Why schools should relax about cheating
Here’s a rather unconventional view on cheating. It was written by Penelope Trunk, who founded Brazen Careerist and two other startups. Her career advice runs in 200 newspapers. She lives on a farm in Wisconsin and homeschools her sons. This appeared on her blog.By Penelope Trunk
Eric Anderman, professor at education psychology at Ohio University, has studied cheating for decades, and he says that 85 percent of students admit to cheating. (The number is probably higher since some do it but don’t admit it.) Harvard recently had to have a public discussion about campus cheating, and Stuyvesant, a New York City magnet school that’s harder to get into than Harvard, had an incredibly organized cheating system that rivals best practices for productivity types in Fortune 500 organizations.
It’s completely ridiculous that schools are so uptight about cheating because what schools call cheating is what people in the work world call effective workplace behavior. For example:
1. Networking
In school, looking at someone else’s paper to get the right answer is forbidden. But in the work world, the people who rise the fastest are the ones who know the right person
In school, looking at someone else’s paper to get the right answer is forbidden. But in the work world, the people who rise the fastest are the ones who know the right person
Why teachers should present new material as stories
In this post Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham writes about how students best learn new material. Willingham is a professor and director of graduate studies in psychology at the University of Virginia and author of “Why Don’t Students Like School?” His … Continue reading →
