…because when I read an article with a throughline that’s essentially “Students lie, cheat, and steal a lot more than they used to, and still think they are good people, but it’s OK because there’s so much more stress on them, and anyway it’s not their fault but rather society’s” my reaction is essentially “Oh, phui!”. Everyone thinks they have it harder, and mostly–as far as I’ve been able to tell–they’re wrong.
I do think the apparent rise in unethical behaviour is interesting (although I’d like a lot more information on how they determined if the results show a behaviour change, versus a change in self-reporting standards) but I’m less interested in excusing the behaviour than in explaining it, and then remediating it.
I still can’t really internalize the amounts of cheating that are reported, though. Maybe I lead a particularly sheltered life, at least in as far as my education went, but I rarely saw or heard of anything questionable–I think the worst would have been people working in groups on homework assignments, where there was some shading between collaboration and copying. When I contrast this with reports from people I know teaching university classes (one reported finding 5 different instances of students plagiarizing, in a single class of 50–technology also helps catch this) I just can’t process it. Of course, in that case, I’m also stuck for understanding how someone could make it to university, be told that their papers would be submitted to an automated plagiarism system, and then still be dumb enough to try to pass off someone else’s work as their own…
Ironically, this is making me more cynical, which apparently will enable a whole new generation of cheaters, liars, and thieves.
