Ever wonder how your high school student manages to pull such good grades without doing much homework? Or why teachers aren't "demanding more" of your child in school to prepare for an increasingly complex world?
A new survey shows four out of five teens at the top of their class - the ones getting As and Bs - admit they accumulated at least part of their GPA the easy way: they cheated. The survey, released last week by "Who's Who Among American High School Students," shows a 4 percent increase over 1997 in the number of students who say they cheat.By most anyone's standard, the numbers are startling and frighteningly consistent across the board.
A second survey, released last month by the Josephson Institute for Ethics, shows 70 percent of high school students admit they cheated on an exam at least once in the past 12 months. That's up from 64 percent who admitted at least one such indiscretion in 1996.
Though neither survey breaks down percentages by state, the national results don't bode well for local students.
In fact, a third survey - of Utah Valley high school students who are members of the LDS Church - shows they pretty much mirror the national averages: 69 percent of boys and 65 percent of girls say they have cheated "often or regularly" on tests and assignments.
The local survey, done by Brigham Young University professors Brent Top and Bruce Chadwick, compares teen members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Utah Valley with their peers on both the East and West coasts. When it comes to cheating, females outside Utah were a few points more likely to cheat while males were a little less inclined to so on the West Coast. Males on the East Coast were more likely to do so by a point.
Belief vs. action
The survey also asked a wide variety of other questions designed to help researchers understand what LDS kids say they believe as opposed to how they say they act. In other words, are the lessons they're learning at home and at church influencing their behavior at school, work or with peers.
Results are cited in the authors' new book, "Rearing Righteous Youth of Zion: Great News, Good News, Not-So-Good News."
Chadwick and Top say almost 25 percent of LDS teens surveyed reported that their most difficult challenge in life is "compromising personal integrity, such as lying, stealing or cheating in school."
" `I think cheating is a hard pressure to deal with,' one teen wrote, `because everyone around you is doing it and they think it's not that big a deal. That makes it extra hard to resist.
"Several youth justified cheating because `everyone does it' and `if I don't I will be handicapped in competing for grades and ultimately university admission,' " the researchers say.
`Justification' is common
Apparently, such justification is common among American teens as a whole. While 70 percent admitted cheating in the Josephson study, 60 percent of high school students in the same survey said living up to their own religious standards is "essential" or "very important" to them. Another 26 percent said that kind of personal integrity is "moderately important." And a total of 85 percent said their religion is either essential (36 percent), very important (28 percent) or moderately important (22 percent)
So how can students rationalize their actions when they say their religion is so important in their lives?
Michael Josephson, president of the Character Counts! Coalition, finds the results disturbing.
"What's especially troubling is that young people know what they're doing is wrong. There is a staggering inconsistency in what they say they believe and how they act. Despite highly disturbing levels of lying, cheating and stealing (reported in the survey), 91 percent report that they are `satisfied with my own ethics and character."
Percentages on other questions also show students "know" what is important in terms of character as evidenced by the fact that 97 percent said "it's important for me to be a person of good character" and 78 percent say "it's not worth it to lie or cheat because it hurts your character."
`We've got a problem"
Paul Krause, publisher of the Who's Who student survey, says, "When even the best and brightest students find that the road to temptation is also the path of least resistance, we've got a problem."
While students in his survey identified the "decline of social and moral values" as today's great national crisis - and the biggest problem facing their own generation - they report cheating and other "immoral" behaviors in record numbers.
Top says the BYU study shows "LDS young people have strong feelings of what is immoral and against the Word of Wisdom, but cheating is viewed as pretty much a `how to get ahead and survive in school' strategy. Lots of them don't even see it as being that wrong. That's really quite disturbing to us that they seem to have pretty rigid lines on most things, but when it comes to cheating in school, they don't feel the same degree of immorality. They don't think of dishonesty as being immoral."
Top and Chadwick address the dichotomy between how teens behave and what they say they believe in a religious or moral context. In a recent article published in the Provo Sun, they say in their work with LDS youths that "it became clear to us that religiosity, to have power to positively affect behavior and to deflect negative peer pressure, must be more than `faithfulness' than mere `activity' (in church).
"Genunine gospel substance"
"Attendance and belief, as important as they are, apparently do not in and of themselves promote strength to resist temptation. That results only as youth come to experience the fruits of spirituality in their own personal lives. It is not enough just to get kids into church, but rather we must get genuine gospel substance into them."
Unlike some suspicious parents, Elaine Englehardt, director of the Center for the Study of Ethics at Utah Valley State College, said she was "very surprised" by the results of all three surveys.
"That distresses me a lot. It tells me that people are not reflecting on their own lives but rather doing quick schemes to try to get the good grade so they don't care what it does to their character or integrity. I'd like them to consider in the future how ashamed they're going to be - and if they're not ashamed at all that even scares me more. I don't think anything should ever be worth cheating for. Students need to stop and look at what's motivating them - it's not an either/or situation that you have to to cheat or not. There are lots of other options."
How does she account for the discrepancy between professed beliefs and behavior?
"I'd tell them to examine their religion again. Certainly the base of their religion - whatever it might be - is to love not only ourselves but everyone else and especially God. I don't see cheating in that."
Complex rationale
Though it might be easy to blame the slide in personal responsibility on political figures who don't want to acknowledge ethical breaches, Englehardt says the situation is much more complex.
"So many of my students feel it's not what you know but who you know . . . a vast majority in one of my classes today said they believe that. While they may not be willing to `cheat,' many of them are certainly willing to take any advantage they can to get a job or something else."
The "false rules of competition" in society have fueled the fire, she says, and she'd like to see more business leader speak out about the importance of integrity - in the schools as well as the workplace.
"Corporations are really stressing competition - the importance of making money and having success. That's a total dichotomy with Christian values: love others, developing good relationships. Money is way down on the list of things that should be valuable for someone following Jesus."