Students Help Define New District Cheating Policy

By Jeff White

For the first time, the Newtown school system has a districtwide cheating policy with a strong emphasis on education and clear communication. Although it has been a policy that the district has grappled with for nearly four years, in the end the information the district received from its students helped push the policy through the approval stages.

“First of all, the student input that we had been getting had a significant effect in terms of us looking at this whole issue,” said Assistant Superintendent Robert Kuklis, who oversaw much of the policy’s drafting and revision. “Whenever you know that a degree of cheating is going on, you feel that there is a necessity in making sure that as a district we respond and say that this is not the type of behavior that is acceptable, and also look at the types of things we can do educationally to reduce the cheating that goes on.”

Julia-Jane McNulty, a high school senior and president of the student government, co-wrote an independent study on the prevalence of cheating at the high school last year. Although the survey, filled out by 247 students ranging from freshman to seniors, was necessarily limited, it did produce some remarkable findings.

Of the students surveyed, 92 percent said that they had witnessed cheating, with nearly 41 percent indicating that they saw cheating on a weekly basis. Moreover, 83 percent said that they themselves had cheated.

“Although these numbers are on a smaller scale, you can magnify them on a larger scale. Something needs to be done,” explained Miss McNulty.

Last spring, Miss McNulty, along with Student Government Vice President Deidre Dougherty, presented the findings to Dr Kuklis, who viewed the data as significant enough to warrant a closer look at cheating in local schools. Specifically, several areas came out of Miss McNulty and Miss Dougherty’s independent study that the district’s Quality Council addressed: defining when cheating occurs, how cheating should be dealt with, and how the education of lower grade levels could help to deter cheating in the future.

The Quality Council—a group of parents, teachers and administrators—had been looking at the issue of cheating since 1996-97 school year, when it devised a survey of what constituted an ideal graduate. One of their findings was that an ideal student needed to be ethical.

During the 1997-98 school year, the Quality Council, through various focus groups, identified a need for an across-the-board policy on cheating, and began drafting such a policy as the 1998-99 school year progressed. At about the same time as the council’s early policy draft was submitted to the school board, Miss McNulty and Miss Dougherty’s findings were made available.

 Their survey gave school officials concrete affirmation that the district was right in its need for a cheating policy, said Dr Kuklis.

The Quality Council sought further student comments once an initial districtwide policy was drafted and read by the school board this past summer. As a new school year began in September, they looked to students participating in the Camp Jewel leadership program as well as middle school discussion groups.

Although well received overall, the early efforts of the Board of Education were met with some criticism by students who felt the language of the policy was too ambiguous.

“When I initially read it, I thought that the policy was flimsy,” recalled Ryan Ignatious, a junior representative to the high school’s student government. “There was no concrete anything in the policy.”

The comments that were returned to policy makers alerted them to the need for clearer language and emphasis on early deterrence.

Students reviewing the policy felt that in elementary schools, emphasis was needed on teaching students the definition of cheating  “so that they may understand what they are asked not to do.”

Moreover, students concluded, in elementary schools, should a second offense of cheating occur, the consequence should be progressive, and parents should be notified.

“You want direct involvement at young ages,” said high school senior Tate Hoessel. “If a student is starting to cheat at that young of an age, it is something that should be addressed then.”

Many of the comments returned by middle school students focused on restitution after an incident of cheating has been discovered. “If the cheating involved another student who was unaware of the cheating,” the policy states, “ the two will… make a plan whereby the student who cheated makes restitution to the student who was unaware of the cheating.”

Much of the student feedback was incorporated directly into the final policy approved by the school board. “We came to the realization that [the policy] needs constant review and that student input is necessary. The input we received from high school and middle school students had a tremendous impact,” said Dr Kuklis.

“I think some of the concerns of the students were not so much for the policy but how it was going to be implemented,” Dr Kuklis added.

The final version of the policy adopted by the board states that student participation is an integral part of its implementation.

“Student review of this policy has made it clear that its implementation requires a thoughtful process of education involving students, teachers, administrators and parents, including a comprehensive evaluation of this policy after one year,” the policy states.

High School Principal Bill Manfredonia said recently that the areas of cheating that are the most prevalent at the high school involve homework and the Internet.

In the study performed by Julia-Jane McNulty and Deidre Dougherty, 48 percent of students surveyed identified copying another student’s homework as cheating. Still, it is a gray area in the implementation process when one considers the growing number of study groups and group projects that are encouraged by many teachers.

The Internet also poses a challenge, as more and more students are tempted to take work off the Web and pass it off as their own.

According to Mr Manfredonia, the new cheating policy is a way to “reemphasize the need for students to do their own work 100 percent of the time.”

The problem boils down to just how much of a norm some forms of cheating have become. Walk into the cafeteria, explained senior Tate Hoessel, and you hear students talking about tests all the time. Sometimes they are talking about a test that other students are scheduled to take later in the day. These students, reasoned Miss Hoessel, are not aware that this is cheating.

For Julia-Jane McNulty, some assurance can be gained in the fact that the new cheating policy is an across-the-board policy that has as its ultimate message, “Newtown Public Schools will not tolerate cheating.”

“The policy has to be completely [enforced] across the board,” she said. “It clearly won’t work if it is not. It is not something that is going to be easy to monitor. This problem is about changing a society, and that is something that is hard to do.

“It is so hard to change a mentality. It has to come with a lot of education and keeping everything uniform and the faculty on one wave length.”

As the policy progresses through the early stages of implementation, Miss McNulty is left to consider her data, and how much her findings on cheating indicate the growing pressures on students to perform.

An April article in The American School Board Journal said, “To an alarming degree, [students] don’t think [cheating] is a big deal. To many of them, cheating is simply a survival skill in a competitive world.”

“Aren’t we starting to put too much pressure on our kids?” Miss McNulty wondered. “We want them to work a job, play a sport and remain at the top of their classes. It really is hard for kids. In some cases that I can think of, I really can’t blame them. Some of them probably feel that [cheating] is their last resort.”