A better way to prevent student cheating

If faculty cast cheating as an issue of justice, they won't have to play cop

As another academic year draws to a close, amid a rushed flurry of final exams and term papers, it's time for professors to play their least favorite role: cop. With some surveys finding that up to three-quarters of college students cheat, faculty and administrators are making a bigger push for integrity. What most still lack, however, is a compelling moral argument against cheating.

A growing number of universities have enacted honor codes, but many of these codes - along with campus efforts to publicize them - fail to make a strong case for why cheating is wrong. Often they invoke fuzzy ideals of honor or, conversely, dwell on the negative consequences for cheaters who are caught. Neither approach gets very far - not these days, anyway.

Honor, with its emphasis on doing the right thing for its own sake, is no match for the anxious cynicism of many college students. This point was driven home to me by a junior I met last year in North Carolina. Why not cheat, he argued, given how many of America's most successful people cut corners to get where they are? Cheating is how the real world works, he said. Look at the politicians who lie or the sluggers who take steroids, or the CEOs who cook the books. The student also pointed to the hurdles he faced as he tried to get ahead: high tuition costs, heavy student loans, low-paying jobs without benefits. America wasn't a fair place for kids like him, so it made sense to try to level the playing field by bending a few rules.

Many young people take this bleak view. A 2004 poll of high school students found that 59 percent agreed that "successful people do what they have to do to win, even if others consider it cheating." Young people believe in honor and value integrity; they also worry that living by these beliefs could mean ending up as a loser. In justifying her cheating, one student told a researcher: "Good grades can make the difference between going to medical school and being a janitor." Few professors have a ready retort to this logic.

Appeals to self-interest only worsen the problem. If you tell a student that she shouldn't cheat because she might get caught, or that she's "just cheating herself" by not learning the material, or that integrity is an asset in life to be cultivated, she might respond - as the student I met in North Carolina did - by spelling out the ways that successful cheating could advance one's self-interest, especially if "everybody else" is doing it.

Students with a strong sense of right and wrong, learned early in life, may be more willing to sacrifice personal advancement for the sake of their values. Some research has shown, for instance, that students with a theistic outlook are less likely to cheat. But most colleges aren't in the position to reshape students' character at this level. Likewise, our universities have limited influence over the broader socioeconomic trends that help fuel cheating, such as rising economic inequality and increasing middle-class insecurity.

What can faculty and administrators do to stem epidemic cheating? Their best hope is to cast cheating as an issue of justice. Students may be cynical about what it takes to succeed these days, but they do care about fairness. And cheating is nothing if not unfair. Cheaters get rewards they don't deserve, like scholarships, admission to college or grad school, internships, and jobs. Cheating is the antithesis of equal opportunity - the notion that we all should have a fair shot at success and that the people who get rewarded are the people who deserve those rewards because they worked the hardest.

Many students understand that the ideal of equal opportunity is threatened in an era of rising inequality. Quite a few say they want to do something about this. Anticheating efforts offer a way to build, on campus, a microcosm of the kind of society they want to live in - one with a level playing field for all. Some students see this and are organizing to fight cheating. Maybe academic integrity will never become a great campus cause. But if faculty can cast this issue as a matter of justice, and empower students to take action, perhaps some day they won't have to spend so much time playing cop.

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U.N. making homeschooling illegal?

Threat seen from U.S. judges who bow to child-rights treaty

A U.N. treaty conferring rights to children could make homeschooling illegal in the U.S. even though the Senate has not ratified it, a homeschooling association warns. Michael Farris, chairman and general counsel of the Home School Legal Defense Association, or HSLDA, believes the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child could be binding on U.S. citizens because of activist judges, reports LifeSite News.

Farris said that according to a new interpretation of "customary international law," some U.S. judges have ruled the convention applies to American parents. "In the 2002 case of Beharry v. Reno, one federal court said that even though the convention was never ratified, it still has an impact on American law," Farris explained, according to LifeSiteNews. "The fact that virtually every other nation in the world has adopted it has made it part of customary international law, and it means that it should be considered part of American jurisprudence."

The convention places severe limitations on a parent's right to direct and train their children, Farris contends. The HSLDA produced a report in 1993 showing that under Article 13, parents could be subject to prosecution for any attempt to prevent their children from interacting with material they deem unacceptable. Under Article 14, children are guaranteed "freedom of thought, conscience and religion," which suggests they have a legal right to object to all religious training. Further, under Article 15, the child has a right to "freedom of association." "If this measure were to be taken seriously, parents could be prevented from forbidding their child to associate with people deemed to be objectionable companions," the HSLDA report explained.

Farris pointed out that in 1995 the United Kingdom was deemed out of compliance with the convention "because it allowed parents to remove their children from public school sex-education classes without consulting the child." Farris argues, according to LifeSiteNews, that "by the same reasoning, parents would be denied the ability to homeschool their children unless the government first talked with their children and the government decided what was best. This committee would even have the right to determine what religious teaching, if any, served the child's best interest."

Offering solutions, Farris suggests Congress use its power to define customary law and modify the jurisdiction of federal courts. "Congress needs to address this issue of judicial tyranny by enacting legislation that limits the definition of customary international law to include only provisions of treaties that Congress has ratified," he said. Farris also suggested Congress could pass a constitutional amendment stating explicitly that no provision of any international agreement can supersede the constitutional rights of an American citizen. He pointed out two such amendments have been proposed in Congress.

Finally, he says specific threats to parental rights can be solved by "putting a clear parents' rights amendment into the black and white text of the United States Constitution."

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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