading Comprehension Exercises - 9097

The document discusses cheating among American high school students. A survey found that 75% of students engage in serious cheating and over 50% have plagiarized work from the internet. Many students do not see cheating as wrong if it helps them get ahead academically. While some blame pressure and access to information online, others argue schools should focus more on promoting integrity.

Uploaded by

Isabel Ramallo
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 3

Many students say cheating's OK

Confessed cheater: 'What's important is getting ahead'

(CNN) -- "Cheating is a shortcut and it's a pretty efficient one in a lot of cases."

That's not exactly the lesson


most people want students to
be learning in high school, but
it's what 17-year-old Alice
Newhall, a senior in a top high
school in northern Virginia,
says she believes. There's
growing evidence she's not
alone.

A national survey by Rutgers'


Management Education Center
of 4,500 high school students
found that 75 percent of them
engage in serious cheating.

More than half have plagiarized work they found on the Internet.
Perhaps most disturbing, many of them don't see anything wrong with cheating: Some 50
percent of those responding to the survey said they don't think copying questions and
answers from a test is even cheating.

Newhall, a B student at George Mason High School, says students have very little sense
of moral outrage about cheating. For many, she says, the pressure to do well academically
and compete for good colleges has made cheating a way to survive high school.

"What's important is getting ahead," says Newhall. "The better grades you have, the better
school you get into, the better you're going to do in life. And if you learn to cut corners to
do that, you're going to be saving yourself time and energy. In the real world, that's what's
going to be going on. The better you do, that's what shows. It's not how moral you were in
getting there."
Access to info

Some say the Internet has exacerbated the problem, making electronic plagiarism as easy
as having a modem and a credit card. There are many Web sites like schoolsucks.com
where you can download a paper on nearly any subject for $9.95 per page.
Schools have begun to fight Internet plagiarism with the students' own weapons.
George Mason High School is one of thousands of schools that have contracted with a
company called turnitin.com, which allows teachers to submit student papers. The
company then searches the Web for matching prose. Within 48 hours, the teacher gets the
paper back, color-coded for plagiarism.
Turnitin.com representatives say about a third of the papers they receive have some
amount of plagiarism.

Surveying the shifty

"Students today find it so much easier to rationalize their cheating," says Donald McCabe,
the Rutgers professor who conducted the nationwide survey on high school cheating.
McCabe polled the students in his survey for reasons they cheat. Beside academic
pressure, he says he found the most common response was that the adult world sets such
poor examples.

"I think kids today are looking to adults and society for a moral compass," he says, "and
when they see the behavior occurring there, they don't understand why they should be
held to a higher standard."

Of course, not all students cheat. Mike Denny, also a senior at George Mason High
School, thinks it's simply wrong. But he says a sense of honor that would prevent cheating
seems lacking in high school.

"Honor seems like it's a concept of the past," says Denny. "Something like chivalry and
knights and maybe a Victorian passe thing that no one really believes in any more."

Denny also blames a high school culture where grades and test scores are more important
than integrity.

"By now many of us are so jaded we feel like our whole life has just been taught for one
test," he says. "Things such as who you are and standing by your word and what not,
that's something that we haven't really been taught."

Companies like turnitin.com may be part of the solution, but Donald McCabe says he
thinks such policing action is just a Band-Aid for a moral deficit that schools and parents
should address.

"I subscribe to the theory that suggests we'd be much better off promoting integrity among
our students rather than trying to police their dishonesty," says McCabe.
Answer the questions

What do most American highschool students think about cheating at school?

Why do even A students cheat at tests?

How can you get a good paper?

How do school fight plagiarisme from the internet?

What do students feel about honor?

Discussion:

What do you think about the statement 'What's important is getting ahead'?

Have you ever cheated during a test at school? Why / not? If yes, what kind of cheating
have you used?

Did the teacher catch you? If yes, what was the punishment?

Have you ever used a paper or an article from the internet and presented it as yours?

What do you feel about honor?

What would you do if you were the teacher and you catch your students cheating?

What would you do if you were .....? Make sentences using Conditional

A teacher and you catch a student cheating


________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

A parent called to school because your child was cheating


________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

A student who was cheating and got caught

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