District examines 'academic dishonesty'

The use of crib notes or cheat sheets for a test, copying a friend's essay, paying somebody to write an essay, plagiarism and other forms of cheating in school used to be easy to define, but Las Virgenes Unified School District board members grappled with the gray area of "academic dishonesty" at the mid-August meeting.

What if a student lifts passages and research information from his or her own stellar research paper completed a year earlier to use for a current assignment? What if a student already read the novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" in middle school and decides to skip rereading the book when it's assigned in high school, instead watching the movie and skimming Spark Notes, the study guides that summarize plot, characters, motivations, etc.? Are these students cheating?

Jim Nielsen, the district's director of secondary education, opened the discussion of "academic dishonesty" with the intent of clarifying board policy on cheating.

"I prefer to call it academic honesty," Board President Cindy Iser said.

The board policy needed updating, Nielsen said. It was included in the 2006/2007 Legal Notification Handbook distributed to all students, parents and staff in the district.

Board members reviewed a lengthy list of cheating possibilities, including 11 ways to cheat on an exam, eight ways to plagiarize assignments and several other miscellaneous forms of cheating. The definition of academic dishonesty was provided by the Josephson Institute of Ethics and a program called "Character Counts."

Copying another student's test answers is passé. Assistant Superintendent of Education Joe Nardo said technology has opened the door to many new cheating avenues. With the advent of cellphones with cameras, students can snap a photo of a test question to pass along to friends, or two or more students could use their cellphones within the same class to textmessage answers to each other.

Board member Pat Schulz wondered why consequences for cheating were left to the discretion of administrators at individual schools, particularly at the high school level.

Issues differ for elementary, middle and high school, Nielsen said. He added school principals must collaborate to develop consistent policies between grade levels or elementary schools versus secondary schools.

Although the handbook now clearly outlines what most teachers consider cheating, board members want teachers to address ethical behavior in classes.

"Strong ethics training could really be a basis for heading off problems, and I would like to see us go in the direction of really incorporating strong ethics training throughout the curriculum for all our students," Schulz said. "I feel we have a really strong obligation."

"To have a policy and to have a punitive response is just one way that you might minimize cheating," Iser said. "But the real way cheating is minimized is to teach students why academic honesty matters. And that's the component that we really need to have."

Students' lifting of their own work to use for another class is called "self plagiarism," according to the Josephson Institute of Ethics.

But the term "self plagiarism" rattled some board members, since the definition of plagiarism ranges from copying another student's work to failing to use quote marks correctly or properly attribute paraphrased passages.

Iser argued that students who used portions of their own previous work were not plagiarists. She wasn't even sure whether the practice was necessarily dishonest.

"I think just from my own experience in my doctoral work, certainly once you create a unique piece of research that is your own, you can write it and rewrite it a hundred different ways and publish it in a hundred different places-it's still yours...," Superintendent Sandra Smyser said.

The solution, Smyser said, was for students to consult with teachers before handing in work that includes information from previous assignments. The difference, she said, is whether a student intends to deceive a teacher.

Board members agreed that students need to be taught ethical behavior.

"Every single teacher should include some sort of ethics lesson in the curriculum," Schulz said.

Board member Gordon Whitehead said ethical behavior should be woven into the curriculum, and teachers should not be "preaching to kids for five or ten minutes." He acknowledged the difficulty of ethics training because it's not included in standards-based instruction.

"I think having the ethical tools to approach your school work falls in the same category as having study skills," board member Dave Moorman said.

"It seems to me," he said, "that the opportune time to really get this point across, to be able to set the kids up for success, is at the tail end of their elementary years before they step into middle school when they are a lot more on their own and a lot less monitored by their teachers as far as their study skills and their work habits."