Michael H. Romanowski is a professor at the Center for Teacher Education, Ohio Northern University in Ada, Ohio.

School board members, administrators and parents all like to think of children as hard working students and honest in their academic endeavors. According to recent surveys, that's a misperception.

Rutgers Management Education Center reports 75 percent of the 4,500 high school students surveyed engaged in serious cheating and 88 percent judged cheating to be "common" among their peers. Some surveys say more than 90 percent of students have copied homework.

These are not students who do poorly in school. The 28th annual Who's Who among American High School Students' survey of "high achievers" found 76 percent of the nation's top teens have cheated on their schoolwork, most because it "didn't seem like a big deal."

No matter the statistics, the bottom line is that academic dishonesty is not only epidemic but also seems to be accepted as a normal part of school culture among all types of students.

Compared to earlier generations, schools now find an increased amount of academic dishonesty. Studies of college students in the 1940's indicated only about 20 percent of those surveyed admitted cheating in high school. In 1962, about 61 percent admitted to cheating, while 74 percent admitted cheating in 2002.

Not only has cheating increased, but it has become more sophisticated and much more difficult to detect. With the Internet, students can obtain papers on numerous Web sites for any imaginable topic. Cell phones and iPods have created more sophisticated approaches for cheaters.

Academic dishonesty is a complex issue because what cheating "is" and "is not" varies among students and the context. Often thought of in terms of "serious" or "not as serious" cheating, students are involved in academic dishonesty when their behavior falls within one of the following:

• plagiarism or presenting someone else's work as your own;
• self-plagiarism or submission of the same work more than once;
• fabrication of information;
• providing false information regarding an academic exercise (i.e. falsely claiming to have submitted an assignment);
• cheating by giving or obtaining help in an academic assignment;
• any attempt to prevent others from completing their work.

No matter the form of cheating, a need exists to examine the reasons and the culture that seems to accept cheating as a normal aspect of schools.

Let's examine the idea that students cheat because many are morally illiterate. If someone is a functional illiterate, they lack basic skills such as reading, writing and mathematics. To be culturally illiterate, an individual lacks the basics needed to thrive in the modern world.

When students are morally illiterate, they fail to see situations in a context that requires a moral response. Students can be morally illiterate when they fail to see cheating as a moral dilemma or they don't see anything wrong with cheating.

Some 50 percent of students responding to the Rutgers' survey noted above said they don't think copying questions and answers from a test is cheating. But if students do not see cheating as a moral concern, then how can we expect ethical behavior?

If cheating is viewed as a tool to get ahead, then we should expect students to develop their cheating skills in order to be successful. In schools today, a culture of cheating exists because enough students engage in cheating and, with an increase in its social acceptance, issues of right and wrong are mute — hence moral illiteracy.

How has this happened?

First, the issue is complex and blame falls numerous places: family, church, entertainment industry, the government, etc. For our purposes, schools are at the center of the discussion.

When it comes to public schools, it is important to remember that schools reflect the culture in which they are embedded. One can easily argue that whatever occurs in American culture will appear in public schools. Although a particular issue might appear one way in culture, the same issue might appear differently in the classroom.

There are no screen doors in schools to filter out particular ideas and behavior. Therefore it can be argued that dishonesty and cheating in school is merely a reflection of the culture's moral decline.

One look at American culture illustrates that cheating exists in professional sports (steroid abuse, wagering on games and conducting dog fights), in the business world (WorldCom and Enron) and in a political arena that fails to provide honest role models. Cheating and dishonesty seem to be the norm or at least tolerated in terms of career, money, achievement and success. It seems inevitable in a culture that encourages individual success and achievement over integrity and care for others.

Second, ideologies play a significant role in how students view education. Today's U.S. ideology of individualism and consumerism has taught students to expect and want more. Whether they envision a large house, the newest SUV or a six-figure salary in their 20's, students have high expectations that often reduce education to simply a means to an end. Education is not viewed as an opportunity to learn and gain knowledge but as a ticket to a better future.

Education has been trivialized to a focus on grade obsession and success at any cost.

Third, schools often cling to a myth that they must provide an apolitical, neutral education that is unbiased and objective so students can gain admission to college and eventually secure a high-paying career. This type of "value-free" education omits addressing moral issues because of the fear of church and state legal issues, a belief there is no moral consensus, and because morals and ethics seldom find their way onto proficiency tests.

The school curriculum, similar to culture, neglects moral, social and political issues stressing instead the unquestioning mastery of facts and theories. In addition, religious and spiritual ideas have steadily lost their significance in U.S. culture, especially in public education.

Schools have become so secularized that discussion of ethical and moral issues, or simply discourse about education and learning itself, have taken a back seat to testing. The result: a majority of students remain morally illiterate, considering cheating as a way to get ahead without moral significance.

As pressure increases on students to improve performance on high-stakes tests, so does the temptation to cheat. Testing shifts educational goals from learning and knowing to memorizing and mastering knowledge in order to increase test scores. Any time test scores become the main goal of education, pressure to succeed will increase, and more and more individuals will be ethically tested.

And it's not just the students. Teachers in Mississippi, Texas, New York and Arizona have been involved in cheating scandals in an effort to increase students' test scores. In Ohio, teachers are required to sign a code of ethics and, if they are caught cheating, their licenses may be revoked. Kentucky uses six different versions of the exam to cut down on teachers cheating.

If professional educators are willing to cheat to raise scores, how much more tempting is cheating for students? More importantly, what message is sent to students in a culture where the cheaters are the teachers?

Fourth and finally, schools have remained passive and allowed a culture of cheating to develop. Even when cheating is detected, swift and appropriate punishment may not accompany the offense. Too often schools avoid punishments. They fail to recognize that cheating is occurring, or they make excuses, citing legal concerns with charging students with cheating or the attitude that students will find another way to cheat if punished.

This position implicitly condones cheating and adds to moral illiteracy by not viewing cheating as a major moral problem, such as drinking or other student misconduct. But cheating is a mindset: the more it goes unchecked, the more it occurs.

Of the confessed cheaters surveyed by Who's Who, 92 percent said they had never been caught. If cheating makes the road to success easier, then students see an easier route to their reward, not the difference between honesty and cheating.

The concern for educators is that if students accept cheating as normal, what will they accept as adults? Will cheating on tests translate to cheating on the balance sheet, shoplifting a sweater, misleading investors, ripping off insurance companies, lying to clients or misusing work expense accounts?

Schools must challenge a student culture that embraces cheating and eliminates moral questions, and replace it with a culture that raises moral issues and teaches the importance of ethical issues. This requires integrating issues such as cheating, justice and self-control into the curriculum.

Such integration begins with teachers who must believe cheating is wrong and be willing to teach students about academic dishonesty, as well as detect and punish offenders. Teachers also must be vigilant and informed about newer forms of cheating, especially use of new technologies.

However, academic dishonesty is not just a teacher's issue or concern. School boards and administrators cannot be idle bystanders condoning cheating. They cannot send mixed messages to faculty and students through inconsistent or passive behavior. This reinforces academic dishonesty and does little for the educational process.

Rather, school boards must be a moral compass, supporting teacher efforts to discover and sanction plagiarism, as well as other forms of academic dishonesty. This is an opportunity for the board to teach children about integrity. Students will cheat, but less cheating takes place at schools with an academic honest policy, according to Donald L. McCabe of Rutgers University and one of the founders of the Center for Academic Integrity.

School boards and administrators can begin by creating a culture that condemns dishonesty and encourages moral literacy in students.

First, they should engage in serious discussion and honestly examine the current status of academic honesty in their district. If they have an academic honesty policy or honor code, it should be evaluated for its effectiveness.

This discussion must include administrators and teachers. Excuses such as legal concerns, too much work or students will cheat anyway need to be addressed and dismissed, pointing out the importance of honesty. More importantly, we must realize that tough policies and honor codes alone will not be effective tools to prevent cheating — instructional efforts are needed, too.

Second, based on this discussion and/or analysis of the current program and climate, board members must decide if they will revise or extend any existing program, or develop and adopt a new written policy on academic dishonesty. The board might want to examine other schools' policies and decide what is best for their own particular district.

The development of an honor code or zero tolerance policies must be well thought out and consistently applied. Decisions about how to create a climate for honesty and educate students and teachers must also be addressed.

Third, a very important part of academic integrity is developing procedures to resolve suspected situations of academic dishonesty. Will the board allow for informal resolution or only formal resolutions via hearing with the school board or some other committee? If informal resolution is used, what sanctions will teachers be able to impose? Will a group of teachers and administrators serve as an academic honesty committee to determine each situation and apply appropriate sanctions? In addition, the policy must spell out the specific penalties that can be imposed for violations.

Fourth, once a policy is in place, teachers should be well informed about its details. The policy should encourage teachers to take appropriate steps to reduce the opportunities for academic dishonesty. This should include specific measures designed to prevent cheating especially using text messaging or iPods.

Also, allow time to clarify the policy and procedures. Small and large group discussions addressing faculty concerns and problems would provide great insight. These steps not only prepare the faculty to deal with cheating, but also send a message to parents and students that the school expects high academic standards and integrity.

Teachers need to discuss the role instructional strategies play in cheating. For example, when students are asked to memorize knowledge for objective tests instead of developing creative and critical thinking, cheating is much easier. Students might very well view memory-level learning as trivial and a waste of time, and consider cheating on these assignments as no big deal.

Teachers need to consider how they might reduce cheating by developing tests and assignments that encourage students to develop original thinking and to allow students to be more actively involved in learning. It is much harder to cheat on essay tests or when students are asked to defend or develop a particular position than when they are tested only on facts.

As an experienced educator, I understand the work and time involved in grading and constructing fresh assignments. However, reconstructing tests and assignments might reduce dishonest behavior by students.

Furthermore, students would gain significantly regarding moral literacy from engaging in discussions dealing with issues of honesty and dishonesty and the implications on families, businesses, communities, politics, sports and other relevant aspects of culture. These discussions should take place in the curriculum when appropriate, but the time spent might reduce moral illiteracy by placing academic dishonesty and other relevant issues in a moral context.

Also, giving time to the discussion of moral issues within the existing curriculum and not adding a course shows its importance. Schools need to raise moral issues with students and provide them with multiple perspectives that will enable them to engage in critical thought and allow them to make their own moral choices.

Fifth, school boards must provide firm, consistent support for academic honesty policies and not cave to parental pressure to have their interests served. Teachers are more likely to deal with academic dishonesty if they are confident that they will have consistent support from administrators and school board members.

Finally, time should be spent teaching students exactly what academic dishonesty is. Teachers could provide students with instances of different forms of academic dishonesty — age-appropriate teaching about plagiarism, paraphrasing and citing sources, examples of working together on a project or giving false excuses for missing deadline — even in the early grades. A 1977 study by Ann Bushway and William R. Nash found that 20 percent of students started cheating in the first grade.

Schools can help students develop study skills, provide handbooks describing the academic honesty policy, include relevant aspects on each course syllabus, send letters home to parents informing them of the importance of academic honesty and any adopted policy, post information on the school's Web site and, if possible, invite speakers who can address both faculty and students needs.

The goal should be to restore a moral outrage about cheating and restore the importance of integrity as a goal of education.

Will this eliminate all cheating in school? It's doubtful, but reducing moral illiteracy in students is a worthwhile goal. Teachers and students must be held to the same standards that exist in higher education and the workplace. And schools must be the starting point.

Ann Bushway and William R. Nash, "School Cheating Behavior," Review of Educational Research 47, Autumn 1977

Donald L. McCabe, "Academic Dishonesty among High School Students," Adolescence, December 1999

The following resources can aid in developing an academic honesty policy and provide tips and ideas to reduce cheating:

Barbara G. Davis, "Tools for teaching: Preventing academic dishonesty," University of California-Berkeley, 2002: http://teaching.berkeley.edu/bgd/prevent.html

GSI Teaching & Resource Center, University of California-Berkeley: http://gsi.berkeley.edu/resources/contents.html

Bruce Leland, "Plagiarism and the Web," Western Illinois University, Macomb, 2002: www.wiu.edu/users/mfbhl/wiu/plagiarism.htm

"The Academic Dishonesty Question: A Guide to an Answer through Education, Prevention, Adjudication and Obligation": http://hep.ucsb.edu/people/hnn/conduct/disq.html

"Plagiarism: What It is and How to Recognize and Avoid It," Writing Tutorial Services, Indiana University: http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/pamphlets/plagiarism.shtml

A study of academic dishonesty in high schools by Rutgers University professor Donald McCabe revealed many reasons why students cheat and rationalize their behavior:

• Grade obsession and intense fixation on high grades at all costs
• Pressure for scholarships and admission to good universities
• Feelings that they can't compete without cheating, since cheating is the norm
• Cheating is an accepted practice because everybody does it
• Lack of knowledge about academic integrity, such as plagiarism
• Usefulness, convenience or the easy way out
• Increased pressure of advanced courses, jobs, sports and other extracurricular activities
• Peer pressure
• Parents' obsession to see them out-perform peers
• Viewing assignments or courses as a waste of time
• Laziness or thrill seeking
• Adults set poor examples

The reality is the majority of students cheat in order to improve their chances for success. The main concern, however, is that — for many students — the decision to cheat is based on pragmatic concerns rather than ethical considerations.

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