by: Tommy Raskin
Published in the May / June 2013 Humanist
Students cheat in high school. In fact, a lot of high school students cheat routinely. A 2010 study conducted by the Josephson Institute of Ethics found that at least 59 percent of high school students had cheated on a test in the past year, and over 33 percent had cheated more than twice. People who work in our high schools know that cheating is rampant but they ignore it: the constant whispering during tests, the scrawled answers on forearms, the use of cell phone cameras to take pictures of “cheat sheets” before finals. Meanwhile, non-cheating students don’t blow the whistle on rule violations because they want to avoid being labeled “snitches” and “jerks.”