<p>Great article in online Newsweek – <a href=“http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12755802/site/newsweek/[/url]”>http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12755802/site/newsweek/</a></p>
<p>This article made me smile and I like its premise. Kids who get all A’s may be the brightest, but not necessarily the best. I’ve always let it be known to my kids that I value their being a good person more than I value straight A’s. I don’t usually check that website; thanks for posting the article!</p>
<p>Thanks from me, too. One of the little things I liked at S’ high school: The Yearbook Superlatives included (along with Best Smile, etc.) the boy and girl Most Likely to Give A Million (instead of most likely to make a million). I felt the parents of those two kids should truly be proud.</p>
<p>Actually, this essay made me angry as I read it. It appears to be a very pessimistic point of view.</p>
<pre><code>The author implies that those who seek and accomplish high grades are not those who are most “virtuous”. He even states: “Getting the highest grades is just an entry-level drug to getting the highest salary and then to cooking the books to keep the stock price high” What?
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<p>I work as a volunteer with very academically gifted h.s. students. They are not all grade grubbers who are cheating the system. They typically do have very high GPA’s because they value their education, and work to improve it. In no way do I see the school system producing " a culture of grubby cheaters, plagiarizers and criminals who get the only barely twisted message that the bottom line is all that matters." There are always a few bad apples, but the author implies that it is epidemic, and proportionately higher in those who are at the academic top. I disagree.</p>
<pre><code>Per the author: “I once asked a graduating class of M.B.A.s if they thought that cheating in business, though morally wrong, would make them more money, and virtually all of them said yes. Morality cannot always triumph over such cynicism.” Note he did not ask if they would CHOOSE to cheat. He is implying that because there are short-cuts in life, we will all eventually take that path. There will always be shortcuts. Removing the rewards for academic pursuits will not eliminate the temptations to pursue those shortcuts. It is much deeper than that.
Virtue is important. But how do we measure? I believe there are universal traits we all admire. Many in our area believe you must be “religious” first . I agree that would be nice to honor those students who are truly “virtuous”, but not by eliminating the other areas of honor. We have plenty of battles on other forums between those who value athletics, academics or the arts. I think we could safely add another category to the mix, without denying those who place academics high. {I can’t think of a category that begins with the letter “A” for mensches 
} Our HS honors all – the volunteer, the athlete, the artist, AND the academic. I will admit it is often not equal (the athletes tend to get more of the accolades – and rewards), but at least there is an attempt to look at all our gifts.
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<p>I didn’t read the whole article, but the quotes cited above make me very angry. Clearly, the writer had an agenda and stuck to it; why really get to know something about real kids?</p>
<p>My S was not the val, but he was close. When I talked to his teachers, though they’d mention his academics, what they’d invariably emphasized was his character–common words were kind, nice, friendly, good-natured, helpful, etc. It ain’t mutually exclusive.</p>
<p>He’s not accusing every smart person in the world of cheating. He’s just suggesting that we should honor virtue in situations where it is not currently valued as much as winning the prize. I loved the article. I did not find it negative at all.</p>
<p>I liked the article, and if you read some of the posters on this site, they, the students, will tell you about how much cheating goes on and among the top students as well</p>
<p>My D says she know of kids who cheat, and get straight As, the As, to them are more valuable then honesty</p>
<p>The point to me of the article is wow, getting straight As is great, but to honor it at the expense of many other virtues is sad and can be harmful</p>
<p>If you read this site about all the different ways Vals are picked, and the sniping and valid issues involved, it is not a great</p>
<p>Sure many kids deserve the As, but i think often those some of those kids have learned to play the game and not veer from the trodden path, going the safe route</p>
<p>I would rather my D get a B because she questions, and rights things that aren’t just the same ole thing</p>
<p>Well, he needs to write better. When you use statements like “Getting the highest grades is just an entry-level drug to getting the highest salary and then to cooking the books to keep the stock price high” you’re talking in absolutes–it’s an either/or proposition with that “just” in there. And like the above writer pointed out, for MBAs to say that a person who cheats will get ahead is, unfortunately, just a statement of fact, not an account of their own values. They weren’t asked their values.</p>
<p>The point he’s making is valid, but it’s undercut by flabby thinking and absolutist writing, which is a shame.</p>
<p>First of all, I don’t know how closely he’s studied high school students, or maybe it’s just me, but my honors classes always had much less cheating (that I observed) than my non-honors classes. Using his own assumptions (which are full of flaws in themselves) I think it’s precisely that they do value their grades that honors students don’t cheat. If you care about your grades, you’re more likely to want them to mean something; if you don’t, then perhaps you’re more likely to accept cheating. Who knows, maybe I was simply oblivious to the rampant cheating that infested me and my peers like a cancer as the writer put it, but to me, it seems kind of like a broad, back-in-my-day type of criticism of “kids today.”</p>
<p>Another problem I have with this article is how on earth are a student body and a faculty supposed to pick which graduating senior has the best morals? If the students vote, then it’s like asking “which of your friends has the best morals?” Maybe they will pick someone with good morals, but what about the people who aren’t well known? I could easily see that system devolving into something tantamount to picking prom queen. Having teachers decide is just as flawed–sure the bad cheaters won’t get it, but the teachers probably know less about who is cheating than the students do. Then there are the thousands of definitions of morality. Who gets to decide what’s moral and what isn’t. Like a previous poster said, to be considered moral in many areas, it is necessary to be religious.</p>
<p>The apple does not fall far from the tree.</p>
<p>Pfft!</p>
<p>The good Rabbi should not venture THAT far from his knowledge of “Spiritual State.” Actually, there is “spirit” and “knowledge” in his article: mean-spirited lacking much knowledge comes to mind. Excuse me for not believing that high achieving kids are more prone to cheating. It may be so that the pupils of Mr. Gellman are falling in the category of high achieving cheats, but from my vantage point, I’d put my money on catching cheats among the low performers sitting in the back of the class.</p>
<p>Further, Gellman’s proposal that quantifying education leads to a lack of ethics and an Enronesque world is simply ridiculous. What could be said about the multitude of well-meaners who want to see a Lake Wobegon world where everyone is superior, and seek to establish this by removing the spirit of competition from our daily lives? The world of YMCA competition where everyone gets an athletic trophy for participating is an illusion: there is no escaping the fact that we WILL be labeled and measured for the entire duration of our life. Pretending that we all are good kids or whatever that term “mensch” might mean in mainstream America, and that a recognition of THAT prowess is deserving a “recognition” is simply nutty. </p>
<p>A blank page would have served Newsweek a lot better than printing this non-sense.</p>
<p>Those of you who are attacking this article seem to be enjoying your own sense of absolutism. Living in your own private Lake Wobegon, if I may use that term again. Accept that there is a mixture of motivations in any group of high-achieving students. </p>
<p>We are a society dominated by materialists that is raising a new generation that is dominated by materialism. This means, in the typical case, the emphasis of education from the pupil’s standpoint shifts away from learning and towards material success. A high school class, regardless of intelligence, represents a whole spectrum of moralities. I feel extremely confident in saying that being morally against cheating (to improve grades and therefore raise the probability of success) is the exception rather than the rule. I’m saying this fresh out of a number of IB courses in high school. The author of this article never defined cheating. Cheating can be as simple as copying mindless homework assignments from a workbook. A very common case is copying notes onto a graphing calculator. I didn’t know a single person in high school, regardless of rank, who felt it was immoral to copy an entire study guide onto their calculator and refer to it during tests, and even IB exams. It is in everybody’s individual advantage to cheat. Nash equilibrium. Because seriously, it is a rare person (probably religious) who would feel like they truly compromised some part of themselves by doing so. It’s the only way to stay ahead of the curve! (And when it comes to choosing valedictorian, the tiny decisive decimal points in GPA’s make the pressure to slip in a little bit of cheating too intense to resist).</p>
<p>So as a student one year out of high school who was in classes with the very best students, I can say that anyone who calls this article ‘absolute’ nonsense is incredibly misled. But, no offense, this is really what I’ve come to expect from 30% of the parent’s forum. Stop listening to your kids’ words as gospel. Bright kids are really good at bending the truth and feeling no shame about it. Simply because it is so easy to justify, unless you fear some deity is watching you from above.</p>
<p>What I’m not talking about is plagiarism, buying essays online, copying off of tests, etc. This is rare for the high-achievers. But I’m assuming your definition of cheating is flexible.</p>
<p>I’m probably weighted towards the cynical end because I did not go to a very intellectual high school (many go on to pre-professional or business fields). My college experience is much more optimistic, but things like putting notes on calculators are still prevalent.</p>