Three years after the tumult, after his school was rocked to its core, Constantine Kiamos can talk of it in soft, retrospective tones.
“It hurt. It hurt. Probably deeper than I’ve let anyone know,” says the principal of Steinmetz High School on the city’s Far Northwest Side.
Kiamos rode the euphoria and then bore the shame of Steinmetz’s notorious performance in the 1995 Academic Decathlon competition. He gushed for cameras when it looked as though his team had won the state crown with an incredible 49,500-point score. He stiffened his upper lip when it was revealed that the team had done so by cheating. With the imprimatur of its faculty mentor, a feisty, charismatic English instructor, the nine-member squad nailed the six-hour exam having crammed with a stolen copy of the test.
While Academic Decathlon competition is a white-hot, specialized high school event, the routine, everyday variety of cheating is all too prevalent, permeating today’s classrooms like hormones and horseplay. American students, most often the brightest and most promising, from 5th graders to college seniors, in tony private schools and hardscrabble publics, fudge and and fabricate on everything from pop quizzes to senior essays. Few are caught.
Almost none are punished.
Of 3,210 “high achievers” polled nationwide in the 1997 “Who’s Who Among American High School Students” survey, 88 percent said cheating was “common” at their schools. Seventy-six percent said they themselves had cheated. The cheating they cited consisted of copying someone else’s homework (65 percent of the cheaters), cheating on a quiz or test (38 percent), using Cliff or Monarch notes to avoid reading a book (29 percent), and plagiarizing part of an essay (15 percent). A hefty 92 percent said they had never been caught. Similar polls in teen-oriented magazines produce almost identical percentages. What’s more, Internet-savvy students can easily buy essays and term papers on scores of subjects from several Web sites.
On the flip side, of course, are the students who do not cheat. They are incensed by how grade curves and class rankings are skewed by cheaters. Yet they often feel that their sentiments are lost in prevailing winds.
It is when you walk into a neighborhood school that you move past statistics and get a taste for the game. The class is skittery. It is afternoon and they are 7th graders, 12 and 13 years old, all itchy and scratchy.
Theirs is one of several Chicago classrooms–all made up of bright students in magnet programs–that I visit on the condition that I do not mention the school or the names of individual teachers or students. My session with them, I learn, replaces the day’s lit class, in which they are reading Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” a play, appropriately enough, about morals and ethics in Puritan America.
First they provide specifics. Answers inked on the arm, the wrist, sometimes the sole of a shoe. Roving eyes. Calculators and pocket organizers programmed with formulas and definitions. Sign language or a version of Morse code. A class brain, the “pack mule,” signaling answers to his friends.
Then the chatter. Yeah, we cheat and we cheat all the time. On homework, papers, science labs, quizzes, tests. It’s no big thing. They run all over the map with their reasoning.
“Why should I know the parts of a squid’s stomach?” asks one girl.
“Cheating never hurts anybody,” a boy retorts. “Ten years from now, who’s going to care?”
After 20 minutes of this glibness, I sense that I’m being lightly hosed. Seventh graders–especially bright ones like these kids–love hearing themselves talk. Theirs is a blackboard jungle, they say, and it’s kill or be killed. Especially the boys, who start giving me one-liners borrowed from a renegade ethical terrain: We don’t feel guilty. We don’t even think about it. We’re cool. We never get caught. If we do, nothing happens.
Later, their teacher chuckles at their skit: “They’ll try to impress you any way they can. It wouldn’t be cool if cheating was anything they couldn’t handle.”
The boys in his class, he points out, score off the top end of the skills tests. They are talented, cagey and certain they will never lose. Only a few of them, he insists, cheat as much as they say.
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Today’s teachers rue not the phenomenon of cheating as much as the murky chore of defining the offense. For the record, every school system has strict rules and punishments for cheating violations. In the real classroom world, however, it is the individual teacher’s call. A teacher’s biggest nightmare lies in the specter of nailing the cheater. Going to the wall over even the most blatant case almost guarantees parental hassle, time-consuming hearings, administrative intervention, possible union action and even litigation.
For many parents, the consequences of cheating are OK up to a point.
“My daughter was suspended for cheating, and I backed up the suspension,” said the mother of a city public school 8th grader who had been disciplined. “But if it goes any further as to what the school does to her record or her reputation, I’ll step in.”
With few exceptions, parents whose children are somehow involved in cheating say they don’t want an immature act of bad judgment to result in a permanent scarlet letter.
“It’s cheating, after all,” said the 8th-grade girl’s mother. “She didn’t pull a knife on somebody.”
Many parents, according to school officials, look unsympathetically on cheating until their child is involved. Then they hedge, invent excuses or mitigating circumstances, and, if pushed, demand that their child be given due process.
“Remember, there are a lot of lawyers out there,” said one Chicago elementary school principal.
The parents of a child in an elite Chicago private school who was given a failing test grade because she supplied answers sided with their daughter and insisted that she, in fact, was not cheating. In an attack on the teacher, the parents said, “At what point has this gone from being a so-called important lesson in life to a teacher’s personal crusade to destroy our child?”
And more often than not, parents are wont to rationalize their cheaters’ actions by citing society, Bill Clinton, stress, competition, single-parent homes or any number of modern-day social maladies.
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“I don’t think we should be terribly surprised as adults, parents or educators,” said Paul Krouse, Lake Forest-based publisher of the high school “Who’s Who” survey, when asked about the statistics on cheating. “Hardly a day goes by when we’re not reading about somebody who is being indicted or investigated for unethical or illegal behavior. This has trickled down to students; they don’t live in a vacuum.”
There is no dearth of opinions from pollsters, academics, psychologists and other experts when it comes to cheating. Their words are measured.
“It’s hard to know why cheating seems to be more widespread,” said Ruby Takanishi, executive director of the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development in Washington. “But look what’s happening to families. Even the best families are swimming upstream. Kids feel less sanctioned about doing these kinds of things.”
The Who’s Who 1997 survey found that 60 percent of high school students who admitted to cheating explained that “it did not seem like a big deal.”
Krouse said his survey tells him that parents are simply not talking to their children about morals, not telling them “that it is not just what you achieve, but how you achieve it. . . . We’re starting to hypothesize that parents are falling asleep at the switch.”
Then there is the perspective of a teacher I’ll call Elaine. A 25-year veteran, she has taught a public high school’s college-bound students and its struggling low achievers. To both, she reveals that she cheated in college, on a freshman English paper, lifting information from a published critique. And she got tagged.
“They suspended me for a semester,” she recalled. “But what I’ll never forget was a comment the dean made. “You’ve done well,” he said, “but not well enough. So we suspect you’ve done this kind of thing in all your classes.” It was an awful thing to say and totally untrue and I’ll never forget it.”
She uses the experience like a shiv. She says: “I know what it’s like. I was there and it hurt like hell, and I can tell kids where it got me and where it’s going to get them. It was an awful, awful experience.”
It helps that Elaine is able to add that she served her suspension, then re-enrolled and got her degree with honors. It is her gifted, honor-roll students, she points out, who need her admonitions most.
“They are driven cheaters,” she says. “They do it for grades, not because they’re lazy or stupid or don’t know the material.”
To counteract their tendencies, Elaine is a stickler for accuracy and attribution in everything they write: “By the time they get to college, they will know how to document every comma and quotation mark.”
“It’s sad, you see, because they’re so driven to have a high grade-point average so they can get into their first-choice college. I hate it, because they lose interest in learning. I tell their parents that it’s OK if a student gets a B. It’s more important to be a well-rounded, interested, bright kid. But that’s a hard sell.”
Down the hall from Elaine is another teacher of gifted students who was berated by a parent during a report card conference because she had given the student a B. Said the parent, “That mark could be the difference between his going to Northeastern or Northwestern.”
And springtime, the high season of SAT and ACT tests, heightens tensions and exposes nerves among bright, competitive, Ivy-League-or-die students like no other time.
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The sophomore insists he is one of the approximately 25 percent of students who say they never cheat. His classmates back him up. Call him Glenn.
“It enrages me,” he says. “It’s unfair to me and everyone else who doesn’t cheat. It wrecks the curve. It screws up class rankings. It wrecks the integrity of grades altogether.”
He doesn’t know what infuriates him more–the kids who cheat or the teachers who ignore it. Most of the kids who do it don’t have to. They’re not dumb. Just the opposite. And the teachers think I’m crazy. They walk out of the room during a test or they do their nails or they just pretend it’s not happening.
“There’s no big mystery to why I feel this way. Cheating is stealing. It’s not yours. You didn’t earn it. I don’t want somebody who cheated to do my taxes or be my doctor or to work on a drug I’m supposed to take.”
And yet Glenn stands shoulder-to-shoulder with friends and classmates who zap him with all the excuses, all the rationale, all the hip attitudes.
“Everyone cheats. It works. It’s foolproof,” they say.
“If you do get caught and you’re a good student, most teachers won’t want to mess you up. You’re the good part of their day. Not some banger with a gun.”
“There’s no relationship between me cheating on a biology exam and a scientist who cheats on AIDS research. No way.”
And on and on in a teenage litany of getting by.
“I don’t care what they say,” Glenn says. “You cheat and you’re a phony. There’s a hole in you a mile wide.”
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“It is gone now,” Principal Kiamos said of the stain of the Steinmetz scandal. “By June of ’96–about a year later–it was completely behind us. If you stopped 10 people on the street right now, they wouldn’t know what you’re talking about.”
Nevertheless, Steinmetz has not fielded an Academic Decathlon team since. “It takes a teacher willing to volunteer,” said Kiamos. “And no one has wanted to do it. One teacher told me it was a lose-lose situation. We do poorly and it’s `I told you so.’ We do well and we cheated.”
As for the offending nine team members, all but three confessed. Those who did produced written apologies plus an essay on ethics, and performed 30 hours of community service. All of them, Kiamos said, went on to college. “They weren’t stigmatized,” he said.
As for cheating in the overall student population, Kiamos said he sees little evidence of it at Steinmetz: “We’ve changed our way of evaluating students. True-false, yes-no–that’s passe. Authentic assessment of whether a student understands the material is the goal.”
The scandal, in Kiamos’ view, was a glaring example of negligence and betrayal on the part of English teacher and Decathlon coach Gerard Plecki.
“I’ve revisited the whole thing many times, and I think the key player was the teacher. Those kids would not have cheated without him. I’m not absolving them, but as the teacher, he was the gatekeeper. There were several times when he had the opportunity to do the right thing. He chose not to.”
Plecki resigned soon after the scam was exposed.
“It was such a good team,” Kiamos said wistfully. “A dream team. They didn’t have to win it all. It would have been wonderful if they had finished 10th or 12th in state. We’d have been so proud. Instead they went right down the tubes. It was gut-wrenching.”
