Ballpark a slice of cheating culture

By ELLIS HENICAN

NEWSDAY

Here’s the easy part:

Denouncing the widespread steroid use among high-performance athletes, then pretending that all this cheating begins and ends at the ballpark.

Ha!

I had a conversation the other day with a teacher from one of New York’s toniest prep schools, an institution renowned for its high academic standards.

“You wouldn’t believe how much cheating goes on,” he told me. “And no one wants to confront it. Not the teachers, not the parents, not the administration. When there’s some egregious case and a teacher pushes the issue, the answer from above is always the same: ‘We don’t want to kill this kid’s chance of getting into college.”’

Batter up, steroid boy!

Blame technology if you like. Text messages bounce the answers around on test day. Wikipedia and Google make plagiarism a breeze.

But the technology alone can’t explain numbers like these:

Sixty percent of high school students admit they cheated on a test during the past year, according to Josephson Institute of Ethics. And those are just the ones who admit it.

If anything, the high achievers cheat more. At Who’s Who Among American High School Students, 80 percent said they’ve cheated on an exam. At Syracuse University, 74 percent of undergraduates said they’ve cheated, too.

According to Rutgers professor Donald McCabe, 56 percent of American MBA students, 54 percent of engineering students and 45 percent of law students are admitted cheaters. Obviously, some of the law students have taken criminal, where they learned, “Don’t admit anything!”

Why do they do it? Pressure? Ease? Moral laxity? “Because they can,” ethics expert Michael Josephson says, “and so few of them get caught.”

So will these kids become the juicers of tomorrow? Or can we blame the cheating athletes for influencing them?

It’ll take a generation or two to unwind all this cheating. In the meantime, just remember: It goes a whole lot farther than the locker room.

X Ellis Henican is a columnist for Newsday. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.