I know, I know, it's appalling that kids are still cheating nowadays. (Isn't that what the interwebs was supposed to solve?) Well... kids are definitely still doing it according to this article in The New Yorker. It talks about a cheating ring at Stuyvesant (read: hoity-toity, very prestigious high school) in New York City that involved 140 students. At the center of the maelstrom is Nayeem Ahsan, a 16 year old kid from Bangledeshi immigrant parents.
Being first generation, he talks about the pressures that are out there for him to do well. Even after getting into a super prestigious school, there is continual pressure for him to do well at said prestigious school so that he can go to a good college. Once in a good college, he hopes to get a prestigious education so that he can land a prestigious job and .... well, make lots of money.
Nayeem's argument is that studying was pointless because studying was more was not going to make much of a difference. Sure, maybe it could help, but "there are things I'm bound not to know". His argument, therefore, was that studying, when compared to outright cheating, was more effective because his end goal was high scores, and cheating gave him more incremental value per unit.
When I first read this article, I was angry. Angry because I've grown up around kids like Nayeem my whole life-- kids who have been told the "right" from the "wrong", but seemed so disillusioned or so disoriented that they didn't seem to believe it. Scarier still, I worry that these kids did believe it, but just didn't care-- the ends justify the means, right? As a hard worker myself, I've been told I'm smart. Sure, I'm probably smarter than your average bear, but I'm by no means a genius. I work really hard to learn the things I learn and I put a lot of time into these things. People who cheat make my work incrementally worth less because they get the same results with less time. It makes the whole "market of smartness" worse off through false inflation.
But then I started thinking about it more. And I get it. I still don't agree with what this kid did, but I understand it because this type of behavior still goes on. It even happens at school now. There are simply too many things to do and too little time. There inevitably will be people who have prioritized, say, recruiting, over classes because our main goal right now is getting a job. These people sometimes will take fewer classes or easier ones to compensate for the lack of time, sometimes they won't. Those that won't usually have to a.) accept that they're not going to do as well as what they're used to or, b.) they cheat.
I argue though that the true crux of the problem though isn't that it's inherently wrong (which it is though, by the way), not that it's "ruining it for the rest of us" (which it also is, by the way), but that it's really more of an indication of the type of students that we're creating. By placing so much pressure on our students, their perspective of what's "most important" gets skewed. As it becomes more and more disoriented, they begin to simply try to get by, instead of doing what they know they should be doing. On one hand, we're creating highly effective people in the skills of prioritizing, organizing and coordinating. It takes a lot of work to cheat I'd imagine (you'd need to find someone who knew the answers, etc.). On the other though, we're creating a whole new generation of "super achievers" that can't accept that they can't do everything and that they need to prioritize. Is that a generation that we want to empower with prestigious jobs and schooling? I'm not so sure.
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