Cheating seen reaching the 'middle majority' of high school students

Published: 2006-04-21

ATLANTA (CNS) -- Cheating is reaching the "middle majority" of high school students, and not necessarily because the Internet makes it easier to cheat, said a former Catholic high school student who said he once nearly succumbed to the temptation to cheat. Jared Fattoross, now in college, said his freshman biology teacher at Bergen Catholic High School in Oradell, N.J., once gave back a pop quiz unchecked and unmarked. "I've been really busy," he told the students, saying they could grade the quizzes themselves and return it the next day. Fattoross said he went so far as to erase some of his wrong answers on the quiz, and figured out "exactly what score I needed to get a passing grade in biology" before he restored the wrong answers. He got a 70 on the quiz. The teacher, though, had photocopied all of the quizzes before he handed them back to the students. When the class realized that, "some of them were sweating. You could smell it," Fattoross told a standing-room-only workshop crowd April 19 during the National Catholic Educational Association convention in Atlanta. The students who redid their quizzes got two zeroes for having cheated.

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