Cheating Students Following Society’s Examples

The Carnegie Commission on ethical standards reported that from 1969 to 1976 cheating by college students nearly doubled. Part of the commission’s findings were: “Cheaters are stealing and mutilating library books, buying ready-made term papers, earning degrees falsely—and costing colleges a lot of money. Questionable behavior extends to professors and administrators. With enrollment expected to drop 25 percent by 1992, they are said to be frantically publishing misleading catalogues and even hiring search firms to find affluent students. Meanwhile, students are courted with easy grades; the proportion with A or B averages has risen from 35 to 59 percent in a decade.”

The report proposed some remedies, but the editorial on it in the New York “Times,” May 2, 1979, concluded: “Yet these recommendations beg the question of why so many standards seem to be slipping. Blame should not be limited to the campus. There is plenty of it for Washington and for industry, where cheating on rules and white-collar crime abound. Why does society expect students to uphold values any nobler than those of the families that rear them, the institutions that train them and the businesses that hire them?”