I’ve written before about how many academics and commentators have observed that cheating in its various forms, is becoming a social epidemic here in the U.S. and around the world. To give us some more perspective on it, the San Francisco Chronicle explores the issue in good detail:

It used to be that cheating was done by the few, and most often they were the weaker students who couldn’t get good grades on their own. There was fear of reprisal and shame if apprehended. Today, there is no stigma left. It is accepted as a normal part of school life, and is more likely to be done by the good students, who are fully capable of getting high marks without cheating. . . .

Denise Pope agrees. She’s an adjunct professor at Stanford University and founder and director of Stanford’s SOS: Stressed-Out Students Project. . . “Nationally, 75 percent of all high school students cheat. But the ones who cheat more are the ones who have the most to lose, which is the honors and AP (advanced placement) students. Eighty percent of honors and AP students cheat on a regular basis.”

The pressure to succeed weighs heavily on these students. An upper-middle-class senior at an East Bay private high school, whom I’ll call Sarah (who like many high school and college students I interviewed insisted on anonymity), sums it up succinctly: “There’s so much pressure to get a good job, and to get a good job you have to get into a good school, and to get into a good school, you have to get good grades, and to get good grades you have to cheat.”

The article goes on to describe how the culture of cheating has become so pervasive in many areas of American social life, not just academic: sports at all levels (such as the revelations against the New England Patriots earlier this week), the business world, media and file-sharing through the Internet, celebrities escaping criminal punishment, etc. The article also describes some of the attitudes that many students have about various forms of cheating, in which they say “It’s not cheating, it’s helping.”

The article also lists some specific tactics that educators can use to try to reduce the temptation and frequency of students cheating. But ultimately, I agree with their overall assessment that cheating has become so widespread because as a society, perhaps even as a human civilization, we have come to value achievement over character.