Title: Academic Dishonesty and the Culture of Assessment
Abstract: Mention the escalation of academic dishonesty and most of us working in education are immediately inclined to whistle for our moral high horse. But too much moralistic tongue-clicking can blind us to the ways in which we who constitute the system contribute to the very malady we lament. For if academic dishonesty is like a disease--and we repeatedly hear it described as an epidemic--we may all be carriers, even cultivators, of the virus that causes it. Let me explain. Socrates sought to understand the essence of a thing by asking what all instances of it have in common. This approach is open to well-known objections, but it can have its uses. In the present case, for example, I think it leads to the following important observation: all instances of academic dishonesty are attempts to appear cleverer, more knowledgeable, more skillful, or more industrious than one really is. Buying or copying a term paper, plagiarizing from the Internet, using a crib sheet on an exam, accessing external assistance from beyond the exam room by means of a cell phone, fabricating a lab report, having another student sign one's name on an attendance sheet--all such practices serve this same purpose. The goal is to produce an appearance that is more impressive than the reality. So far, so obvious, you might say. But what is not so obvious--and this is a key point in the argument I am making--is that this same prioritizing of appearance over reality permeates much of our education system. It is endorsed by parents, teachers, and administrators, and it is encouraged by many of our well-intentioned pedagogical practices. Students absorb this ordering of values over many years, especially in high school; so by the time they reach college they have been marinating in the toxin for a long time. Here are some examples of what I mean. The College Board, The Princeton Review, Kaplan and many other organizations offer extensive advice on test-taking strategies for students taking SATs, GREs, AP exams, and so on. Most of us view such guidance as innocent and making use of it as sensible; but underlying it is an attitude that should give us pause. Here is how The Princeton Review describes its approach to cracking the new SAT: This book will show you how to exploit the standardized format of the SAT. ETS uses the same tricks over and over again; once you become aware of them, you won't fall for them ... Our job isn't to teach you math or English ... Instead we're going to teach you the SAT. You'll soon see that the SAT involves a very different skill set.... You don't have to prove that you know why your answer is correct. The only thing EST's scoring machine cares about is the answer you come up with. If you darken the right space on your answer sheet, you'll get credit, even if you didn't quite understand the question. (The Princeton Review, Cracking the New SAT (New York: Random House, 2006), pp. 10-12.) There is nothing surprising here. But we should reflect on both the message being conveyed and the alternative view that is being undermined. The message conveyed is that although SAT scores are supposed to reflect knowledge and abilities within a field, there are clever stratagems you can use to boost your scores beyond what you would get if you just relied on what you actually know. These test-prep power tactics (as SparkNotes calls them) are, in effect, ways of making yourself look smarter than you are. The view being undermined is that what really matters is genuine understanding of the material: achieve this--ideally on the basis of an interest in the subject and a love of learning--and the tests can take care of themselves. Or consider a specific test-preparation methodology: using vocabulary lists to prepare for the verbal section of the SAT. One idea behind the test, presumably, is to gauge the range and depth of a student's grasp of English. …
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-09-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 5
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