“Pro Scientia Atque Sapientia”: For knowledge and wisdom. This is the motto for Stuyvesant High School, one of nine specialized high schools in New York City. In 2012, The New York Times reported a widespread case of cheating at Stuyvesant, which involved more than 80 students allegedly communicating via text message regarding exam information. The high school principal uncovered this by confiscating a teen’s cell phone during a state language exam, only to find evidence of communication between students regarding a state exam’s confidential information. The incident ignited a fiery debate and brought to light an eyebrow-raising concern about our current educational system.
Academic integrity is a concept present in most classrooms nationwide. Despite extensive promotion of honesty and responsibility, little change has been seen in the classrooms. The rate of academic dishonesty inside the classroom has remained the same. A study conducted by Trevor S. Harding from Kettering University shows self-reported “cheating among college students has been on the increase since at least the 1940’s.” According to the study, in the 1940s the number of students who self-reported cheating neared 23 percent, and by the early 1990s, “the percentage of students who self-reported cheating reached 67 [percent] and is expected to go even higher in coming decades.”
One may question why the educational community, which has been focusing on this ideology of an honest and higher education for years, still confronts these issues. I believe the reason for this is because plagiarism is being regarded as a cause, instead of a consequence. We see this issue as something that exists because students created it, instead of seeing it as an issue that was implanted in the system the very moment of said system’s inception. The current educational system is designed to identify students through numbers, such as grade point averages, standardized exam scores and grading systems. The definition of an educated person has undergone one of the most significant transformations since the Enlightenment. It went from being about the person who is the most educated to being about the person who has the highest GPA, the highest standardized exam score and the highest grades.
This transformation is the consequence of our educational system’s design. It is designed in such a way that our scores determine our academic future. This, of course, has made many students value their grades, or their academic future, more than what they actually learn. In this design, students are willing to cheat, lie and steal other people’s work in order to avoid failing and thus, potentially ruining their academic future.
One of the main consequences of our current educational system, which measures students on a wide variety of purely numerical and objective methods, is that it is incentivizing students to act dishonestly when it comes to classwork. Originally designed to offer students the incentive to study and learn, the educational community was strategically incorporated by different reward systems that sought to reward good academic behavior — think of golden stars, bonus points and grade A’s. But this economization of our educational system seems to have miscalculated the fact that by incentivizing students, it launched them into a type of “hunger games” for academic success and reward, in which the importance of learning is not factored in, causing the desire for reward to obscure our human desire for knowledge.
But what if our academic future did not depend on numbers and letters? What if instead of measuring a student’s academic capabilities with numbers, his capabilities were measured by how much he actually learned? What would be different? By revolutionizing this evaluation system and taking a completely different approach, students will no longer be incentivized to partake in dishonest academic scandals such as the one that shook Stuyvesant High School. I believe if these changes were made, plagiarism and academic dishonesty would not be cheating the system — engaging would be cheating oneself.
By purposely incurring an attitude that revolves around academic fraud, a student will no longer expect an incentive at the other end. Economically speaking, the most effective remedy to academic dishonesty seems to be removing a student’s incentive to “work hard” — that is, removing the entire reward structure from the educational environment. A student’s incentive should be his desire for knowledge and wisdom, not a higher SAT score or a higher GPA. This capitalist component is a system that should not invade schools or colleges.
Carlos Lopez is a Viewpoint writer.
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