USA Today:

According to a survey, nearly three-fourths of high school students in US admit to some form of serious cheating in the past year. But it doesn’t surprise Christine Cachola that it has invaded even the hallowed confines of her all-girl Catholic school. “I see cheating once in a while,” says the high school senior. She wrestles with what to do to stop it, however, saying, “I don’t want to be the bad person and tell on people who do it.” For a host of reasons, students cheat, using high and low-tech ways to get the one-up on their SATs and GPAs. In the movie, ‘The Perfect Score’, teens respond by stealing an advance look at the SAT test — and justify the theft by citing parental and societal pressure.

With rampant cheating, students want the problem fixed and look to adults to fix it, “but they don’t want to be the ones who suffer while it’s being fixed,” says Rutgers University professor Don McCabe. When compiling his survey of 4,500 public and private high school students in 2000-01, McCabe asked students to approach him to confess past transgressions. “I wish I were a psychologist,” the founding president of the Centre for Academic Integrity says. “They’d say, ‘I did this in ninth grade, and I wish I could do something to rectify it’.”

More often, McCabe heard teens who cheated rationalise their reasons for doing so. “We do hear that, ‘The system is flawed, so it doesn’t matter what I do’,” he says. Some excuses sound more plausible than others, McCabe says, such as, “The world puts a high premium on working as a group, and the teacher is out of date.” Or, “In the past, we were told to work together. If I collaborate now, why is this cheating and that not?”

“Still, other teens acknowledged guilt for their actions. Some say, ‘it’s nuts to cheat, I’m just cheating myself.’ From an ethical perspective, that’s displaying maturity. While technology might have made it easier for people to cheat, generally the ease of cheating only affects those inclined to do it in the first place, both McCabe and students say. “Where there’s a will, there is usually a way,” says Teal Takayama, a student at St Andrew’s Priory, an Episcopal school in Honolulu. “... It depends on the teacher and the school. Some are stricter and more aware than others,” he says.

Takayama interviewed a group of students who said cheating is commonplace at every school. But some schools, such as Iolani in Honolulu, are taking a hard line against it. Iolani has a character education committee that creates themes to focus on each quarter (trust, honesty, integrity among them), giving morals a place front and centre of the classroom. “We talk about it,” she says. “Still, we’ve had a few cases where people cheat. We have had to put kids on academic probation. A couple have been caught and asked to leave.” “The message is, we’re here to help them understand, we’re here to help them learn, and the shortcuts aren’t going to work. There are consequences for actions. It’s not a pleasant thing to do, but it’s better to learn a lesson than think they’ve gotten away with it let it become a way of life,” Hall says.

Public high school principal Betsey Gunderson and private school headmaster Adrian Allan say they haven’t had to expel a student for cheating. Yet. “Americans, actually, are obsessed with cheating,” he says. “Particularly with plagiarism, too. The electronic era has heightened this fear still further. There are certainly some countries where it’s less culturally taboo to cheat.”