If two recent news stories are representative of how cheating incidents are handled, it’s no wonder more students are willing to bend the rules.

It’s no surprise that some students are willing to cheat or plagiarize in order to ease an assignment or get a higher grade.

What is more startling to many Kansans are recent reports of the magnitude of the cheating problem and the weak response to it by some education policymakers. Two recent news stories help illustrate the problem.

One story focused on a case at Piper High School in Wyandotte County. A teacher at the school failed 28 students in her sophomore biology class after determining that they had plagiarized papers that counted for half of their semester grade. She first noticed that some of the papers contained identical material. She then ran the papers through a computer program designed to detect whether paragraphs or pages have been plagiarized from Internet sources. It showed that they had, and the students received failing grades.

This incident is disturbing, but not as disturbing as the follow-up. After several parents complained about the teacher’s action, the Piper school board overruled the teacher and ordered that the students should receive partial credit. The teacher resigned the next day saying she couldn’t continue to work in a district that wouldn’t support her. Her stand was not only on principle but on practicality. She reported that when she went to her class the next day her students were “whooping and hollering and saying, ‘We don’t have to listen to you anymore.'”

The action of board members is hard to understand. The fact that they ordered only partial credit on the papers indicates that they agreed the students had cheated. The message board members were sending is that cheating isn’t exactly right, but it isn’t exactly wrong either.

In addition to the moral questions this situation raises, there are legal questions. School board members made their decision about the cheating in an executive session, claiming they were protecting the identity of the students. And because no votes were taken in executive session, they contend, no action needed to be reported after the session. Their explanation is, at best, a weak one.

First, it’s difficult to believe no votes by voice or show of hands were taken on a matter of this sort. And although the board claimed it was a personnel matter that could legally be discussed in executive session, no personnel action was taken. The action that was taken was on a policy issue that should have been discussed and voted on in the public view. The possible violation of the Kansas Open Meetings Law currently is being investigated.

So what happens to students like those at Piper who are taught that cheating is acceptable or at least they can get by with it? Some of them eventually graduate and go on to community colleges or universities. In fact, some of them may have ended up at Barton County Community College in Great Bend, which reported this week an “epidemic” of academic cheating during fall finals.

Up to 30 students at the small school were involved in a variety of cheating incidents during finals week. Their tactics ranged from stealing tests from a teacher’s office to downloading entire term papers from the Internet. In a less-serious, but still disturbing incident an instructor mistakenly handed out a final exam to students when passing out papers. The instructor realized what he had done and rewrote the final, but was distressed by the reaction of students. No one said anything; they treated the event, he said, “like somebody seeing a wallet on the ground and saying, ‘Oh, boy, lucky me.”

So, are the students who get by with cheating really lucky? It’s a little trite to repeat that age-old admonition: “You’re only hurting yourself,” but it’s reasonable to wonder how these students will respond to the performance pressures they will encounter in the real world.

It’s also not fair to condemn an entire generation as cheaters. Today’s students may not be more inclined to cheat than those who went before them, but the Internet offers many tempting options for those who want to “cut corners.”

Barton County Community College has a new interim policy on cheating (they didn’t have one before?!), and the resignation of a teacher may get the attention of the Piper school board. Teachers and school boards probably will never be able to eradicate cheating by students, but the least they can do to stem the tide is to support teachers who detect it and try to set policies that send a message that there’s no gray area when it comes to cheating. It’s wrong, period, and those who are caught will pay the consequences.