Sekolah Bogor Raya

Bambang Nurbianto in his article in the Jakarta Post 13 June 2009, Should we turn a blind eye to dishonesty in Schools? discusses the cheating in the recent national exams in junior and senior high schools. He explained that systematic cheating hag been practiced for years aided by teachers, principals and even provincial education officials, his final sentence reads “ I think we all agree that we have to stop the systematic practice of dishonesty in schools if we really expect better morality of the young generation.”

Cheating on Indonesian exams has even become the butt of jokes. The Uncyclopedia lists under Indonesian Student Code of Conduct: “honor corruption by cheating on all tests, even if you actually know the answers.” And in a long list of characteristics of Indonesians, “You know you’re Indonesian when…
Your whole class has cheated on an exam, and gotten away with it.
You have spent the night before an exam looking for someone who sells the questions.”

But what does Pak Nurbianto mean? That kids should stop cheating, or that their teachers and other educators shouldn’t be involved. We could give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he meant both. and then ask the question, ‘How will this impact on the morality of the younger generation?’ Everybody seems to assume that progress can or should only be made in the young generation. But the young generation learns from the older generation, so do we have one of those impossible-to-solve chicken – egg situations here? I don’t think so, but it will require dedicated, honest adults and ‘clean’ schools working together.

Role modeling is very important when it comes to teaching kids honesty. However, it is pointless to stress the importance of honesty with children, if they live with parents who lie about their whereabouts, steal from their employers, cheat on their taxes, or bribe policemen. Unfortunately, these examples may only be the tip of the iceberg of dishonest behavior.

Psychological studies on the development of lying and cheating behavior in young children clearly indicate that most preschoolers as young as three years of age will cheat if they think they can get away with it, and then lie about or deny their cheating. If admonished to be honest, a significant proportion exhibit honest behavior. In a study of age relation, 78% of first graders, 45% of third gradwes and 31% of fifth graders cheated in an experiment. The majority then lied to conceal their transgression, and their ability to maintain their lies increased with age, In all of these studies cheating is doing something that they were told not to do, such as peeking at a card or playing with a specific toy. Interestingly, both children and adults view these lies very negatively, more negatively than the misdeads themselves. (Talwar et al. Lying in elementary school years: verbal deception and its relation to second-order belief understanding, Develop. Psych. 43 (3) 804, 2007; Talwar et al. Social and cognitive correlates of children’s lying behavior.

In these psychological studies of children the violation is not severe, for obvious ethical reasons. Children’s behavior might change if the stakes were high or if the consequences of transgression were more serious. For instance if the consequence of being caught cheating on an exam was an automatic failure, as is the case in many national plus schools,

On a different note, if newspapers hope to retain their dwindling readerships in this era of intense competition with the internet, they must begin to provide more scholarly editorializing. The complexity of the topic of honesty in schools was hardly touched in this article, Should we turn a blind eye to dishonesty in schools. For example, it is perhaps interesting to view cheating in Indonesian schools in perspective of, for instance cheating in American universities, a topic which has been well studied. McCabe et al in Cheating in Academic Institutions: A Decade of Research (Ethics & Behavior 11(3) 219-232, 2001 ) claim a prevalence of 75% in 1963 to 82% in 1993 for serious cheating Thus, the problem is not limited to Indonesia, and foreign reports should be checked for their relevance to the Indonesian scenario. McCabe and Trevino concluded that “ the strong influence of peer’s behavior may suggest that academic dishonesty not only is learned from observing the behavior of peers, but that peers’ behavior provides a kind of normative support of cheatimg. The fact that others are cheating may also suggest thst, in such a climate, the non-cheater feels left at a disadvantage. Thus cheating may come to be viewed as an acceptable way of getting and staying ahead.” Does this not sound familiar? The same article discusses ways of managing cheating in the classroom, including “clearly communicating expectations regarding cheating behavior, establishing policies regading appropriate conduct, and encouraging students to abide by those policies.”.

In a very recent national survey, technology was implicated in exam cheating in the U.S. More than 1/3 of teenagers with cellphones admitted to cheating at least once with them, and two-thirds of all teens say that others in their school cheat with cellphones. This serious issue is not fully recognized by parents, since seventy-six percent of parents think cellphones ae used for cheating in their child’s school, but only 3% of them say that their child has ever cheated with cellphones. Clearly, the problem of cheating on exams is not limited to any one country and it clearly needs action.