Homeschooling, Cheating, and Ease of Access

As a homeschooled child, one of the things I was taught that public schools were plagued with rampant cheating. Cheating was always listed alongside drugs, bullying, and violence in a long list of the problems with public schools. But in the midst of all the talk about children cheating off each other’s tests in public school, there was very little acknowledgement of our own homeschool cheating problem.

I was reminded of this when I came upon an old post on homeschoolforums.com:

Just Caught my Daughter Cheating on Test

I am shocked and disappointed. I wadded her paper up and threw it in the trash and told her to go to her room.

She was taking a Wordly Wise Test and the answers are in the back of the book. Never did I think in a million years that she would copy the answers or even think to look them up. Shame on me!!

Oh the memories. We used Wordly Wise too. It was for building vocabulary. But more than that, we, too, dealt with the cheating problem. You see, cheating on homework or tests is not just a public school problem. It’s a homeschool problem too. In fact, homeschooling can provide unique opportunities and incentives to cheat.

Half the time, the answers were in the back of our textbooks. Other times, we were handed the answer key so we could grade our own work. The rest of the time, we knew where the answer keys were kept and had easy access to them. We children weren’t always honest. Sometimes we cheated—and it was ridiculously easy to do so. I’m really not sure how our parents thought giving us this level of access to the answers was a good idea. Perhaps they dichotomized, and felt that cheating only correlated with bad character, and not at all with ease of access. If so, they were wrong.

No one ever monitored me when I took tests. Usually I did my work, including tests, alone at a desk in my bedroom. I was expected to grade my own work for most subjects, including both daily lessons and exams. For math and science, my father graded my tests, but he simply checked whether the answers were correct. This was likely because he wasn’t immediately familiar with the subject matter we were studying and did not have the time he would need to familiarize himself with it. Fortunately, my enjoyment of academics and my ability to effectively self-educate helped keep me honest. But that was not true for one of my sisters, the one who comes immediately after me in birth order. We’ll call her Heidi.

Heidi didn’t take to academic work like I did. Maybe she needed the motivation of competing with other students, or maybe academics just wasn’t her thing, I don’t know. Whatever it was, she spent an entire year cheating on her math for every single lesson and test. She would start each problem, then flounder, and then look in the back of the book for the answer and write it at the bottom of her work. She completed the tests out of the answer key, putting it back each time when she had finished. My father graded her tests, but merely checked to make sure the final answers were correct—and they were. That was how Heidi did math for that entire year. I think this was during her sophomore year of high school.

Heidi’s struggles with her schoolwork extended beyond the year she spent cheating on math. For a while, my parents tried to motivate her to do her schoolwork by restricting her access to her friends and curtailing what she was allowed to do on weekends. There were some years when she had to continue doing school through the summer to make up for all of the days she didn’t do what she was supposed to do. There was a constant battle over Heidi’s schoolwork throughout her high school years.

When my parents found out that Heidi had been cheating on her math, they were upset. Fortunately, their response was to hire a tutor and having her redo that entire year of math. In a very real sense, this was a positive response, because a large part of the reason Heidi spent that year cheating is that she did not have the level of instruction she needed and had the answers in such easy reach that cheating seemed a better option than staring at a jumble of numbers in frustration for hours every day. A tutor could provide more guidance and also make cheating more difficult.

As I was talking about this with Heidi recently she mentioned that her husband, also a homeschool graduate, had himself spent a year cheating when he was in high school. Apparently he had a friend who used the same correspondence program he did, and she gave him her old workbooks with the answers all filled out. His parents eventually caught on because his grades improved dramatically, with no apparent explanation.

Homeschooling parents need to understand that cheating is not simply a public school problem, and indeed that homeschooling can provide children with unique opportunities and incentives to cheat. I know this because I’ve been there and experienced it and watched it happen. Homeschooling parents need to be aware that leaving children with the answer key and expecting them to teach the material to themselves without guidance may not work. In fact, for some homeschooled children, this combination of lack of instruction and ease of access to the answers can make cheating look like the only available option.

I can only hope that the horrified homeschool mom on homeschoolforums.com was able to look beyond her immediate anger and disappointment to realize this.