Students without honor.

Byline: Susan Palmer The Register-Guard

Jeanne Wagenknecht has a message for University of Oregon students who take her finance classes. If you cheat, she will mess with your head.

For a student she suspected of computer hacking to get access to her exams, she composed a fake.

"This student went from doing beautifully on my exams to flunking the final," she said.

That happened several years ago, Wagenknecht said, but she tells the story to all of her classes now as a cautionary tale.

"The moral of this story for students is, it may be hard for me to prove it, but I will try to make your life miserable," she said. "I get a big kick out of making dishonest people suffer."

The cheating revolution has educators at colleges and high schools here and nationwide scrambling to stay ahead of the cat-and-mouse game. With final projects and exams looming, students feel tempted to cut corners. Some educators think today's students carry a burden of greater expectations, from more community service and extracurricular activities to higher grade-point averages to get into college or to get a good job after college.

"I believe there's so much more pressure than when we were in college," Wagenknecht said. "But I don't buy that that's a reason to become dishonest."

The most recent figures from the University of Oregon show a fourfold increase in reported cheating in the past five years.

Area high schools have drafted policies that address the latest in high-tech cheating techniques, and some are rewriting their policies to make them crystal clear to students.

National studies indicate that most students cheat.

In a 2001 Rutgers University survey of 4,500 high school students nationwide, 74 percent admitted they cheated once or more on tests and 72 percent acknowledged cheating on written assignments. A 1999 Rutgers survey of college students found 75 percent of 2,100 students had engaged in some form of cheating.

The Josephson Institute of Ethics found that the number of high school students who said they cheated at least once on a test jumped from 61 percent in 1992 to 74 percent in 2002. The nonprofit California institute has surveyed 12,000 students nationwide every two years for the past decade.

"The numbers are being driven by the passivity of the adults and the examples of cheating they (students) see all around them," said Michael Josephson, president of the institute and a former professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. "The fact is there is widespread dishonor and dishonesty."

Cheating goes high-tech

The proliferation of high-tech gadgets such as graphing calculators, personal digital assistants and text-messaging cell phones makes cheating on tests a simple matter of a few button clicks. For years, students also have had access to Web sites such as Cheathouse.com and essays4less.com that sell essays and research papers, in some cases providing them for free.

At Springfield High School, Principal Chris Reiersgard and the staff are preparing policies to combat misuse of cell phones and other electronic devices.

"We're at the infancy stage here. The kids are always ahead of us technologically," he said.

He got a firsthand look at the challenge when some students showed him just how fast they could send text messages with their cell phones. "Their fingers were flying," he said.

With cell phones, students can text message test answers to each other or store information in the device. Phones that take pictures allow students to photograph exams.

North Eugene High School banned cell phones from classrooms this year after teachers caught wind of the problem from a television show, Principal Peter Tromba said. Student phones must stay off and in purses or backpacks while students are in class, he said.

"The first offense is a warning. The second offense, the principal gets the phone till the end of the day. The third offense, you can't have it at school at all," he said.

To combat plagiarism, some teachers have purchased software that helps them screen student writing for material that's available on the Internet.

Other teachers have students do an in-class writing assignment at the beginning of the year to gauge their skills. With that sample in hand, work that's out of character for an individual student stands out.

At the University of Oregon, professors and instructors set individual policies for the use of electronic devices in their classrooms, said Chris Loschiavo, director of student judicial affairs.

Students caught cheating face discipline that ranges from a failed grade on a test or in a course to suspension or expulsion from the university, Loschiavo said.

Meanwhile, teachers must contend with all of the low-tech tricks of the cheating trade. Students still filch exams, sneak glances at other students' tests or carry cheat sheets with them into the classroom.

But if the numbers are any indication, efforts to short-circuit cheating represent a rear-guard action in an ethical battle where ethics seem to be losing.

Students' morality tales

Almost every student has a cheating story to tell.

"In the big lecture halls, it's easy to cheat," UO general science major Lilee Hua said. "I see kids cheating in class all the time."

Jackson Hager, an International High School senior at South Eugene, recalls students getting caught during his freshman year for bringing in a cheat sheet on a vocabulary test, with all the words in tiny print on a small piece of paper. Other students have tried cheating off his tests, he said.

UO finance student Ben Cannon said a friend of his once got someone else to write a research paper for her.

"I know people who admit to cheating through a whole math class," said Emily Wattenbarger, a UO student studying Spanish.

Some students acknowledge they've done it themselves.

"I can't say I haven't done it," said Tom Harder, a UO psychology and business major. But Harder said he has cheated only on small 10-point quizzes and wouldn't cheat on a midterm or final.

"I would never think about it. I have too much riding on it," he said.

Hua said that in high school she cheated once on a chemistry test, inserting a small paper inside the cover of her calculator with mathematical formulas that would help her answer test questions.

"When I look back at that, I think it was because I just didn't want to study," she said.

Our cheating hearts

A scan of headlines in the past few years reveals it's not just students taking ethical shortcuts, said Josephson, who heads the California ethics institute.

In the past year, Air Force Academy cadets in Colorado and police academy trainees in Charlotte, N.C., have been caught up in cheating scandals. Corporate fraud has dominated business news, while the nation's top newspapers have fired reporters for plagiarism.

"The sad reality is there's a deterioration of values," Josephson said. "We have this aphorism that cheaters never prosper, but it's not true. Even when they get caught, half the time they're not punished."

The 1999 Rutgers study found that fully one-third of teachers who were aware of student cheating in a course did nothing to address it.

At the UO, Loschiavo is trying turn that ship around. The university regularly holds training sessions for professors, encouraging them to talk about academic honesty with their students at the start of each term and to report cheating to the administration rather than just dealing with it themselves.

An increase in reporting may partially account for an increase in the number of students disciplined for academic dishonesty, he said. In 1999, 53 students cheated or plagiarized. So far this year, 217 students have committed some form of academic dishonesty.

Since 1999, the university has suspended or expelled about 10 students for cheating, Loschiavo said.

But not all faculty members report cheating, believing that the university's formal hearing process will take too long or be burdensome, Loschiavo said.

Cultural messages

All the discipline in the world won't help if students get mixed messages about appropriate behavior, said Diane Downey, an English teacher at North Eugene High School.

Students see TV shows such as "Survivor," where deceit, cheating and treachery keep the players in the game.

That makes it all the harder to teach values, she said. "The message is, be a winner, not a loser," she said.

After years as an educator, Downey has concluded that values are as important as the subject matter she's hired to teach.

"I have it in my mind that I can make them as literate as I want, but if they're lying cheats, I've failed," she said.

She has students sign an honor code that she requires their parents to witness.

Even so, this spring she caught students in an early period passing test information to students in a later period.

"In the past I've used a values clarification unit with the kids. I didn't do that this year," she said.

UO finance instructor Wagenknecht tries to instill a sense of community with her students by not grading on a curve and encouraging the best students to help those who are struggling.

She gives two versions of a test in her classes and warns students she'll take off double the points if they have the right answers to the wrong questions.

But when a student recently cheated on such a test, she met with the student and explained how cheating damages the student more than the institution.

"I went through my concerns. I told her I didn't know what to do. Well, she wrote me this long apology letter, said she was sorry and wanted the opportunity to set things right."

Not all teachers are willing to engage students at that level.

And teachers who do can run into trouble with parents and school boards.

Two years ago, a Kansas biology teacher who had failed 28 students for plagiarizing their science projects from the Internet, was ordered by the school board to give students partial credit and decrease the project's value from 50 percent of the final grade to 30 percent. She quit in protest.

Turn this ship around

There's plenty of help for those who want to put an end to cheating and plagiarism, but it takes work, Josephson said.

"You have to create an environment that says, if you cheat, you'll get caught, and one that vindicates those who don't cheat," he said.

"It needs to be two-pronged: mechanical, where you make cheating harder, but you've got to promote integrity," he said. "You have to make them feel ashamed, that what they're doing is deeply wrong."

South Eugene High School senior Chris Marusich has come to see cheating in a more negative light as he's gotten older. He used to regard it in the same light as skipping a class, not necessarily a good thing, but not that big a deal.

But Marusich, who heads to the University of Washington next fall, has changed his mind.

"I would say, it's pretty bad. If you get a good grade by cheating, it's not really your grade. It's not what you really are."

ACADEMIC DISHONESTY

Here's how the University of Oregon defines cheating, plagiarism and fabrication in its student conduct code.

Plagiarism: The inclusion of someone else's product, words, ideas or data as one's own work. When a student submits work for credit that includes the product, words, ideas or data of others, the source must be acknowledged by the use of complete, accurate, and specific references, such as footnotes. Plagiarism also includes submitting work in which portions were substantially produced by someone acting as a tutor or editor.

Fabrication: The intentional use of information that the author has invented when he or she states or implies otherwise, or the falsification of research or other findings with the intent to deceive.

Cheating: An act of deception by which a student misrepresents or misleadingly demonstrates that he or she has mastered information on an academic exercise that he or she has not mastered. Examples include, but are not limited to: copying from another student's test paper, computer program, project, product or performance; collaborating without authority or allowing another student to copy one's work in a test situation; using the course textbook or other material not authorized for use during a test; using unauthorized materials during a test, for example, notes, formula lists, cues on a computer, photographs, symbolic representations and notes written on clothing. It also includes resubmitting substantially the same work that was produced for another assignment without the knowledge and permission of the instructor, and taking a test for someone else or permitting someone else to take a test for you.

HONOR CODE

North Eugene High School teacher Diane Downey asks her students to commit to ethical behavior by signing this agreement.

Cheating: I will not cheat during tests or during test correcting. In addition, I will not discuss test questions or answers with other students. Though I may discuss homework with classmates, I will not share homework with classmates for the purpose of copying.

Plagiarism: Plagiarism is presenting another person's ideas or writing - even a few words - as one's own. I will not plagiarize.

CAPTION(S):

Diane Downey offers words of advice on the blackboard of her North Eugene English classroom: "Be honest, Be kind, Be responsible." Downey says teaching good values is as important as the subject matter. Kevin Clark / The Register-Guard Diane Downey (left), English department chairwoman at North Eugene, explains test questions to Amanda Klitzke.