Plagiarism case sends wrong message to kids

Parents who want to teach their children about morals and values don’t have to resort to the fables in storybooks.

With so much high-profile deceit in the world today, our newspapers provide a wealth of instructional material about the real-life consequences of cheating and the damage it can cause.

Cheaters abound. They pop up in the Olympics, where a skating judge is found to have thrown her vote. They show up in academia, where a celebrated historian is discovered to have lifted passages from other authors without proper attribution. In amateur sports, a football coach fudges his resume and is forced from his job at a prestigious university. In the business world, cheating at the highest level ultimately brings down one of the country’s biggest corporations.

Each scandal can be seen as a morality tale for our time, an ethics lesson that can teach youngsters a lot about the differences between right and wrong.

But how do we begin to explain the lesson taught recently in Kansas, where blatant cheating by a group of high school students was not only condoned but rewarded in the end?

At a high school in Piper, Kan., a teacher named Christine Pelton assigned 118 sophomores in her biology classes to write essays about a variety of tree leaves they had collected. Pelton made it clear to her students beforehand what plagiarism meant and that it would not be allowed. Included in a list of class rules, which were signed by the students and their parents, was the stipulation that “all work turned in by students must be completely their own.” Yet as Pelton later reviewed her students’ papers, she noticed that many of them contained whole passages that were nearly identical to one another. Her investigation revealed that 28 of the 118 students had copied material, word for word, from the same Internet site and handed it in as their own work.

So Pelton did what she thought was right: She gave the 28 offenders no credit for their papers. Because the assignment counted for 50 percent of the grade, the students were going to fail for the semester. It would be a hard lesson, of course, but a valuable one – something the students might do well to remember as they went on to become, let’s say, historians, football coaches, Olympic judges or corporate executives.

But that lesson was lost entirely when some of the parents complained. They whined that the teacher had been too harsh, and that the failing grades would look bad on the transcripts of their college-bound kids. They suggested that their children might not have fully grasped the concept of plagiarism, after all, and were being made to suffer unfairly. The principal and superintendent backed Pelton, but the school board caved in to the parents’ protests and overruled the teacher. The board then ordered that the students be given partial credit for their plagiarized papers, and that the assignment count for only 30 percent of the final grade. The students celebrated their victory, telling their teacher they no longer had to listen to her. Pelton resigned her position.

So what were the real-life lessons these 28 triumphant high school students took from their experience?

Well, they learned that cheating is OK, for one thing, as long as you’ve got indulgent parents and a spineless school board to back you up. They learned that there are authority figures – adults who are supposed to serve as role models for proper behavior – who have so little respect for honest work that they were willing to insult those students who tried to put in the effort and follow the well-prescribed rules. The students learned, too, that integrity and principle can never hope to win out against power and influence.

Poor kids. Perhaps one day they’ll understand that they’re the ones who really got cheated in the end.