It’s past midnight on Thursday. You just finished that 12-page English paper on Modernism. Now on to the lab report—you’re drained. You Google the title. An example of the exact assignment pops up. Do you use it?
For many CHS students, the answer is yes. In a recent Globe survey issued to six English classes, 39 percent of the students admitted to cheating to obtain a better grade, 16 percent said they had never cheated, and 45 percent did not respond.
But for those who choose to use the lab report, there is a more important question to answer: how do you use it?
For chemistry teacher Nathan Peck, this was a complex issue. Several students in AP Chemistry made the same unique mistake on the Qualitative Analysis Lab, one of the most important labs of the year.
After further investigation, Peck found that a former student had posted his labs on a website for others to view. The errors were identical.
Peck said that there are gray areas when it comes to cheating—that there is a difference between copying something and using it as a resource to understand a problem.
“There was a variable grade penalty assessed that was commensurate with the degree to which plagiarism occurred on the assignment,” Peck said.
Peck also offered his students the option of confessing to having looked at the lab report and receiving a grade penalty, or taking their chances of not getting caught and having worse consequences.
Now, the class places more emphasis on lab quizzes rather than lab reports, a change that Peck hopes will ensure that students “own the knowledge” necessary to succeed.
“Kids tend to focus too much on the product instead of focusing on the process,” Peck said. He stands by the way he dealt with this issue, and believes that the changes he made will get his students focused back on the learning process.
But some community members have questioned if the punishment was strict enough.
Andy Rochman, who graduated from CHS in 1964, said he was “shocked by the school’s minimalist, slap-on-the-wrist response.”
As a community member, he has been concerned for several years with academic integrity in the school district. When an article about cheating was published in the March 2007 Globe, Rochman was stunned that CHS students were willing to brag about instances of cheating.
He spoke about this issue at a school board meeting, and superintendent Don Senti penned a letter in response.
“While students may feel that there are gray areas surrounding this issue, their teachers do not share the same perspective,” Senti said.
Evidently, some teachers at CHS do share the same perspective. According to a Globe survey that asked teachers to rank certain actions on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being not really unethical and 5 being absolutely unethical, numbers varied. However, only 17 teachers responded out of approximately 90.
For example, 9 out of 17 teachers reported that there was a difference between collaborating on an assignment that is supposed to be done individually and plainly copying answers from another student’s homework.
“Where things often get gray is let’s say we’re in a class together, and it’s an individual assignment, but I’m struggling,” Principal Louise Losos said. “You talk me through it. You don’t let me copy your work, but you help me process it. Is that cheating? Probably not. But you were told to work independently, so it’s that very fine line.”
J. Martin Rochester, Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and an active member of the Clayton community, sees cheating as fairly straightforward.
“There are gray areas, but 95 percent of plagiarism is clear-cut,” Rochester said. “It’s not rocket science, and AP students should be able to figure out what cheating is.”
Losos offered a simple definition.
“In the end, when a student turns in that work, when they put their name on it, the work needs to be theirs,” Losos said.
Currently, the administration does not have a school-wide policy for punishing cheating. Losos, along with many teachers, wants to keep it that way.
“I like the fact that our policy allows teachers to determine the consequence commensurate with the infraction,” Losos said. “Teachers are professionals, and they have a responsibility in the classroom.”
Rochman, however, feels differently.
“There needs to be some kind of consistency and unless you have some kind of top-down guidelines that won’t happen,” Rochman said. “It puts too much pressure on the teachers and the administration when the teachers make up their own rules.”
Rochester agrees that teachers should be responsible for issuing punishments, but thinks that cheating needs to be tracked more efficiently.
“I do believe strongly that the classroom is your castle,” Rochester said. “The teachers should be permitted to have control over the grade, but there has to be a school wide system for reporting and monitoring cheating. Teachers should be obligated to report it to the principal, and the principal should be required to keep a record.”
In this way, “serial” cheaters cannot evade harsher punishment by cheating in several classes.
“We don’t have a systematic way of recording incidents of cheating,” Losos said. “Right now we might need to look at some of our systems so that a kid can’t cheat once in each of the core areas and have no severe consequences.”
Still, before punishment comes prevention.
“I think that perhaps as an institution we can be doing a better job of talking with the students about our expectations—our belief about what is cheating and what is not,” Losos said. “There is some cheating that is clearly black and white, and there is some cheating where it’s worth having a discussion. But that discussion has to come before hand, and not after.”
Teachers should thus do a better job of clarifying when an assignment is collaborative or individual, Losos said.
“One of the things that is contributing to plagiarism is this obsession with collaborative learning,” Rochester said. “Because there’s so much made of collaboration, it’s become a bit of slippery slope, where students now assume that it’s okay to get help on something even if that constitutes cheating.”
However, some students know that their actions are unethical but still choose to cheat.
“I’ve copied other students’ work several times,” an anonymous senior said on the survey. “My parents are really strict about grades. There is so much pressure placed on academic success that a lot of us resort to cheating.”
But perhaps in this case, “success” is being measured as a grade, and not as the level of understanding—an indication that students are still focusing on the “product instead of the process” as Peck asserted.
“I see Clayton as a moral relativism community,” history teacher David Aiello said. “The desire to succeed and get ahead is so strong  that many people will cheat and feel like they can justify it due to the noble reason behind the cheating.  I believe it is endemic to this type of high-achieving community, and can feel almost necessary just to stay competitive with those who will cheat at the drop of a hat.”
Students seem to disagree. Only 35 percent of the surveyed students said that cheating was a problem at CHS, whereas 100 percent of the teachers said it was.
“To the extent there’s any solution to the problem, it has to be education at the front end, where it’s explained clearly to the students and there’s adequate warning from faculty about the consequences,” Rochester said. “Clayton makes a big deal about the open campus, treating kids like adults, and personal responsibility, but in this issue, they fall back into ‘kids will be kids.’”
The district will be reconvening a committee on Academic Integrity in the hopes of drafting a more precise definition of cheating.
The statement on Academic Integrity currently reads: “Students found to have engaged in academic dishonesty shall be subject to disciplinary action at either the classroom or building level.”
Is this statement too vague, or vague enough to allow appropriate interpretation?
“One of the attributes of Clayton High School is the individual responsibility given to students and teachers, combined with a level of mutual responsibility to each other, the building and our profession,” Losos said. “We don’t enforce our discipline code with a draconian approach.”