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Cheating, stealing liars

By Sharon Hayes - posted Wednesday, 4 May 2005


Recent research suggests that students are more likely to cheat, steal and lie today than ten years ago. The evidence is that a willingness to cheat has become the norm in spite of ongoing efforts by parents, teachers and coaches. Yet students do not seem to appear remorseful or shamed about their behaviour. Indeed, research suggests that students believe they need to lie or cheat sometimes in order to succeed.

Part of the problem appears to be a lack of adequate social engagement brought on by the current propensity of young people to communicate and to seek information via the internet, through digital television and mobile phones. Communication has become abstracted and removed from relationships, allowing the creation of multiple identities and fictional realities.

The resulting lack of engagement leads to both poor social conscience and an inability to think critically about important issues. There is both research and anecdotal evidence that more young people are leaving school without ever having thought about ethical issues, and consequently most have very little in the way of personal resources to call upon when faced with real life ethical dilemmas.

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A recent survey conducted by the Josephson Institute for Ethics revealed that high school students “are more likely to cheat, steal and lie than [high school students] ten years ago”. The Institute surveyed 12,000 high schools throughout the United States, and found there were few differences between public and private, state and “religious” schools.

Josephson et al report that 74 per cent of students admitted to cheating in an exam at least once in the past year (up from 61 per cent in 1992), while the number of students who stole something over the past 12 months rose from 31 per cent to 38 per cent over the same period. The report also found that while students from independent schools were less likely to shoplift (78 per cent versus 72 per cent), they were more likely to cheat on exams (86 per cent versus 81 per cent) and lie to their teachers (86 per cent versus 81 per cent).

President of the Josephson Institute, Dr Michael Josephson, says of the findings:

The evidence is that a willingness to cheat has become the norm and that parents, teachers, coaches and even religious educators have not been able to stem the tide. The scary thing is that so many kids are entering the workforce to become corporate executives, politicians, airplane mechanics and nuclear inspectors with the dispositions of cheaters and thieves.

The survey also found that students were more likely to lie to parents, lie to get a job, and steal from parents. Most students also believed they were ethical by nature. Over three-quarters of the sample claimed “when it comes to doing what is right, I am better than most people I know”.

While these results essentially reflect the attitudes and practices of American high school students, and while no comparable study of Australian students has been conducted, there is plenty of local anecdotal evidence that teachers believe the Institute’s findings would be upheld by a survey of our own students.

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Richard Teese, a Professor of Education at the University of Melbourne, for example, recently wrote on the problem of values education in schools claiming, “What Australia needs is a good values education for all children” to address the insidiousness of lying and cheating in schools (The Age, January 22, 2004). University of Sydney lecturer, Anne Bamford, argues that cheating and bullying in 10-16-year-olds is exacerbated by their familiarity and addiction to the Internet.

Bamford calls this new generation of young people the N-Generation, and argues that the use of multiple virtual identities among the group allows them to distance themselves from many of the ethical requirements of the “real” selves.

Educators from several local schools have expressed concern over the lack of cyber-ethics among students, with some students participating in competitive hacking of school systems within locally established cyber-communities. Rodger Smee, director of the exceptional students program at St Peter’s College, Indooroopilly, claims teachers have complained that students cannot see the problem with hacking because it seems like a victimless crime. “They admit they wouldn’t pick the lock of the Principal’s office, yet they feel justified in hacking into the school server.”

Our own informal survey of colleagues teaching first year students at university level found that they almost unanimously complained about an increase in students’ plagiarising, cheating, and being disrespectful towards both lecturers and general staff. In one first year social ethics unit over half of a class of 200 cheated in an online test - an ethics test! If students are arriving at university with little or no ethics awareness, one can only assume they are not receiving the required knowledge and experience from either high school or home.

Attempts have been made to address these problems through the implementation of codes of conduct and other similar programs in high schools. Although it has always been the case that schools have operated under a system of rules and regulations that dictate to students exactly what is and isn’t allowed, the recent influx of technological leisure pursuits has created a gap in many directories of school rules.

Many schools have developed a code of conduct for students as a way of connecting appropriate behaviour with a school’s mission statement (for example, Education Queensland, 2004; St Peters Lutheran College, 2004 (pdf file 103KB)). However, such measures are external to the student, mostly seeking compliance and offering relevant sanctions for non-compliance. They do not address the N-generation dichotomy between real and virtual selves. Students need to learn to think through issues of rightness and wrongness as they appear in every aspect of their lives (rather than simply accepting what others have told them to do in situations of authority rule) if they are to be able to transfer their knowledge of right and wrong across situations - from school and home to leisure and workplace activities, for example. However, our research has found that few schools are equipped to assist students to critically analyse ethically challenging situations, or to appreciate the depth of moral issues.

Having said this, educators have acknowledged the need for raised consciousness of ethical concepts, and several attempts have been made to create programs that address this need. The most well-known program forms part of a program developed in 1985 in the US by Matthew Lipman, called Philosophy for Children. The ethics portion of the program focuses on a story about “Lisa”, who encounters a number of ethical issues, which students are encouraged to discuss and analyse according to a workbook developed as part of the overall program. “Lisa” asks all the interesting questions to which children are interested in finding the answers. However, the program is somewhat outdated and lacking in contemporary appeal, not to mention also lacking many of the dilemmas that have arisen through our modern technological advances among other things.

Another American educator, Anthony Tiatorio, has developed a more recent ethics workbook for students, based on a journey through the history of ideas. Tiatorio guides students through The Book of the Dead, the Bible and Christianity, ancient Greece, Islam, eastern philosophy, and the enlightenment, towards modern notions of public ethics and the rule of law. The book, which is downloadable from the Internet, is a good resource for students of ethics, but is quite long and rather intense, given the age of the readership.

Apart from these, there are no comprehensive ethics programs for young people, and certainly little in the way of inspiring, interactive, challenging methods for teaching ethics at the middle or high school level. There is a desperate need, therefore, to provide a more contemporary ethics education for young people, one that appeals to, and makes use of, their love of new technologies.

One recent attempt to address the dearth has been developed by a group of academics and educators in Brisbane (including the author), who are working on a program to design and implement an interactive multimedia online ethics program for use by students across a range of grades in both primary and high school.

The program draws on the concept of multiple intelligences within a technological framework to bring the issues to students through a variety of learning styles. Such methods include, for example, engaging students in story-telling and creative writing; in critical analysis of issues and arguments using logic and mind games; through three-dimensional imagery and concept-mapping; through dance, drama and physical games; through music; through observations of, and interactions with, the natural world; and through debate, mediation and journal-writing. Such an approach is highly suited to the teaching and learning of ethics because it focuses on the context of learning in a digital age and on the ability on individuals to identify novel solutions to practical problems encountered in everyday life.

The intention is not to provide students with a pre-conceived set of answers to ethical questions, but rather to guide them through issues and assist them to think critically about moral concepts and ethical situations. Psychological research shows that young people begin to internalise values and principles sometime after year 5, allowing them to self-regulate their behaviour according to whatever values and principles they were socialised into. High school students, and in particular, middle school students (years 6-9) are therefore particularly well placed to be invited to explore their values and beliefs in a way that will develop their higher order thinking and problem solving skills. The Brisbane program will provide the vehicle for such activity, within a context that has “N-Generation” appeal.

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About the Author

Dr Sharon Hayes is a lecturer in the School of Justice Studies at QUT. She is a foundational Fellow of the International Institute for Public Ethics, the Ethics and Justice Society, and the Corruption Prevention Network Queensland. and has been recently appointed to the new Legal Practice Tribunal in Queensland.

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