"Hey, FF. Do you live in NoVA?"
Yes.

"The amount of cheating that technology helps to detect is about 1 one millionth of that which it enables. "
The truth is sufficiently tragic and irritating that it is dimeaned by this sort of hyperbole. We should also acknowledge that the truth is also more complicated than the discussion so far reflects.

There is, sadly, as with so many other tnings, a racial tinge to the conversation. My daughters have always been proud of their dual ethnicity, but recently my oldest daughter was almost teary when she confided that "sometimes she was ashamed to be asian."

She says that she's under enormous pressure to cheat. Other students are always trying to give her unsolicited information - and sometimes when she's desperate she's tempted. Sometimes they're really obnoxious about it - "HA! You're SOOOO STUPID! You spent all that time working on that lab and the whole thing is posted online!"

So far she has nearly straight As, but she expects her grades to drop soon. This is not something that worried me in school. I really didn't care in school. I actually believed (and still believe) that cheaters eventually get what's coming to them. Also, I just never cared about grades - not my own, and not anyone else's.

But this is really getting her. She's looking into colleges and is saying, "Daddy, look, I'm taking two APs this year and I'm barely hanging on. These other guys are 5 APs and they're getting the same grades. But colleges don't have any way of knowing who got their grades by doing the work and who got it by cheating."

"Well, not directly, but they're probably going to think it's pretty suspicious when someone gets straight As, but only gets a 3 on the AP."

"Not true. They have a ready excuse - 'I just don't test well.'"

"Well, why don't you just rat them out? Give them a warning - and say anyone I catching cheating after a certain date will be turned in."

"I can't! They're already pissed at me. Even the teachers will be won't believe who's doing it and you KNOW their parents won't. I just wanna get through this."

"How can your teachers fix things, if they don't understand the magnitude of the problem? Things are only going to change with you and other students make a stand."

And so on. Of course sports has similar issues, largely because there are full scholarships available for sports.

Actually, I've spoken to the principle about this - and he's taken a small measure to improve things, but she's still miserable. It sucks, but I'm convinced she's going to have to either accept it or act herself.

Last edited by TheFallibleFiend; 11/13/2006 4:31 PM.