<p>Most of the competitive high schools in the US. It’s called Naviance. Stuy is NOT posting the GPAs of current students; it does post the equivalent of Naviance. So, juniors look at the stats for the previous year. The kid really wants to go to, e.g. Columbia, for perfectly valid reasons.The lowest GPA of anyone admitted to Columbia the previous year was 96.8 (I’m making up a #–I haven’t a clue as to what the real number would be.) The kid’s current average is a 95.6. It’s SO tempting to think if I just cheat in that one subject I struggle a bit with I can get it up to the zone where I have at least a chance of getting in. </p>
<p>Naviance is a two-edged sword. It’s a wonderful too for figuring out safety, match and reach schools, but it also puts pressure on kids to get their gpa’s up to certain levels to get into their dream colleges.</p>
<p>PS posted today at about 2:45 pm. Something is wrong with the time machine on CC. My post should be at the end of page 2.</p>
<p>I’m just trying to figure out if we have more cheating now than we used to have. (I don’t recall my friends and I cheating, and we were the AP kids in our HS). And if this is just kind of the final result of the intense competition for the top colleges, which we did not have when I was in HS.</p>
<p>My kids aren’t really gunners, school wise, so I don’t think I fully “get” the level of pressure some of these academic types are feeling at this age, at all, and I wonder if this culture of cheating is infecting many of our more competitive schools like an ineradicable virus caused by an intolerable pressure to be perfect.</p>
<p>Ah yes, the terror of the group project. More tears were shed, more parental involvement induced (OMG the tales I could tell about a particular Father and his manipulations and undermining of my D during a ‘collaborative’ science project) and more actual learning about the inherent inequality of the redistribution of grade wealth can not be found My S in particular was regularly matched with the star gazers of the class.</p>
<p>^Overlooked the fact that the more kid does, the more he learns. Actully, these type of students have to restrain themselves later on. In Med. School, for example, everybody wants to talk during group discussion. Everybody wants to cut in Anatomy Lab, observing is not as interesting. Many High Schoolers who are used to doing most (if not all) group work, lead group discussions in college, many others seek their help and they are getting ahead by providing help and learning material better this way. They also getting hand picked by profs for SI positions. This is not a bad thing to do everything for the entire group. It is a bad thing for the lazy ones who gave up their rights to learn to somebody else.</p>
<p>After he read the NY Times article about cheating at Stuyvesant, i asked my son, a sophomore, who is a top student, if he would be tempted to cheat if he were at that school. </p>
<p>He said, “No, I have integrity.”</p>
<p>Good answer, but then I asked him what if all your cheatingm classmates looked like they would get into better colleges than you. He found that harder to answer.</p>
<p>I’d trust that he’d do the right thing anyway, but he appreciated the temptation. </p>
<p>I guess I’m glad he’s not at that kind of a pressure cooker school.</p>
<p>I think more competition definitely forces people who would not normally cheat to take ‘extreme measures’. I’m still in HS and no longer go to my competitive one due to unfortunate circumstances, but god, there is SO much pressure to do well.</p>
<p>Straight As, do sports, do time consuming clubs, win awards, get internships/research positions etc. etc. There’s no time to go in and deeply ponder a book that you’re reading for AP lang because you have a monster APUSH assignment to do till 3 AM. Ugh, and don’t forget about those standardized tests and that committee you have to chair for a conference that’s 3 weeks for now. </p>
<p>And this was a school in which there were only 30 kids gunning for the top and no class rank. That being said, even the “average” kids ended up with at least 4-6 APs by graduation- the most competitive kids had 14 or more. </p>
<p>Granted, most kids in the ‘competitive’ group did get into Ivies/top schools/BS MD programs or huge scholarships, so it ended up being worth it, but it’s just a ton ton ton of pressure. </p>
<p>I, and many of my friends from that school routinely freak out and worry about failing and not meeting our goals. It’s a real grind. However, there’s not much cheating going on tests, at least because that school doesn’t post marks and admissions for the public and b) people are usually put into interesting classes by 10/11. People do exchange HW, but no one really cares about that. Most HW is busy work and anyone dumb enough to copy an essay deserves a 0. </p>
<p>In someways, i like how my new school has a schedule that doesn’t really allow for more than 4 APs a year. I have time to look into other things instead of working till 6 PM and going home to 5 hours of homework. If the kids were like the ones at my old school and the new school had more money/resources, it’d be really awesome.</p>
<p>Group projects…who thinks those are a good idea, really? I’ve seen both sides of this coin with my kids.</p>
<p>S, now in college, when grouped with high achieving girls, found that they’d do everything and he’d get the nice grade along with them. Senior year he had a brilliant teacher…she put 4 slightly slacker boys together on a huge project and they all HAD to do the work. And they got an A on it. </p>
<p>D, now a soph, is in the “does it all” category for the less ambitious guys placed in her groups.</p>
<p>Anyone else feel like it seems to be the girls in these groups that do most of the work? Especially when the grade includes a nice looking presentation, electronic or poster board or whatever?</p>
<p>I’m glad group projects are few and far between at our HS.</p>
<p>In theory, it gives students practice at what they will see in college and work.</p>
<p>In practice, the K-12 school environment will show a much greater variation in ability and motivation for a given project or subject than a college, graduate school, or work environment.</p>
<p>For example, the variation of ability and motivation in a high school history class (particularly a required one) compared to a college history class (which is taken as an elective, or especially a more advanced course taken by history majors). The high school class likely includes many slackers and others who are just not good or interested in history (and who would stay far away from history classes if they go to college), while the college class more likely includes mainly students who have some interest in the subject of the class.</p>
<p>In the work place, group projects are common, but (in theory anyway) people are assigned to them based on their presumed ability to contribute to the particular project.</p>
<p>Speaking as the mother of a son, no. My son had to endure girls endlessly yammering about their social lives, as well as bossy mother hens. He is very bright, very independent-minded, and simply preferred to do his own work, the reverse of the classic middle school pleaser-girl. Yes, it is probably true that the arts and crafts components of those horrendous group projects appealed more to some girls than to most boys…certainly more than it did to my kid. </p>
<p>I’ll give you an example. His science teacher in 7th grade was particularly into projects designed to engage girls with little interest in science. That was her mission as a teacher. The first one involved hypothesizing which flavor lifesaver would melt in the mouth the fastest, then conducting an “experiment” to test the hypothesis. This project, designed apparently to introduce the scientific method–with which my S and every other reasonably intelligent kid was completely familiar already–filled my S with contempt for the teacher. He despised her. She hated him. I’m sure the girly girls did cute art work on the project. But it added nothing whatever to the actual learning involved. And I’m sure that the smart girls who were interested in science were equally revolted by this BS.</p>
<p>Group projects:
In 24 years between two kids I’ve only seen group projects work three times.</p>
<p>Twice in elementary school science fairs where the kids picked each other for partners.</p>
<p>Once in middle school where the teacher had the class divided into four or so groups to produce magazine which she got a grant to get published. She had kids in the class write resumes and cover letters for jobs like editor and art director and she chose those jobs. Then the groups got together and decided on the magazine theme. Everyone had to write at least one article. Most of the work was done in class - articles were homework. If someone didn’t pull their weight she fired them and gave them boring English work instead. Worked like a charm. Only a handful of students ended up being fired. The magazines were really impressive. The teacher ended up getting an award for the project, and I was happy to write one of the recommendations for that award.</p>
<p>As to the original question of cheating - I know it occured. In my older son’s class somehow a group got a hold of an answer key to an APUSH test and passed it around. My son was clueless. Kids got a slap on the wrist basically - plenty went on to very good schools. (Though at least some of them had a bumpy road in those schools.)</p>
<p>Younger son mentioned to me that he had always assumed that sooner or later the “biggest cheaters” would get their comeuppance, but they all got into good schools too. </p>
<p>Personally, I wish there was more tattle-tailing. The kids know who is cheating, but as long as they are unwilling to rat out fellow student - the cheating won’t stop.</p>
<p>I was fascinated by the fact that the other kids are actually helping the other kids cheat. Why?</p>
<p>Growing up, my friends and I would never have asked each other to cheat. I’m not saying we were pollyannas. we were plenty problematic in our own ways, just not that way. We broke some rules, had some good clean fun, some not so clean, but we were pretty ethical, all round.</p>
<p>Sometimes I think we’ve tightened up soooo hard on the fun parts of life for these kids, treating EC’s like jobs, and whatnot, zero tolerance for some innocuous things, that the kids are kind of basket cases, just in general. And I just wonder what this desperation is that would make you think cheating or helping your friend cheat was a solution. </p>
<p>Could just be my perspective, though, growing up with hippies for parents.</p>
<p>I think there are a lot of factors to blame – parental pressure to succeed in many cases; also peer pressure to succeed. And then there’s the inhuman amount of work assigned in higher-level classes. Kids in the honors track in our school routinely get less than 6 hours of sleep per night - not uncommonly 3 or less, with little or no free time on weekends, and no way to catch up on sleep. My D2 still had not caught up on sleep by the end of summer vacation, in part because the homework didn’t even stop then. Very few of the kids who make it into the most competitive schools are able to handle this work without putting in hours that would make sweat shops look almost hospitable. I think that creates a mentality where teachers, who often wield power arbitrarily (“if your final essay is an hour late, you get zero!”), become adversaries and kids are doing what they think they need to do to survive (where “survival” means doing well). They help each other because they are all in the same boat. And then finally a culture is established where the behavior is considered normal by other kids – not the open cheating on tests, but everything short of that.</p>
<p>When I was in high school, we would never ever have dreamed of cheating on tests or giving answers to later classes, that just baffles me. But helping out on homework was very common. I had a French speaking friend who helped out with my homework fairly regularly. I probably got a very slightly better grade than I deserved. (B vs B- or B+ vs B, not more than that.) OTOH, before going to college I spent a whole year in France and ended up speaking far better than I had at the end of senior year!</p>
<p>Some spend more time on devising the way to cheat (and end up only cheating themselves of learning opportunities) than straight forward sit down and study. Nobody needs to be a genius to get straight As in HS, just do the work, and the work is very very doable, not any kind of rocket science. The same approach works perfectly in college. No cheating type of schemas are required!
And if you get a group that does not want to do their part, embrace the fact positively - better for you, do the work and learn more, not only academically. It is your chance to improve communication sckills, lead everybody else, who have given their rights to learn to you, it will pay of.</p>
<p>I recall my DD complaining about group assignments. She said she ended up doing all the work or she had to re do the work of others because it was not correct. She complained because it took longer to do the work with a team, than alone. I told her that perhaps exposure to the challenges of working within a team was part of the lesson. She didn’t buy it.</p>
<p>^She should have listen to you. You were absolutely right! She did more, good for her, it will pay of big time, it will, trust me! These hard working kids gain much more than just an academic knowledge.</p>
<p>Helping with a having a group divide and conquer homework? Why not?</p>
<p>Do we all do every part of a project at work? I think not. In college, don’t students compare & share notes (we did this even back oin the day when using inl & quill)? In B school, isn’t divide and conquer pretty common?</p>
My S in particular was regularly matched with the star gazers of the class.</p>