When colleges cheat

Opinion: February 3, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

When colleges cheat

Los Angeles Times: Society trusts teachers and school administrators to deliver a lesson arguably more important than reading and math: Cheating is not only forbidden but dishonorable. How discouraging and frustrating it is, then, to discover yet another instance in which an institution itself has been caught violating the rules. Claremont McKenna College has announced that an official there inflated the SAT scores of incoming students to make the school look good in national rankings, including the overhyped lists published in U.S. News & World Report.

This follows revelations last year of widespread cheating on state standardized tests by public school teachers and administrators in Georgia, New York and Pennsylvania. As a sign of how worrisome the problem has become, the U.S. Department of Education is soliciting public opinion until Feb. 16 on how to stop cheating by schools.

It is bad enough when teachers cheat on tests, but when the cheating is carried out at a college — supposedly an unimpeachable bastion of the disinterested pursuit of pure truth — the notion of honor seems fragile and fleeting indeed.

The truth is, this sort of trickery has been going on at colleges for many years, as they sought to burnish their images. Maybe they didn’t out-and-out change numbers, but they certainly manipulated them. According to a 1995 report by the Wall Street Journal, this included omitting the SAT scores of (take your pick) bottom scorers, international students, disadvantaged applicants and athletes before the scores were reported to various publications.

Colleges and public schools are under pressure to look good, which means they must also ramp up efforts to ensure that’s done ethically. Do teachers cut students a break if they’re caught cheating on final exams because of academic pressure? No.