Ethics for Kids

Six weeks ago I mentioned in this blog that the College Board reported reading scores on the SAT at an all-time low. A few weeks later the news was of a scandal: cheating on the SAT. Among other stories was one of a 19-year-old college student who was using fake IDs to take the SAT for high school students at $2,500 a pop. Why?

There are answers, both general and specific. The SAT may be viewed as overemphasized. Students (and their parents) may think the stakes are so high that cheating can be justified. If your SAT score is too low it will sink your chances of getting into the college of your choice, even though everything else on your resume indicates you are qualified and would be successful there. This may seem especially unfair if you consider that the "experts," who once agreed that SAT scores foretold academic success in college better than any other single predictor, now say the scores correlate best with family income - and not so well at all with college performance. As family income rises, they say, resources that enable intensive test preparation are more abundant, overwhelming the test's ability to distinguish among students of varying levels of academic talent.

There are also more general arguments used to justify cheating. As with the SAT, all sorts of other tests may be considered unfair. A student may rationalize cheating by deciding that his inability to perform well on tests in a high school or college course reflects poor teaching rather than any lack of effort or aptitude on his part. Or, perhaps, the teacher is competent in the classroom but insists on writing exams that are so difficult as to invite cheating.

Among the more disturbing justifications is that "everyone is doing it." The idea here is that the inclination to seek unfair advantage (or mitigate a disadvantage perceived as unfair) is so widespread that one is placed at a disadvantage by not doing what one believes all his fellows are doing to get ahead.

A well-known example of this is the use of anabolic steroids in competitive athletics. Many players came to believe that "everyone" was doing it. That meant anyone who chose to rely on the combination of innate ability, good nutrition, and hard work through training and practice was placing himself at a competitive disadvantage. Added to that was the rationalization that the logical principles employed to decide which performance-enhancing substances were permitted and which were banned were elusive at best, as this was often a matter of whether there were tests available to discover their use.

Why, you might ask, am I so interested in the justifications used for cheating?

For nearly all of my career I have had an intense interest in ethics, especially biomedical and professional ethics. So many of the most intriguing challenges we face in the practice of medicine relate to ethical dilemmas. That term deserves a definition. An ethical dilemma arises when the right and wrong in a situation are not entirely clear. The dilemma can then be framed in terms of what we call competing interests. Those interests must be described and evaluated and weighed against each other. We try to decide which interests deserve greater weight or higher priority. We have a set of ethical principles to guide our analysis.

When I began looking into the matter of students cheating, I noticed that, for much of the analysis of the problem, journalists went to ethicists. Clearly the thinking is that widespread cheating represents a failure in our society to communicate the well-developed ethical values of one generation to the next. Or does it?

News outlets in recent years have been full of stories about institutionalized cheating in public schools to boost kids' scores on standardized tests and avoid missing benchmark targets set by federal legislation for schools' performance. This means students are getting the message directly from their teachers that cheating is OK.

What about parents? According to a recent report on National Public Radio, two thirds of parents think cheating by students is "no big deal" and "all students do it." Is it any wonder, with these kinds of attitudes among parents and teachers, that most students now cheat? Yes, that's right, most students. Surveys of college students in the 1940s found that 20% admitted to cheating at some time. Today those numbers range from 75-98%. It may be that the real number in the 1940s was higher than the number who admitted it, because of the stigma attached to cheating, which is clearly now much less. But today's percentages are shocking.

It doesn't have to be this way. At the K-12 school attended by my daughters, penalties for cheating were harsh (but appropriate). High school students had an ethics class. I hope my daughters learned nothing in that class they had not already been taught in the home. Cheating does not pose an ethical dilemma. There are no legitimate competing interests. Right and wrong are clear. We must teach our children this; we must demand that their teachers do the same; and we must all consistently model the behavior we know is right.

Update, 10-22-2012

In 1998 Mark McGwire set a new single-season record for home runs with 70, surpassing the longstanding record held by Roger Maris (61 in '61).  Everything about McGwire seemed squeaky clean, but rumors of use of anabolic steroids didn't take long to bubble up.  McGwire finally admitted it in 2010.  Barry Bonds set a new record for home runs in a single season with 73 in 2001.  And he passed Hank Aaron and The Babe with 762 career home runs.  He is the only major leaguer to have accumulated more than 500 each of home runs and stolen bases in a career.  The records go on and on. But in the minds of baseball purists, every one of them should be marked with an asterisk, because Bonds used performance-enhancing anabolic steroids for much of his career.

Unlike baseball, other sports actually take things away from cheaters.  Olympic gold medals, for example.  Just ask Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson about his 1988 gold in the 100 meters.

And now, after years of swirling controversy, the Union Cycliste International has stripped Lance Armstrong of all seven of his Tour de France championships.  The decision follows this month's finding by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency that there is "overwhelming" evidence that Armstrong was involved as a professional cyclist in "the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program."

Really, Lance?  After many years of being idolized by everyone for astonishing athletic accomplishments after winning your battle with cancer?  What about all those yellow bracelets honoring those fighting similar battles and symbolizing the work of your foundation?  What about Athletes for Hope?

Now, more than ever, we must redouble our efforts to teach our kids about playing by the rules in all spheres of life.  And we should thank the Union Cycliste International for reminding us all that cheating has consequences.