Seventy students were involved in a pattern of smartphone-enabled cheating last month at Stuyvesant High School, New York City officials said Monday, describing an episode that has blemished one of the country’s most prestigious public schools.
The cheating involved several state exams and was uncovered after a cellphone was confiscated from a 16-year-old junior during a citywide language exam on June 18, according to a city Department of Education investigation.
Cellphones are not permitted in city schools, and when officials looked into the student’s phone, they found a trail of text messages, including photos of test pages, that suggested pupils had been sharing information about state Regents exams while they were taking them.
Sixty-nine students had received the messages and responded to them, the department said.
FULL ARTICLE.
CM graphic of the year? Congrats to whoever created this one!
ReplyDeleteSomewhere, on a golf course, Cal is blushing.
DeleteLeslie K.
The "vidshiz" button (icon?) cracked me up.
DeleteWhat a shame. My Dad went to Stuyvesant: it's just as well that he didn't live to see this. He rode the subway in from Brooklyn every day, but that was in 1922.
ReplyDeleteStudents! Those p'tach have no honor!
ReplyDeleteIs anyone really surprised by this?
ReplyDeleteStudents cheat. Schools cheat. Parents cheat. Corporations cheat. Politicians cheat. Everybody cheats.
I think I just wrote my first children's book.
One Cheat,
DeleteTwo Cheat,
Red Cheat,
Blue Cheat.
I picked up a book a few months ago called "The Cheating Culture" or something like that. I've haven't read it yet, but it the dust jacket made it sound interesting enough to get.
DeleteAs ye live by high stakes testing, so shall ye aid and abet in cheating.
ReplyDeleteI began my teaching career in NYC, but wasn't raised in NYS. I had no idea how New York had embraced 'teaching to the test' LONG before No Child Left Behind mandated it.
DeleteParticularly in NYC, there is a particular mythos in pedagogy regarding the Regents Exams -- the HS level exams required in several subjects in order to graduate. Originally an honors distinction, after NCLB, they became the qualifying exams.
As you can imagine, with the flip of a calendar, what used to be the honors requirements became the basic requirements which lead to instantaneous rejiggering of passing scores.
I spent a year in a private school hoping to avoid the "do anything to let them pass" mentality of NYC. Sadly, in a semi-exclusive suburban private school, the administration engaged in wholesale cheating -- e.g. ignoring qualifying requirements, "finding" extra points to bump just failing grades -- in order to maintain their fabricated 100% graduation rate.
I did try to alert education officials about the wholesale institutional cheating in the private school but got no response.
After that experience, I immediately put plans into motion to advance my education and move to the college level.
Not actually sure anything improved.
A (n unusually brief) Jeremiad for our times.
DeleteAs a strange coincidence, I teach at SCCC and this past spring, I caught two students cheating on a take home exam (one was copying answers from the other's paper as I entered the classroom). I confronted both students and they denied doing so and I filed a complaint with the Dean of Students.
ReplyDeleteI attended a hearing where one of the students was present, along with 2 faculty members and a student representative. The long and short of it was, after not hearing from the Dean for 6 weeks, I called to ask what happened. She sent me a curt email telling me the student were found not to have violated the policy on academic dishonesty.
The lesson I learned from all this is to exercise my option under the policy for dishonesty-if you catch a student cheating, you can fail the student right then and there and let the student then file a grievance. Whatever the outcome, the Dean cannot override your giving the student an F.
I'm not about to excuse cheating, ever, for any reason (okay, maybe under a dictatorial regime where lives are at stake, but not in the U.S.). But as a resident of a community where college-entrance competition is similarly intense, and the subject of college applications hence similarly fraught, I think the appropriate answer to this is not a(nother) lecture on honor and integrity, but a workshop focused on helping students identify which schools other than Ivy/MIT/Stanford would be good fits for them, not as "safety schools," but as places they'd really like to go (and *know* why they'd really like to go there). In fact, maybe doing some of the groundwork for putting together such a class would be a good community service activity for the 69 students mentioned above. Besides, they're going to need the information (or at least I hope so).
ReplyDelete