More on Cheating

In my newsletter message last week, I wrote about the Harvard cheating scandal, the questions it raises, and the lessons to be learned.  Clearly, Robert Kolker of New York Magazine must be an avid reader of the MHA/FYOS Reporter because two days later he published this piece which focuses on a similar scandal at New York's prestigious Stuyvesant High School and expands on the ideas in very important ways.  

Here are some selections

But the much-publicized scandals have shined a light on the problem, and social psychologists say today’s high-school students live in a culture that, perhaps more than ever, fosters cheating, or at least the temptation to cheat. The prime offender, they say, is the increased emphasis on testing... 

...But why do bright kids—Stuyvesant and Harvard students—cheat? Aren’t they smart enough to get ahead honestly? One might think so, but the pressure to succeed, or the perception of it anyway, is often only greater for such students. Students who attend such schools often feel they not only have to live up to the reputation of the institution and the expectations that it brings, but that they have to compete, many of them for the first time, with a school full of kids as smart, or smarter, than they are.

The article is well worth reading in its entirety - and giving to your high school children to read as well.