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Cheatin hearts - gaining unfair advantage in the classroom

Sunday News (Lancaster, Pennsylvania) July 29, 2007 Sunday CHEATIN' HEARTS; On the playing fields, in classrooms and boardrooms, gaining unfair advantages and cutting corners is epidemic.

Widespread in schools Serving 'me' Sunday News Staff A; Pg.

1 1298 words DATELINE: Lancaster, PA Suzanne Cassidy Each time San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds came to bat last week, innumerable camera flashes went off, as if to illuminate this fact of American life: Allegations of cheating, and confirmed instances of cheating, are all around us.

Indeed, ethics experts worry that cheating has become part of the American way.

Cheating continues to carry a stigma.

Cyclist Floyd Landis, the Farmersville native whose 2006 Tour de France win was tarnished by a failed doping test, has spent much of the past year asserting his innocence and fighting to reclaim his reputation.

Whatever the stigma attached to cheating, though, it hasn't stemmed the tide of cheating.

In the view of Patricia Harned, an Elizabethtown College graduate who now is president of the Ethics Resource Center in Washington, D.C., there is an "ethics crisis" in America, and no sector of society is going untouched.

Cheating is definitely up, and it's definitely everywhere, agreed David Callahan, author of the book "The Cheating Culture." "Cheating is not a new phenomenon; there's always been cheating," Callahan said last week in an interview.

"It's maybe innate in human nature to seek some sort of extra advantage." Right now, there's just a whole lot of cheating going on.

Consider not only Bonds, who is pursuing Major League Baseball's revered home-run record despite allegations that he has cheated by using steroids.

Consider also the NBA referee, Tim Donaghy, who is under investigation for allegedly betting on basketball games, including perhaps some that he officiated.

And then there is Sen.

David Vitter (R-La.), who was revealed earlier this month to have cheated on his wife by using an escort service.

The Tour de France was hit by more doping-related controversies last week, leading some to dub the competition the "Tour de Farce." And recently, NASCAR officials warned racing teams that surreptitious alterations to cars to make them faster would be dealt with even faster and harsher.

News stories about NASCAR's crackdown noted that the long-held belief among NASCAR traditionalists has been that "if you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'." A similar belief - if less colorfully expressed - seems to have taken hold at schools, where surveys indicate that cheating is widespread.

This past spring, Duke University's Fuqua School of Business announced that it would be punishing 34 graduate students for cheating on an exam.

According to the 2006 Josephson Institute Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth, 60 percent of high school students surveyed admitted to cheating on a test within the previous 12 months, and 33 percent said they had copied an Internet document in that period.

Nearly six in 10 agreed with the statement, "In the real world, successful people do what they have to do to win, even if others consider it cheating." And four in 10 said they believed a person "has to lie or cheat sometimes in order to succeed." Donna Yarri, associate professor of theology at Alvernia College in Reading, said the prevalence of cheating wouldn't come as a surprise to most professors.

The Internet and access to other technology has made cheating easier, she said - and conversely, the Web site Turnitin.com has made it easier for professors to identify cheaters.

Sometimes, students cheat out of laziness, feeling that "if someone else has already done the work, why bother?" Yarri said.

But she added, "I don't tend to think that people do things because they're evil." Students are under a lot of pressure nowadays, pressure to maintain their GPAs in order to keep much-needed scholarships or to maintain their place in certain majors.

They need not merely to compete but to excel.

Clearly, adults are feeling similar pressures, because studies have suggested that significant numbers of them pad their resumes.

David Callahan said that when cheating in a culture becomes prevalent, cheating can take on a cycle of its own.

"If you perceive that everybody's cheating, then you feel like you need to cheat just to compete on the level playing field," he said.

"That's the rationalization of a lot of cheaters, that this is the way the world works." Callahan said the degree to which cheating occurs in a society waxes and wanes.

"In the last couple of decades, we've really seen a convergence of forces which encourage cheating." He contends that the United States has become a "winner-take-all society," which rewards winners in a big, sometimes extreme, way.

Those huge rewards make cheating seem more rational, he said.

Twenty years ago, Barry Bonds earned just $100,000 playing in his second season for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

This year, he's earning nearly $16 million.

Salary inflation for top performers is not occurring solely in the sports world.

Corporate executives reap huge bonuses for downsizing workers and for eliminating worker benefits.

"The people who are the winners get bigger rewards, and those rewards have been escalating in the last couple of decades," Callahan said.

"Not only are the winners getting bigger rewards, but it's tougher just to be ordinary.

...

There's more insecurity and hardship for ordinary performers." This insecurity can lead to cynicism, when people feel that living by the rules isn't getting them anywhere, and when they come to believe that the people running the system have rigged it in their own favor, he said.

Young people, in particular, have a lot of cynicism about success; this is reflected in those polls that suggest that youths are prepared to cheat in order to get ahead.

"The culture is highly materialistic and individualistic," Callahan said.

"There are not a lot of heroes around who are making the world a better place.

Who are our heroes today? There's not a Martin Luther King Jr.

or Bobby Kennedy in sight." Walt Mueller, founder and president of the Center for Parent-Youth Understanding in Elizabethtown, said, "In a world that is less other-oriented, and more oriented toward serving me, myself and I, you're going to have people who cheat, you're going to have people who lie." Adults have to be really careful about the examples they set for children, Mueller said.

When grown-ups "bend the truth a little bit," they are giving kids permission to do so as well.

Ira Wolfe, founder of Success Performance Solutions, an employment consulting firm in Lancaster, said cheating can cost employers tremendous losses of profits and productivity.

But the most significant loss may be the loss of trust, and this, from a cultural perspective, can be devastating, he said.

"You have to trust people in your society," Wolfe said.

"There has to be certain degree of ethics for a society to survive.

We seem to be lowering the bar and chipping away the standards." The odd thing, according to author Callahan, is that other indicators - declining divorce and teen pregnancy rates, for instance - suggest a "moral renewal" in the United States.

He believes cheating was, for too long, left out of the values debate in this country.

Harned, of the Ethics Resource Center, said the cheating crisis is a crisis of leadership.

Adults have to talk to young people about values such as integrity and honesty, she said, noting that success is laudable and desirable, but not "success by any means necessary." In this age when even very young students are feeling the pressure to score high on standardized tests, failure is not seen as an option.

And yet, Harned said, "Sometimes, failure can be as important a lesson as succeeding." Yarri, of Alvernia College, said that while cheating may be commonplace, many people do not lie on their tax returns.

Many athletes do not take performance-enhancing drugs.

A good many students resist the temptation to cheat on exams.

"I would say that not everybody does it," Yarri said.

"I think that's a rationalization." July 30, 2007 ENGLISH GRAPHIC: Accused of cheating are top Barry Bonds (steroids) above Sen.

David Vitter married but visiting prostitutes and right referee Tim Donaghy shaving points.

Associated Press In NASCAR it has long been said that "if you ain't cheatin' you ain't tryin'." NASCAR has cracked down with heavy fines suspensions and loss of points for those who are caught trying to make their cars go faster.

Associated Press Newspaper Copyright 2007 Lancaster Newspapers, Inc.