Last night, Jonah struggled with a biology lab. His biology teacher is on maternity leave, and the substitute is less-than-awesome. Jonah and his friends texted each other for hours trying to figure out the answers to the questions. Jonah asked the teacher for help with formulating the hypothesis for the lab the day before, but she didn’t answer his question.
So, I sat down with him at the computer. He showed me the results of the lab, and I walked him through the lab with the help of some strategic googling for answers. “Definition organic molecules.” “Lipids.” I don’t know anything about biology, but between the wikipedia and some power point slides from his class, I could fake it. We printed out the lab two hours later. I didn’t write the lab for him, but I certainly walked him through it.
Was that ethical?
In Tablet, Marjorie Ingall goes to town on New York Magazine’s article on ethical parenting, and all parents who rationalize plain bad behavior to give their children an edge. She has highest contempt for gifted and talented schools.
Thoughts?
Apt. 11d 
I get frustrated at the lack of guidance that comes from authorities as to what constitutes acceptable collaboration on an assignment. With respect to schoolwork, my thoughts are that if the conduct is permissible within the established rules of engagement, it is ethical. (These are not necessarily my thoughts on ethics on other areas.) I would think that based on standard practices for homework that were used when I was in high school (in the 1980s), what you did would have been perfectly acceptable. But that type of collaboration would have not have been permissible for the science labs I later took in college. I could (and may) go on a long rant on the types of conduct that I think are sketchy, but apparently accepted in schools. Access to old tests is a big point with me. I think previously used tests should be public information that is available to all, preferably through their maintenance in a library or on a website. But if they are not so available, is it ethical for a particular group to obtain them from students who have had the teacher before and maintain them for the benefit of that group’s members? Does it make a difference if the students who donated the old tests were authorized to donate them, or were even authorized to have them in their possession? Does it make a difference if the group attempts to level the playing field by giving access to its files to non-members? What if the group is just a family, whose members are siblings who have had the same teacher? I think these are legitimate issues about the rules of an exam, but there was a resounding silence about these specific issues when I was in college. One exception came from, I think, The Naval Academy, which I did not attend, which (I am told) had students sign something saying that they did not have information that they were not authorized to have when taking a test.
I think about 100 students recently were asked to withdraw from Harvard for one year, for engaging in conduct that, while not the same as the conduct you describe here, has some similarities in terms of the level of collaboration. Based on what I have read about the incident, I think those students were treated unfairly, because the instructor did not provide a sufficient amount of information about what was considered acceptable collaboration. There are a lot of academic readers on this blog, who are undoubtedly familiar with the Harvard incident. I would be happy to hear what they think. For what it is worth, I am not an academic.
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I had read about the Harvard incident and then read some more last night, and I lean towards supporting the punishment. For one thing, one of the “tells” was the copying and pasting of online info, which was discovered through a recurrent typo that made it into several students’ papers. So students were *sharing info* with each other but also copying/pasting it from an outside source. There is something pretty suspicious there. I actually have a great deal of confidence in Harvard’s investigative process here. No faculty member or administrator really wants to get into this crap. It’s time-consuming, it’s miserable, and it’s potentially risky from a legal standpoint (as evidenced by the lawsuits Harvard has been facing). And yes, I’m going here, and I feel I can because I went to an Ivy myself and was a sportswriter for the paper, but the fact that the course was filled with student-athletes is also a concern. Students who are juggling massive time commitments with sports take short-cuts. These short-cuts can come in terms of seeking out “easy” courses, or they can come in terms of collaborating a lot (they spend so much time together), or it can come from having their groupies do some of their work for them (one of my student-athletes was talking about rewriting his paper and he said “I’ll have one of the girls type it up for me.” Yes. He said this. Scarier is that one of the girls would do it.) So I don’t have a big problem with believing that a large number of students would act unethically in such a circumstance.
(As an aside, I’ve busted 5 students for cheating on in-class exams over the past few weeks. They somehow get on their smart phones without my noticing, but it all becomes clear when I read the exam, and the prose goes from typical first-year-speak to beautifully composed sentences written by a literary scholar. Then all it takes is a little Googling.)
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Wendy said:
“(one of my student-athletes was talking about rewriting his paper and he said “I’ll have one of the girls type it up for me.” Yes. He said this. Scarier is that one of the girls would do it.)”
Beautiful. One of the plagiarism defenses that I’ve heard about is, “It’s not plagiarized. My girlfriend wrote it.”
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I have to say I feel like there’s a changing ethics on collaboration, plagiarism, research, reuse of material that just isn’t going to go away and that we have to face the issue and deal with it.
Regarding old tests, I think teachers have to accept that students are going to get access to old tests and make them available to everyone (and write new tests). The other alternative would be to destroy the tests after grading, but that’s no good, ’cause the kids should be able to examine their performance on the tests. One could let them look and then destroy, but in this age of cell phone cameras, they’ll be copied, by someone.
Then, there’s internet research. Some of it is good and fine. But, some, for example, in math, allows folks to undermine the HW’s purpose. Working through a problem is different than following someone else’s solution, as a learning experience, and as a reflection of math ability. An even more extreme example is using google translate — which really is going to help a lot in language homework, and will result in a different kind of language learning (and not, I think, what most folks are going for).
Specifically in your scenario — I’m pretty sure you don’t think you undermined Jonah’s learning (and in that scenario, where the teaching isn’t up to par, you’ve probably just filled in as teacher). The second question is whether you’ve given J a leg up by helping when others couldn’t get that help. In your district? probably not that much, since I’d guess lots of other parents could give similar help. The third question, is if you’ve allowed a bad situation to continue by filling in for the teacher yourself. In the case you describe (temporary leave, substitute teacher), there to, I’d guess not, since the situation is going to resolve itself anyway. So, in my job as the 11D ethics columnist, I absolve you :-).
I think I’m an ethical parent, at least partly because i think hard about these issues. But I’m aided a lot by having a good school situation, kids who are well suited to school, and a school that doesn’t have any high staked ranking, yet (i.e. nothing really matters).
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“I have to say I feel like there’s a changing ethics on collaboration, plagiarism, research, reuse of material that just isn’t going to go away and that we have to face the issue and deal with it.”
Yes. Try explaining to students that copying others’ words is wrong, when they can Google a topic and find the same passages on 3 or 4 different sites just on the first page of Google.
I have a weird situation right now. I got a student paper this past week, and it was sort of related to the assignment but not. See, I devise my assignments carefully so that students can’t swap in someone else’s paper as their own. For example, my research paper involved asking them what they had learned about a topic, and I made it clear in my assignment to do certain kinds of things/make certain kind of moves in organizing the essay. So of course, some student hands in a paper that doesn’t do those things, and my alarms go off. But he had turned it in through Turnitin, and it came up clean for internet sources. But this is not my first rodeo, so I bring him in and talk to him, and eventually, once he’s comfortable enough, he reveals that his sister is an education major (his topic was on effective and ineffective teaching techniques) and she helped him out by showing him a few sources (which would be ok with me if that’s where it ended).
So now I’m pretty sure that with some work I could track down his sister’s name and where she goes to college, send a copy of the paper to the chair of the education department, and have my answer within a few days, but … should I? Will I? I’m still recovering from this past week’s grading marathon. So instead I’m making him rewrite the paper to meet the assignment (although I don’t really care about the assignment as long as he did it himself), and then I’ll probably make him rewrite it some more, and if I’m really cruel, make him re-do it yet again.
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Go, Wendy!
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One thought that keeps coming to me in this discussion is that I think I do have a responsibility to uphold certain ethics. And a social responsibility to work towards equitable education. But I’m not sure I have a responsibility to worry that the things I choose to do with my child meet some kind of level playing field measure.
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Does Jonah actually understand the material better? It sounds like he did his best to understand the material with what he had been given, but life doesn’t always give you everything you need to get the understanding you want. Googling for understanding is ethical. As is asking someone (even a non-expert) to point you in the right direction when you’re stuck.
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Hmmm, isn’t Jonah using exactly the kind of skills needed for the 21st century by tapping into resources (friends, family and Google) to solve his problem? He attempted to problem solve the first time by asking the teacher. He didn’t get a good answer so he *persisted* and asked his friends and finally you. Sounds like great problem solving skills to me. I like some of my co-workers to have that kind of persistence and drive.
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I would say, if you did the job that the teacher should have done, you did nothing wrong. If you did the job the student should have done, that is wrong or, at the least, not consistent with self-interest rightly understood. (Because you aren’t really helping the student long-term; a bad homework grade which taught the student something useful would be better for his long-term welfare than a higher grade on a single assignment.)
Whether self-interest rightly understood is identical with morality is a very difficult question.
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Ethics aside, I’m too lazy for that much effort on school.
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This is an interesting article in light of all of the software problems with the Common Application this year. Several websites have noted that the only parents who are able to troubleshoot a software problem and develop a work-around tend to be those with their own computers, a fair amount of tech savvy and likely some education. (The program didn’t work in Chrome, and most people eventually figured out that you needed to use Explorer, or Mozilla — not a big deal when it’s your computer and you can install whatever browser you want. Not so good if you’re working on a borrowed computer at school, the Y, the community center, etc.; There were also some funky editting problems that required a complicated workaround that I had trouble with. My kid’s essays probably still don’t look right.)
When it takes six hours to upload your college essay because the screen keeps freezing, the kid from the inner city who is uploading his essays at the public library is clearly at a disadvantage. When it requires reinstalling software, creating multiple dummy accounts, eliminating the cookies from your system, etc. the kid whose parents can take a day off from work to resolve the situation is clearly at an advantage.
Yet most parents would argue that troubleshooting a wonky computer program to assure that your kid gets his college essays in on time is not just allowed, it’s a duty. Where does that leave the kid whose parents can’t get the day off; don’t own a computer; and can’t fix the problem?
That’s the problem with at least some of the ethical parenting dilemmas — the system is structured in such a way that everyone KNOWS the work can’t actually be completed by the six year old, the twelve year old, or the fifteen year old — yet we pretend that it can, and ignore that fact that the six year old whose parents are recent immigrants and not actually literate in their own language is at a serious disadvantage. (Every time I go to the nail salon, I end up helping the owner’s daughter with her math homework. She’s eight and has figured out how to get the help she needs — she looks for people who are probably moms and very politely asks for help. I fantasize about writing her a letter of recommendation for my alma mater someday. And helping her troubleshoot the problems with the common app.)
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We have an honor code at my school, and a student honor board that is part of the process whenever a student has violated that code. This year, the student board asked our faculty if we could be much more explicit throughout the year about what kind of assistance is appropriate or not, because so often students feel confused or unsure about exactly the kind of scenario you’re discussing, Laura. Our kids, for the most part, want seriously to do well and often make their “bad” or unethical decisions driven by panic when they feel they have no other options.
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The Lipvat piece has some problems. First the American Academy of Pediatrics has come out against lice quarantine for students. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/health/21brody.html
And some of the examples are complaints from people who have to work with parents. I spoke at length to an administrator at a prestigious private school who talked about the damage done to children’s sense of self when their parents (overtly or covertly) contradict a school’s purpose and values. At good schools, for example, the college counselors know the kids. They know the colleges. They compile lists of prospective schools with the kids’ best interests at heart. But the parents, unsatisfied, hire a private college counselor, who makes a different list of schools—along with different things the kid needs to do to get in. And the child is put in an impossible position of having to pretend to want both things. “You’re asking the child not to passively accept this, but to actively talk out of two sides of his mouth. This goes to a kid’s core identity. Who am I? How am I representing myself?,” this administrator says. “And the result is a kind of cynicism. There’s nothing like cynicism to prevent an authentic development of self. It’s the ultimate defense against meaning and purpose.”
College counseling is difficult work–and I assume it’s incredibly intense in New York, at a “prestigious” private school. I am cynical enough to opine that not all college counselors are experienced, well-informed saints insulated from any political machinations. There are “good” counselors, and then there are counselors who are on the road to burnout, or just learning the ropes. Sometimes it is a great help for students to speak with someone who is not invested in the school’s overall culture, and who does not care about the school’s overall track record in placement.
For example. We have not used private college counselors, but my cousin did. Her child applied early decision to a selective liberal arts college. The school’s counselor had advised against ED. As I know this boy, I would guess that he had a fair chance of getting in to the Ivy League college(s) at which the school had good relations. However, he didn’t want to do that. He wanted a small liberal arts college. He’s a kid who would run a mile from a college with an overly competitive, “prestigious” environment. The “different list of schools” could arise from overweening, unrealistic parental ambition. Or it could arise from a disjunction between the school’s interest and opinion of a student and the student’s own desires. Perhaps the kid who applies to Stanford against the school counselor’s wishes would ruin the chances of the child of an influential parent.
I have heard that some schools limit the number of applications a student may file, and even to which colleges a student may apply. Some of the systems make sense, and work to improve the outcome for the entire student body. I don’t think it’s fair when the valedictorian is allowed to rack up 12 acceptances, crowding out other students. Some schools encourage students to apply early, and if they get in to the most hotly desired schools, to remain by that choice. So, if you get in to Princeton Early Action, you’re done. That might work out well for the majority. I find it fair. On the other hand, a school counselor’s perception of a kid’s best interests might not align well with the family’s perception.
Just a long-winded way to say, sometimes different people perceive “purpose and values” differently.
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One filter to use is if the help you provide is helping your kid to learn. If that is one of your values (that your kids learn) I would ok it, since I don’t think I ever agreed that it was the school’s responsibility to take care of that part alone. There are plenty of areas that I don’t even pretend to let the school do the job (playing an instrument, learning my native language, swimming, table manners and so much more) and if I feel that I could teach my child something within the topics that might be covered in school then why not? I do not think that is unethical at all. Tedious maybe.
If the reason for my help is that I think it will put my kid ahead or in a better position in the school or education system then it is much less palatable.
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Interestingly, I agree with everything Wendy says on this thread. I would add one thing: the situation with athletes is unfortunately even worse at non-Ivies. My daughter indicates that the “tutoring center” at her college basically (i) writes the athletes’ papers for them and (ii) stares blankly at anyone else who comes in seeking help.
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“My daughter indicates that the “tutoring center” at her college basically (i) writes the athletes’ papers for them and (ii) stares blankly at anyone else who comes in seeking help.”
Ugh ugh ugh. I ran a tutoring program at one university (staffed by student tutors), and they were under orders not to do this (not that we had athletes, really). That’s a case where strong leadership needs to step in. My point is: why would you even *want* to do that kind of work for another student?
I’ve tried to restructure my course so that students have to do a lot of writing in class. I would much rather the lit students, for example, write papers, but there’s just not enough time in my day to deal with all the freakin’ plagiarized papers I would get. I fantasize about having a full-time staff person in our department whose job it is to just track down plagiarized papers and deal with the students. A friend who teaches history gets it even worse, as the students pretty much give up on the idea of ever expressing an original thought about history and just copy and paste away.
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I think a lot of the popular writing on the questions of “ethics” (including ethical parenting) set up extremes. In this ethical parenting dilemma, and specifically in the article in New York magazine that started our discussion, it sometimes seems like there are people who imagine that you should treat your child like you would every other child. Clearly that’s impossible (in the big picture, I have no plan to starve my children, even though lots of children starve. In the smaller picture, I’m going to tell them what I know about GMO foods, and the electoral college, and neuroscience, and facilitated communication, when they ask or when we talk about those topics even though other parents might not be able to have those conversations.
In the other extreme, I would treat my child as though their interests trumped everyone else’s at all times. I don’t do that, and I don’t have to try very hard not to since we really still do live in a world of relative abundance. If I had to press buttons to kill my child or someone else’s I might have a tough time making the ethical decision, but fortunately, I am not, and don’t expect to be in that situation, so asking the theoretical question is mostly a waste of time.
it’s the vast middle where we need to think seriously about our ethics (and, thinking seriously is a big part of the ethical obligation). But, then, we also need to know the rules in the particulars of the situation we are talking about. Say, in Destination Imagination, the rule is that you are not supposed to “interfere”, and they are clear that going through Google sites with your child, researching biological topics that they would use in their presentation is not acceptable. Sometimes we get similar directives — in 4th grade math, for example, the teacher has answered the question, “how much should you help your kid?”, with “not very much at all.” He wants the kids to do the HW by themselves, and is ready to intervene if they don’t seem to understand it. If you interfere, you’ll make it hard for him to understand whether the child understands.
I think a tough question for parents is how much support/accommodation do you provide so that your kid can keep up with others? And, I think, my broad brush answer (like others suggest) for those supports are that they are ethically accessible, even if they reflect significant privilege, if they are helping your child learn (i.e. SAT tutoring is OK, as are private tennis lessons, . . . .), but are questionable if they are making it appear that your child is learning while they’re not learning, or at least not learning as well as others.
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(This post was posted 3 days ago when I was hugely busy and exhausted, so I am just getting to it.)
I have trouble knowing how much to help E (who has Asperger’s) with his homework. He has all the usual 6th grader issues with organization plus a charming habit of ignoring homework he can’t do instead of asking for help. An example: He had to write an essay last year about what Veterans Day means to him. Since he doesn’t know any veterans and never thinks about war, he had no idea what to write, so I found out about it when his teacher e-mailed me to let me know he hadn’t turned it in. So I made him write it, of course, but getting him to write it was very frustrating. I ended up feeding him ideas because he simply had nothing to draw from, and imagination is not his strong point, and I just wanted the f-ing thing done. A lot of times it’s the way the instructions are worded that trip him up. Heck, they trip me up. He showed me a math problem. I knew the answer was 3x + 4. But I couldn’t figure out how to explain to him that the question was asking for 3x + 4 because all math pedagogies have their own language about expression and factors and variables or whatever. So I eventually just told him what the answer was and we tried to figure out how the question was asking for the answer.
But when I talked about this with E’s psychologist, she pointed out that part of the problem may be that the teacher discussed how to do the problems in class and E might not have absorbed the info (i.e., not listening, or not hearing). She says what E needs is written directions that are very clear that he can bring home to refer to. I don’t really know how to get that to happen–do I ask the teacher to do it for him? Do I make him learn to do it for himself? Gah. No one ever taught me to do these things. I taught myself. But when did I teach myself? Was I older than 11? Is an older age a more appropriate time developmentally? I can’t remember–it was so long ago now.
The help I give my daughter is different. She basically takes care of her own business and figures it all out for herself. Sometimes she’ll send me a PM asking me questions about how to word something (I just got one that asked “How do you use ‘headlong’ in a sentence?” And I’ll edit her writing. But I’m a trained writing tutor/English teacher, and I know how to turn editing into teaching in a way that would satisfy *me* as a teacher. And she is also a kid who has taught herself to manage her own work. Is it because she’s neurotypical? She has always been very self-caretaking, though.
Who knows, but all I can say is that I frickin’ hate homework. I have to resign myself to the fact that my kid’s grades will never match his “raw” ability. He will get perfect math scores and 80s in his math classes because of the homework thing. And I can only hope that he’ll end up in a college that caters to the quirky genius type (MIT? Brown?).
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I think there are difficult questions when a child needs more than a typical level of support on these topics (there are some in my kids’ school, and they are handled the way you describe, with written instructions, web information, parent support) and when the school has inappropriate expectations and does not teach to those expectations itself.
More practically — have you tried online sources of explanation? as I’ve said, the Kahn videos don’t work all that well for me, since I don’t like listening for information, but they might be useful? And, sometimes there are sites where math problems are worked out that might be useful.
Utimately, there has to be transfer of the learning in one problem to another, so it’s fairly dangerous to be providing too much support on an individual problem, unless you can see the teaching transfer to other learning. Kids are pretty good at tricking you into doing the problem for them, if you’re not careful.
My daughter complained about the same problem with working with a friend on generating writing — that the friend was really good at subtly getting others to do the thinking — things like sitting further away from the computer, so that when a sentence was typed, the peer editor would end up doing the typing, and thus the writing.
Ultimately, this is trying to apply my rule that I have to believe that the “help”/”tutoring” is teaching/learning, rather than completing the work.
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And, as an example of unethical behavior, Rand Paul:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/10/can-rand-paul-learn-to-tell-the-truth/280701/
Asked by students at University of Louisville: “The majority of med students here today have a comprehensive exam tomorrow. I’m just wondering if you have any last-minute advice. . . . .”
Rand Paul: “Actually, I do,” said the ophthalmologist-turned-senator, . . . . But I would sometimes spread misinformation. This is a great tactic. Misinformation can be very important.”
He went on to describe studying for a pathology test with friends in the library. “We spread the rumor that we knew what was on the test and it was definitely going to be all about the liver,” he said. “We tried to trick all of our competing students into over-studying for the liver” and not studying much else.
“So, that’s my advice,” he concluded. “Misinformation works.”
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Oh man. He really disturbs me (along with the fact that he basically self-accredits himself–personally, I would never let him near my eyes; in fact, I stopped going to an opthalmologist mainly because she had a Ron Paul bumper sticker on her car).
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So has cheating increased, or is it just that we’re better at detecting? It is easier to find work to copy than it used to be, and easier to copy it. But, would the same group of people have stolen paragraphs from books, and been undetected (or at least uncaught) because it was too difficult to prove that the cheating had occurred? I’m guessing a teacher would still detect the change into beautifully written text, but they wouldn’t be able to prove where the work came from, unless it was a source they knew already.
Wendy — do you think the transition to “beautiful text” is occurring more frequently now?
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So hard to say. I am certainly becoming a more skilled reader over the years, so I notice shifts so much more quickly than I did when I was starting out.
Back in the mid/late 90s, I worked at a college and a friend of mine was a plagiarism-hunting machine. She’d go to the “real” books to find the plagiarism (back then, I was the only person I knew who ever used the Internet*.) This is when I developed the “make ’em work harder” strategy, because I was super-lazy. I’d get Russian students back then who’d write crap for in-class writing then beautiful text for papers written at home. And I ran the writing lab, so it wasn’t my tutors helping them. 🙂 I couldn’t spend all the time tracking down the original sources, and I refused to feel personally insulted, so I just figured, Hey, what am I really trying to do here? I want them to work on their writing. So I made them work somehow. If I had wrongly targeted someone, then working more on writing wasn’t a negative, really.
*Exaggeration, but not by much.
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I agree with Wendy on the Harvard cheating case. I recommend _That Book about Harvard_, by Eric Kester, himself a Harvard alum who played football. It was published in July, 2012, which means he was wrote before the scandal broke about cheating at Harvard. For myself, I am interested in how some people jump to blame the professor. As far as I can tell from reading the exam online (the Crimson or the NYT posted a scanned copy of the exam), the “open book/open internet, but don’t talk to anyone else” was very clear, at least to anyone who can read. And it didn’t look like a hard exam at all, if one presumes a student attended lectures and did the reading in the one (1) book assigned.
From press reports, it looks as if the course was a “gut” which became marginally harder.
From observing my children’s experiences in school, yes, this generation has been raised to be more collaborative. That doesn’t mean splitting up the work on exams should be tolerated.
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