A friend of mine who serves on the local school board brought this issue to my attention.
I wonder what people here think.
Is this an aberration, or a trend? Is integrity diminishing in the US? And if so, why?
If it's happening, does it matter? And if so, what should be done about it?
The article:
Teacher resigns over plagiarism fight
February 7, 2002 Posted: 8:04 AM EST (1304 GMT)
PIPER, Kansas (AP) -- High school
teacher Christine Pelton wasted no
time after discovering that nearly a
fifth of her biology students had
plagiarized their semester projects
from the Internet.
She had received her rural Kansas
district's backing before when she
accused students of cheating, and she
expected it again this time after failing
the 28 sophomores.
Her principal and superintendent agreed:
It was plagiarism and the students
should get a zero for the assignment.
But after parents complained, the Piper
School Board ordered her to go easier
on the guilty.
Pelton resigned in protest in an episode that some say reflects a national decline
in integrity.
"This kind of thing is happening every day around the country, where people
with integrity are not being backed by their organization," said Michael
Josephson, founder and president of the Josephson Institute of Ethics in Marina
del Rey, Calif.
Josephson pointed to the Enron bankruptcy scandal, in which an executive
whistle-blower had warned superiors about the potential consequences of energy
trader's off-the-books business deals.
Also in recent months, some of the nation's top historians, including Stephen
Ambrose, have been accused of borrowing passages from other authors without
proper credit.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis was suspended without pay for a
year from Mount Holyoke College after lying to his students about serving in
Vietnam. Notre Dame University football coach George O'Leary resigned after
falsifying his athletic and academic achievements on his resume.
"It's so hard to keep sending the message that character counts when you have
officials saying it doesn't count that much," Josephson said.
In Piper, about 20 miles west of Kansas City, Mo., students got that message
loud and clear, Pelton said.
"The students no longer listened to what I had to say," she said. "They knew if
they didn't like anything in my classroom from here on out, they can just go to
the school board and complain."
Piper High School junior Brandon Schmalz, 17, agreed. "That was bad. She was
right, and they were wrong," Schmalz said of the board.
Pelton, 26, resigned days after the board ordered her to give the students partial
credit and to decrease the project's value from 50 percent of the final course
grade to 30 percent.
Board president Chris McCord did not give a reason for the Dec. 11 decision,
which was made behind closed doors. He said it was not prompted by par ents'
complaints.
"If I had known all the publicity that would have come with this, I would still
make the same decision," McCord said.
One of the complaining parents was Theresa Woolley, who told The Kansas City
Star that her daughter did not plagiarize. Rather, her daughter was not sure how
much she needed to rewrite research material, she said.
But Pelton said the course syllabus, which she required students to sign, warned
of the consequences of cheating and plagiarism.
Rutgers University professor of management Donald McCabe, who has
researched academic dishonesty in high schools and colleges, said many teachers
ignore cheating, and the Kansas episode illustrates why.
"Parents are going to complain to principals and the school board, and teachers
feel there's no reason to believe they'll get support," said McCabe, whose study
of high school students in 2000-01 found that 74 percent had cheated or
plagiarized during the prior year.
What is worse, McCabe said, is that tolerance of dishonesty disheartens other
students, who have to compete with the cheaters to get into college.
"If they see teachers looking the other way, students feel compelled to participate
even though it makes them uncomfortable," McCabe said. "The loss of that
sense of fairness is the fundamental reason students cheat."
In Kansas, at least a dozen teachers have said they plan to leave the district after
the school year because of the episode, said Lee Quisenberry, a teachers union
representative.
"You can get away with anything whether you're honest or not," Pelton said. The
board's decision hurt "the honest people, and that's the worst thing about it."
fyi.cnn.com
Here's a somewhat more detailed article, which gives the name of the program she used to detect the plagiarism.
kansascity.com
What's interesting is that apparently the school board doesn't consider plagiarism cheating, since they said the policy on cheating didn't apply to plagiarism. |
