Last Friday, for the first time, orientation for incoming freshmen at Palisades Charter High School included a student-run presentation to discourage cheating.
The program, developed by the newly-formed Student Committee on Academic Integrity, featured a talk by Eeman Khorramian, a recent Pali who now attends UCLA, as well as skits written and performed by Pali theater students.
With “Integrity Matters” as the theme, the committee members “wanted the new students to enter high school intent on the true learning and real achievement that can come from honest, hard work,” said geometry teacher Victor Dorff, who is playing a key role in the campaign.
The Pali student committee, led by senior Tara Vahdani, wrote an integrity pledge this summer that they asked the incoming freshmen to sign. Those who did (more than 700) received a drawstring backpack emblazoned with the “Integrity Matters” logo and were invited to join the committee.
The 30-minute presentation was made to all incoming freshmen, six small groups at a time, in Mercer Hall.
“This school year,” Dorff told the Palisadian-Post, “we want to focus on fostering a culture of academic integrity at Pali, reaching out to parents, students, faculty, and administrators for ideas on how to improve policies, procedures and perceptions regarding cheating on campus.”
Dorff inspired the campaign in late July 2012, when he wrote a viral op-ed for the Los Angeles Times titled “Education’s Cheating Epidemic.”
“Students tell me that math is the easiest course in which to cheat because they can program calculators before a test and cheat undetected,” Dorff wrote. “A few weeks ago, a student took my final exam in the morning and gave the answers to someone who was taking it that afternoon. The second student didn’t notice that the question on his test was slightly different, and the answer was now wrong. When confronted, he professed not to understand that he had cheated. He thought that getting a test answer from another student in advance was no different than studying with a partner. A few days later, when his mother came in to find out why her son had failed, she too said she couldn’t understand the difference.
Dorff continued, “…In a survey of students last month, I asked what they thought of the idea of requiring next semester’s students to sign a pledge that said, simply, ‘I will not lie, cheat or steal.’ Most thought it was a great idea, but they didn’t think the pledge would change anything. As for the proposed penalties, they thought that giving an F on an assignment was okay, giving an F on the report card was acceptable but harsh and that putting the names of the cheaters on a public ‘wall of shame’ would be going too far.”
Shortly after the article appeared, Dorff discussed the issue on Minnesota Public Radio, and when school began in August, Principal Pam McGee talked to him and decided to authorize an Academic Integrity Task Force to examine the issue of cheating on campus.
The group consisted of students (Hailey Biscow and Zoe Jacobs), parents (Polly Bamberger, Diane Elander, Mark Epstein and Lauren Nathanson), teachers (Sarah Crompton, Tim Henderson, Ruth Mills, Brooks Walker and Dorff) and administrators (Kelly Loftus and Magee), who volunteered to be on the panel.
“After I wrote the op-ed piece and saw the kind of response it was getting,” Dorff said, “I discovered a book by three authors (and members of the International Center for Academic Integrity) who had been doing academic research on the subject of cheating for nearly two decades: “Cheating in School: What We Know and What We Can Do.” It provided a lot of insight into the problem and an outline of how to go about addressing it at the school level.”
One of the authors, Dr. Tricia Bertram-Gallant, will visit PaliHi next Tuesday, August 20, to speak with students and faculty about promoting a culture of Academic Integrity. She will also make an open presentation to the community at 6 p.m. that evening in Mercer Hall.
“In February,” Dorff said, “I attended the ICAI conference and met people from all over the world who have been working on this issue for years. Although most of the work has been done at the post-secondary level, the members presented many examples of surveys, programs, online tutorials and training materials that helped us plan an approach that could work at Pali.”
Then in June, Dorff received a $2,000 Lori Petrick Innovation Grant from the Palisades Charter Schools Foundation and a grant from the Palisades Woman’s Club to support the campaign, and those grants “spawned last Friday’s event,” he said.
“When school starts we will expand this program to the rest of the students to continue to promote an environment with academic integrity,” Dorff said. “But there are no quick fixes. This is not a problem that my generation can solve. It’s up to today’s high school students.
“The most gratifying aspect of this campaign,” Dorff said, “is the extent to which the students have stepped up to make it their own. There is a significant population of kids who are tired of the cheating–in school, and in the world in general–and want it to stop.”
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