Bombshell Study: Half of Teens Do THIS

Almost half of American teenagers have cheated on high school exams, according to the 2003 Gallup Youth Survey taken between January 2003 and March 2004. Nailing down real numbers of who cheats and who doesn't is always tricky business since the only sure count is based on those who were caught in the act. So Gallup anonymously polled 2,000 randomly selected high school students and asked them how common they think cheating is at their schools and whether they themselves have ever cheated.

The answers are chilling. Fully 46 percent of the students ages 13 to 17 confessed to cheating on at least one test or major exam, and 65 percent acknowledged that cheating was a problem in their schools, report The Denver Post and the New York Post. (On the up side, that means 53 percent of teens have not cheated.) Summing up the poll's results, Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll, told the New York Post, "There's a whole lotta cheating going on. About half the students said they're cheating. That's a significant issue.

Why do kids cheat--even when they know it's wrong?

The survey didn't ask that question, but Gallup said in the analysis of the results that competition and pressure to get into college is one reason "middle-achieving teens" cheat. Cheating doesn't stop at high school graduation. Citing research conducted by the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University, the Denver Post reports that 75 percent of college students admitted to cheating in general. In a 1999 survey, one-third of 2,100 students on 21 campuses confessed to serious cheating, which included downloading papers or plagiarizing from the Internet.

Thanks to wmconnect

---------------------------------------------------------------------

And this is what I think.

The kids are cheating because more and more it is not unacceptable. And one of the reasons for a company to outsource to another country.

In any business prosperity and longevity depends upon the total honesty of the individuals working for the company. If the employees are not honest then things like Enron happen. I haven't met anyone who was not frightend or disgusted about that scandel and I talk to literally scores to hundreds of people on a monthly basis; just because I am a prolific yakker by the way.
Frankly if I were a businessman and I couldn't trust the companies that I outsourced here in the USA but I could find an honest one outside the country-you bet I would outsource, to keep from going broke because of the lying cheating employees.
If the kids have been taught to cheat by not being punished for cheating or have discovered in some strange sense of justice that if they tell the truth they will be disciplined, and if they lie they will be rewarded(don't scoff that is the way it is working these days)then the climate for a robust economy has seen it's better days in this nation. Sorry that is the way things work. Of the incredible number of times that I have been faced with the opportunity to lie I have not. Most of the time no matter the hurt feelings I would rather die than lie. That is the way it used to be in America and I have to say that it is not the case any more.