‘A’s for sale.
Each year universities compete for the best and the brightest, setting off the national panic over high school GPAs and SAT scores.
But the real stress begins in college as young people try to distinguish themselves and their transcripts in preparation for professional and graduate programs.
Any college student not making the grade knows the chant: “Don’t waste your time and our money!”
After all, what is the point of attending a U.S. News and World Report BEST university if the expensive degree parents pay for can’t earn their sons and daughters entrance into the upper middle class?
The pressure to achieve often transforms learning into doing what one needs to do to make the grade.
And America is, we all know, a nation of achievers.
Donald McCabe, a Rutgers University professor and founder of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University, has studied the problem for the past 11 years.
“When students are asked to report on their own cheating habits and those of their peers . . . over 75 percent of students admit to having cheated at least once,” McCabe says in “Papers, Profits, and Pedagogy: Plagiarism in the Age of the Internet,” published in Perspectives Online. The article can be found at http://www.theaha.org/perspectives/issues/2001/0105/0105new3.cfm.
McCabe concludes that students find it easy to rationalize cheating since they feel that many teachers ignore cheating and since disciplinary action against cheaters seems rare.
McCabe further argues that custom paper mills online and the readiness of writers for hire on campuses are making academic dishonesty less likely to be caught and more of a “hassle” than most professors are willing to endure.
As for professors, the threat of litigation, institutional pressure, and endless grade appeals deter even the best-intentioned professor from pursuing the cheater.
McCabe points out the negative consequences of such inaction. Students know that the honor code is not enforced, so the honest student feels betrayed by the institution — the ultimate theft being the devaluation of honest reward for honest work.
Recent studies by McCabe and others document even higher percentages of students who admit to and make no apology for academic dishonesty.
And why should they?
In a society that values the bottom line, a society in which CEOs sell out their own corporations, a society in which success invokes an almost religious fervor, how are America’s young people to learn the value of doing one’s own work?
As a teacher of English composition here at this Jesuit university, I believe we must take a stand for academic integrity.
In our “Brown Bag” discussions, English 122 teachers have become concerned about what appears to be a growing trend on the part of our students — taking the short road to good grades.
Students everywhere know that writing papers is a necessary step to passing freshman composition.
Suppliers of custom-written papers online and in the neighborhood are ready to provide their services for a fee.
We cannot, and do not want to, become the Loyola Plagiarism Police, but we are committed to the goal of our students learning how to think critically and how to articulate in writing their own insights.
We cannot resign ourselves to the kind of fraud that diminishes the credibility of the courses we teach.
Today and every day, I will state out loud and often that learning is work.
My colleagues and I know that the more a student writes, the more a student thinks; the more a student tries, the better a person that student becomes.
The Ignatian goal of personal excellence can never be bought, traded or quantified in dollars.
Like my colleagues, I will hold the line between honest work and fraud because this line is what makes a Loyola education an education for life, not simply a sum of credits on a degree audit.
Paulette Swartzfager is an instructor in the English department.
