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American Morning

Many High School Students Don't Think There's Anything Wrong With Cheating

Aired April 05, 2002 - 10:33   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: Cheating to get the edge. Many high school students don't think there's anything wrong with it.

Our Kathy Slobogin visited a school in Northern Virginia to talk to young people about cheating.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KATHY SLOBOGIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): To Alice Newhall, cheating is no big deal.

ALICE NEWHALL, HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR: Cheating is a shortcut, and it's a pretty efficient one in a lot of cases.

SLOBOGIN: Alice is a 17-year-old senior at George Mason High School in Northern Virginia. She is typical of what a survey shows is a growing number of kids who see cheating as a way to survive high school.

(on camera): Do you not have any moral outrage about cheating?

NEWHALL: Not really. It's just not the biggest deal in high school. What's important is getting ahead. The better grades you have, the better school you get into, the better you're going to do in life. And if you learn to cut corners to do that, you're going to be saving yourself time and energy. And, in the real world, that's what's going to be going on, is the better you do, that's what shows. It's not how moral you were in getting there.

SLOBOGIN (voice-over): High school cheating is rampant. A national survey of 4,500 students found that 3/4 of them engaged in serious cheating. More than half have plagiarized work off the Internet. If you have a credit card and a modem, it's simple.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I just put it into the machine. I load it up.

NEWHALL: Schools have begun using the kids' weapons against them. George Mason is one of thousands of high schools fighting Web plagiarism with a new service called turnitin.com. Teachers submit students' papers to the company, which then searches the Web for matching prose.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Between 24 and 48 hours, a report will come back, and it's color-coded.

SLOBOGIN: This paper is code red, 97 percent plagiarized. Turnitin says about a third of the papers submitted have some sort of plagiarism.

DONALD MCCABE, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY: Students today find it so much easier to rationalize their cheating.

SLOBOGIN: Donald McCabe, whose survey of high school students found that 50 percent don't even consider Internet plagiarism cheating, says students feel driven by the tremendous pressure to excel and compete for colleges.

MCCABE: For one reason or another, they convince themselves a tenth of a point on the GPA is going to make a dramatic difference in their futures, and they feel compelled to cheat.

SLOBOGIN: Of course, not all students cheat. Mike Denny, also a senior at George Mason, thinks it's simply wrong.

(on camera): Do you think honor is lacking in the average high school student?

MIKE DENNY, HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR: I think honor's lacking in a large part of society, and I think it's, you often see the liars and the people who take the easy way get much higher in life than your average honest Joe on the street.

SLOBOGIN (voice-over): Mike also blames a high school culture where grades and test scores are more important than integrity.

DENNY: By now, many of us are so jaded, we feel like our whole life has just been taught for one test. It's pretty sad that things such as who you are and standing by, your word and whatnot, that's something that we haven't really been taught.

SLOBOGIN: Maybe American high schools are teaching their students the wrong lesson.

Kathy Slobogin, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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