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So, as final exams loomed and pressure built last June at Hanover High School, some students hatched a scheme for acing the tests: One evening after school was out, a group of students entered the school building, authorities say. While some stood sentry in hallways, others entered a classroom and used stolen keys to break into a teacher's filing cabinet and steal exams for advanced math honors, advanced math, Algebra II, and calculus. Five days later, another group stole chemistry finals. In total, some 50 students are suspected of participating in the thefts, either helping to plan them or receiving answers from stolen exams.</p>
<p>Rather than issuing suspensions or grade demotions, school officials notified police. And after a seven-week investigation, the police prosecutor handling the case brought criminal charges against nine students. Last week, the prosecutor notified the nine students' parents that if they chose to take the cases to trial, he could raise misdemeanor charges to felonies, which carry possible prison terms of 3 1/2 to seven years.</p>
<p>Parents of the accused are furious and frantically trying to reduce charges to violations that carry no criminal penalties, penalties they say could harm their children's chances of attending college or securing employment. The scandal has divided the community, with some residents laying blame squarely on the nine accused students - dubbed "the Notorious Nine" - while others have questioned whether the intense competitiveness of 750-student Hanover High forced students into positions of having to cheat.
<p>my favorite line 'parents are furious"! it sounds like they are furious with the wrong people!! they should be furious with their cheating, stealing kids, not the schooland police...</p>
<p>No matter how you look at it, those are some very serious crimes. It would break my heart if my children were ever involved in something like that.</p>
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penalties they say could harm their children's chances of attending college
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<p>If the college has its act together, it should reduce the chances of attending for anyone who can definitely be identified as part of the cheating ring, whether or not the cheater is charged with a felony. I'll let the colleges decide how much contrition might give a kid a second chance, but they should all be wary of cheaters.</p>
<p>Though I agree that the students should take full responsibility for their actions and be held legally accountable, I also think that there is something to the idea that an intensely competitive high school can contribute to an atmosphere in which many kids will cheat. They won't be "forced to" cheat, of course - no one ever is. I do think there's an opportunity here for parents and school officials to think about what they might do to communicate better values from an early age.</p>
<p>This is not just the common garden variety cheating. These kids were gutsy reprobates- they broke into the school and stole. It's not the same thing as asking your friend what he got for question number 25 on the homework. Why would a college want or need students who are burglars?</p>
<p>"This kid has never before cheated? Breaking into a school is 'a mistake'? Wow."</p>
<p>That's a good point. Getting from total innocence to breaking and entering would either require a huge leap or a history of getting away with stuff. I find this quite disturbing.</p>
<p>Top values to communicate: Don't cheat, don't burgle. You break in, you pay for it.`</p>
<p>I agree with MotherofTwo. It must have taken a lot of planning to carry this off. That time and effort could have been better spent learning the subjects. As for the furious parents, they could have inculcated the appropriate values to their kids instead of spending time defending the indefensible.</p>
<p>I wonder how many of the same parents would have been angry and outraged over this "one mistake" ruining kid's lives had the burglars been students not aiming for college and their goal had been easy cash from the drink box or destruction of property instead of tests. (I'm betting not many.)</p>
<p>It just goes to show that when you do stupid stuff, you put yourself at the mercy of other people, i.e. the police, school administrators, the press.......</p>
<p>I've always tried to communicate to my kids that you want to maintain control over the course of your own life and giving that control to someone else is always awful.</p>
<p>curm's post reminds me- A teacher at my kids' hs once told me- "I can put a $20 bill on the top of my desk and leave it there all day and no one will touch it. Yet if the kids know the answer key is in my desk drawer, it won't last half the day."</p>
<p>So here's the philosophical test question: Which is more reprehensible- stealing some money from the teacher's purse in some impoverished school; or stealing the answer key from the teacher's filing cabinet at a posh private school?</p>
<p>I say the answer key theft is, because it's totally unnecessary, while stealing money is at least understandable in some cases.</p>
<p>The argument about being under pressure can be applied to anything- I could say, "My kids have to cheat to make straight A's so they can go to Harvard". Where does the rationalization end?</p>
And that reminds me of how I used to describe a close friend - "I'd leave him alone with a bag of money I hadn't counted, but I wouldn't leave him alone with my date. " ;)</p>
<p>I guess they can cheat until they make District Attorney and get caught (Duke Lacrosse).</p>
<p>I wonder what everyone's opinion is about the parents being interviewed on this issue. Their names are now in the paper, which will probably be archived somewhere online forever, whereas if they had remained silent their kid's names would be in some court record and - maybe? - not anywhere else. As an experiment I've googled names from our town's police blotter, and it's fairly easy to find out who these people are in a broader sense. Just another reason to behave oneself and inculcate ethics into our kids.</p>
<p>"My kids have to cheat to make straight A's so they can go to Harvard". Where does the rationalization end?"</p>
<p>My question is where does that rationalization start? What have these students done or rationalized along the way to the point at which these acts would be acceptable? What other things have the parents explained or "outraged" away in prior years? In my middle-class world, this is a very Big Deal.</p>
<p>The kids whose parents are identified are described as only being lookouts. Yeah, right, as if they did not know they were aiding and abetting a break-in and burglary; as if they had not participated in its planning; as if they did not expect to benefit from this crime. I am dismayed that this crime is described as just a "mistake." It's not exactly like making a mistake on a problem set or taking a wrong turn on the road.
I'm sure that if any of these parents had their house burgled, they'd call for police action pronto. I'm sure that if the columnist had his writings copied without acknowledgment by someone else, he'd cry intellectual property theft.</p>
<p>However, I have a feeling that cheating has reached new heights in today's environment, and I'm not certain why. Some of it is related to the level of competitiveness and grade inflation.</p>
<p>But some of it, I believe, relates to the administrations and teachers not "caring" about it as much as they used to. Years ago there were more strict rules about where you could sit during exams, what you could have with you, etc etc. And there weren't so many group projects and grades that arose from "long term" projects where parents could do the work themselves. [Look at the thread on the science contest prize winners.]</p>
<p>After seeing a lot of this stuff, and seeing others get away with things, I think its not completely unpredictable that some students will be tempted to take the low road. These particular ones certainly weren't very smart about planning their crime though.</p>
<p>dadx,
You have a good point with the take-home projects. When I was going to school, we didn't have a lot of home projects. They gave us homework- but it was more "busy work"- arithmetic practice, spelling practice, grammar fill-in-the-blanks, stuff like that. Nothing that parents would need to help with. The real projects- dioramas, group presentations,posters,re-inactments,science experiments- we did in class. We had much less homework than my kids did, however, it seems like we did just as well if not better in the long run (probably because we were actually doing all the work ourselves!). </p>
<p>My kids had tons of graded at-home projects that became nothing less than one-upmanship on the part of parents. Woe to the poor kid who painstakingly pencils in his science fair board data and results, in his very own fourth grade handwriting. Even if he is not graded down (most teachers recognize this for what it is and actually appreciate the kid doing it all on his own), he is embarassed by all the other kids' wowzie projects and fancy-shmancy word-processed science fair boards, complete with digital pictures, spreadsheets, and computer generated graphs. </p>
<p>What does all this teach kids at a very young age? That it's perfectly OK to take credit for someone else's work!</p>
<p>a mistake is when you drop the milk or forget to turn in your homework. a crime is when you break into a school and steal exams. if parents don't teach lessons on how to behave, society will, and probobly not as pleasantly..</p>