Marsha Sutton: Cheating scandal exposes district problem

More by Marsha Sutton

I don’t know which is worse - the fact that dozens of kids were caught cheating at Canyon Crest Academy or the apathetic way parents and administrators regard the moral lapse.

Under pressure to bury the story, which was brought to my attention because of the wide scope of the sordid affair, I’ve had to sort out what it is about this issue that’s causing so many people to exhibit a jaded attitude tinged with resentment at my inquiries.

“What’s the big deal?” is the most common refrain I’ve heard. “It goes on everywhere.” “Why are you picking on our school?” “What are you trying to prove?” “It doesn’t help to write about bad news.”

Well, golly. I was under the impression that journalism’s job was to expose corruption (and cheating certainly falls into that category, by my lights), hold government agencies accountable, inform the public, and increase awareness of trends and concerns.

A single incident of cheating involving 50 to 60 kids at one of San Diego County’s highest performing high schools is news, but bigger news is that apparently many feel it’s not news at all.
I expected administrators to be less than forthcoming, but the resistance from parents took me by surprise, I confess.

Students just refused to talk to me, afraid of being branded a snitch, a label of criminal proportions in teenage circles. A realistic fear of retribution also contributed to the code of silence.
I have to wonder if Woodward and Bernstein met with pressure to quash their findings because to pursue the Watergate story would reflect poorly on our government. Or more locally, was Diane Shippione, San Diego’s pension crisis whistle-blower, ever called a “snitch” and confronted with the view that exposing this sort of negligence would make our fair city “look bad?”

Or should disgraced former congressmember Randy Cunningham’s crimes have remained secret to protect a fighter pilot’s glowing reputation?

Not that high school cheating rises to the level of these examples, but the analogy holds.

Protestations aside, cheating of this magnitude is a legitimate story, whether it’s in schools, banks, income tax returns, insurance claims, or buried under slabs of pork in questionable government contracts.

Once, this was just a story about a single incident. But it has broader implications. How is it that cheating is now so common that many consider it “no big deal?” And why are so many people not just puzzled, but perturbed, that this is being aired publicly?

What we know

Although never giving enough information to satisfy me completely, Canyon Crest Academy and San Dieguito Union High School District administrators have at least returned my phone calls and provided a sketchy picture of what happened back in early May.

Cheating by students - almost all of them juniors and seniors - was discovered in CCA’s two Advanced Placement psychology classes. Combined enrollment for the two classes exceeds 80 students, more than half of whom have been charged with a form of cheating.

The teacher, who declined to speak to me, uncovered two forms of cheating, said SDUHSD Associate Superintendent Rick Schmitt.

There were those students who were said to have cheated on homework assignments and those who cheated on tests - an important distinction that appears not to matter when applying consequences.

For homework, students were required to do outlines, or study guides, on a regular basis and turn them in for credit.

Many students considered the study guides tedious and time-consuming - especially for these over-scheduled, high-achieving kids, almost all of whom carry heavy academic workloads with spare time, such as it is, filled with community service, sports, extracurricular and leadership activities.

In other words, schedules are packed, pressure is intense, and time for homework is short.

Some students collaborated on the outlines in study groups; others did the work on their own; still others mooched off friends.

Some of those who did the work were asked to share their notes with others, placing them in an awkward position. And some of those who borrowed the notes were too lazy to change even a single word.

Making matters worse, some moochers passed along the borrowed notes to others who also copied the guides word for word and turned in exact replicas of the original student’s work.

Busted. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize exactly the same study guide from a number of students.

Schmitt said about 40 students have admitted to copying or sharing their homework. All those assignments have been zeroed out, he said, meaning the students received zero credit for the work, which in many cases lowered the students’ letter grades.

Initially, it was reported that students were given a zero on three homework assignments and then a few days later the teacher changed grades and handed out a zero on only the one assignment.

Talk centered around the concern that the school, under pressure itself from parents of college-bound students, had in turn pressured the teacher to back off.

“That is a completely inaccurate rumor,” said CCA assistant principal Elloise Allen, who insisted that teachers have sole discretion over grades.

“It’s completely a teacher’s prerogative to make that decision,” she said. “Our involvement with academic honesty situations, and the reason we’re involved, is if there needs to be further consequences including Saturday school or suspension or even involuntary transfer from the school.”

Schmitt said it’s illegal for administrators to try to influence teachers about grades. “It’s actually a crime,” he said. “So that didn’t happen. There was never any pressure [on the teacher].”

Allen said the most likely reason grades were changed is because the teacher may have reconsidered her initial reaction.

“These aren’t tests; these are homework assignments,” she said. “Do you penalize once, or do you penalize multiple times? Is it important for students to learn a lesson and have the learning experience versus simply kind of wiping out the history of what the students have done?”

But Allen defended the teacher’s judgment and said the administration supports the teacher. “It’s very personal for a teacher to discover this kind of disrespect from students,” she said.

Cheating on tests

The scope of the cheating extends beyond homework though.

Some students were also found to be cheating on tests. Schmitt confirmed that the deception was uncovered after one student used the “wrong” cheat sheet for a test and received an unusually low grade.

The teacher connected the dots somehow - reportedly by matching the student’s wrong answers to a different test where he would have received a near-perfect score.

Uncovering who cheated on the tests, however, is proving to be more difficult than the homework incident.

School leaders have been talking to students, 13 of whom were interviewed last week, to investigate “what they think is theft of the original test back from last term,” Schmitt said. “What they’re investigating is how the kids got the answers to the test.”

Rumors that the tests were sold by a student who took the class previously, or that the test may have been stolen, are unconfirmed at this point, but he acknowledged the possibility.

Schmitt said they need hard evidence, which isn’t easy to come by. “The burden of proof is pretty tough,” he said. “Just because they’re kids doesn’t mean they don’t have rights.”

While the homework investigation is over, he said it could take many more weeks before the inquiry into the test matter is complete.

Charges that the school is dragging its feet on the investigation until after graduation, when many of the kids will have finished high school, are false, Allen said. Nor is the school covering up the issue to save its reputation.

“It’s not at all [true],” she said. “We’re just not in a hurry to make snap judgments on students’ futures because for some of them suspensions could mean huge domino effects.”

Canyon Crest principal Brian Kohn said he won’t hesitate to hand out appropriate consequences, but determining what those are “comes at the end of this process, not halfway through or at the beginning. Something like this takes a little bit of time to sort out. We’ll take as long as we need to get it done right.”

Kohn said he would not be influenced by the potential ramifications of the penalties.

“We hand out consequences based on what the offense is,” he said. “How it plays out in other areas is not a factor in determining what the consequences are, because otherwise it becomes grossly unfair. You can’t have a sliding scale for different people.”

Concern by parents and students that the notation “academic dishonesty” is now a part of their permanent record is unfounded, said Schmitt, who called this misinformation.

The designation appears on an internal system, but colleges never see this and it doesn’t appear on transcripts, he said.

“That record is a private record, and only a parent can review their [student's] discipline file,” he said. “The universities don’t get to look at that.”

The exception is that some college applications ask students if they’ve ever cheated or been suspended. If they answer yes, they are asked to provide an explanation.

The real consequence for cheating, Schmitt said, is a zero on the assignment or an F in the class. And for these high-achieving students, “that moves the earth a little bit,” he said.

Interestingly, students found to be cheating on tests - and those determined to have cheated on the study guides - will each receive the same consequences.

“In terms of the punishment, if it’s a first-time offender it’s no different. You get a zero on the assignment,” Schmitt said. Second offense, he said, may be an F in the class or a suspension.

Cheating is cheating, I suppose, and it is the teacher’s decision to make. But I do see a distinction between working on homework collaboratively in a study group, as opposed to procuring a cheat sheet for a test. Punishing both groups of kids in the same way seems unjust somehow.

Further, is there a distinction between the students who did the homework and were asked to share their notes, and those students who mooched and then spread the original work around to others? Do the students who were pressured to share their study guides deserve the same “academic dishonesty” label the lazy students got?

Cheating is rampant

Although there are gray areas, San Dieguito’s academic honesty policy outlines expectations, lists what the district considers to be academic dishonesty, and delineates consequences for violations.

“Every kid and parent has to sign off on that at the beginning of every school year,” Schmitt said. “Every teacher has a syllabus that … addresses cheating and academic honesty. Teachers talk about it and establish ground rules for what shared work is versus what cheating is. It’s a very regular conversation that we have with our kids.”

Despite this, cheating is commonplace in the district. “At every school, every day, kids cheat,” Schmitt said. “And kids get caught every day.”

Cheating, once associated almost exclusively with kids earning Cs and Ds, has now been overrun by the high-achievers who live in a pressure-cooker world of competition for attention, grades and elite college acceptance letters. This trend is a reflection of a society that places a higher value on where you end up more than how you get there.

One high-achieving Canyon Crest student told me she never cheats but so many of her peers do. “It doesn’t surprise me because it goes on in every class,” she said. “There’s lots of peer pressure to cheat, and it’s so easy.”

The problem clearly extends to more schools than Canyon Crest. Schmitt told me of several cheating incidents when he was principal at Torrey Pines High School several years ago that involved dozens of students.

“I had a huge scandal at Torrey Pines my last year there in an AP calculus class … [and it] took about eight weeks to finally get to the bottom of it,” he said.
Schmitt said the CCA cheating was concerning, but added, “I don’t think it’s that big a deal. I don’t want to downplay it because it is a big number of kids, but cheating happens every day … especially with AP kids.

“One school and one principal in one district isn’t going to change the culture around cheating. We’re not. What we do is we address it, it’s part of every teacher’s syllabus and academic policy. We have district policy and school policy around it, and it’s crystal clear. But it’s never stopped it and it won’t.”

When I asked if the school district was doing everything it could to air this, he replied, “I think we shouldn’t be airing it. We have a problem and we know we have a problem, and we deal with it every day. Usually, it’s not out and about in the parent community. This one just happened to be.”

This view was shared by several parents, one of whom told me, “I don’t feel it’s worthy of an article. This will come off as slamming Canyon Crest. Singling out CCA is the wrong thing to do. I don’t think there’s one thing positive or constructive that would come out of this article.”

Maybe so. If the problem is so prevalent that it goes on regularly at all other high schools on a daily basis and is so accepted as to be considered “no big deal” by so many, then certainly putting Canyon Crest under a microscope for this one incident may be harsh.

Estimates of high school students who admit they’ve cheated or plagiarized range from 75 to 90 percent, a staggering figure.

Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean the issue should be ignored. On the contrary, the cheating revealed at CCA provides a window to a dirty world the scope of which I’m guessing few parents completely comprehend.

Protecting a school’s or a district’s reputation by hiding or minimizing dishonest behavior makes a mockery of academic honesty policies and insults students who play by the rules. And there are a few of those left.

“For those kids who don’t do it, absolutely it feels frustrating because they’re putting in the work while somebody else is moving through life easy,” Allen said.

Honest kids work hard for their grades and feel betrayed when they see cheaters go unpunished. They need to know that kids who have been accepted to top-ranked colleges may still get nicked for cheating, that kids whose parents rush to their defense every time something goes wrong will still receive appropriate punishment, that penalties are applied fairly and in proportion to the degree of offense, and ultimately that justice prevails.

The lessons we teach when we dismiss or try to hide unethical behavior - even for seemingly good intentions - are bad lessons indeed. Cheaters win, cover-ups prevail, public agencies’ secrets remain hidden, and good, honest students quietly boil inside.

This originally appeared in Carmel Valley News, an SDNN media partner.

Marsha Sutton is a freelance education writer who has been covering education issues in San Diego County for the past 14 years. She can be reached at: SuttComm@san.rr.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 6:50 am and is filed under Education Commentary . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.