Community service groups share tips.
Fall sports finish strong in CCS.
PG. 14-15 FEATURES
PG. 21 SPORTS
Palo Alto Unified School District Henry M. Gunn High School 780 Arastradero Rd Palo Alto, CA 94306
NON-PROFIT ORG U.S. Postage
PA I D
Permit #44 Palo Alto, Calif.
Follow us on Twitter @GunnOracle and on Instagram @GunnOracle
Graphic by Elizabeth Zu
The more clear-cut incentives Cheating occurs for a wide range of reasons. While a less observable cause is rooted in the community mindset itself, a number of distinct issues lie within the structure of our school. Principal Dr. Denise Herrmann says several general motivations exist for cheating. “I think that most of the time, it’s because [students] haven’t managed enough time for them to be able to do the work, the high-quality work or learning, themselves,” she said.
c Su ge n e all
s ces
Graphics by Jac
k ie L
ou
Clara Kieschnick-Llamas, by an unequal emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) classes over arts and humanities courses. “Because we’re in Silicon Valley and we’re surrounded by people who do math and science, people think that those subjects are the most important to be learning,” she said. Kieschnick-Llamas says she doesn’t often see cheating occurring in math or science classes but instead finds students cheating more in classes that are “less important like language classes and history.” Another contributing factor is miscommunication between teachers and students. In sophomore Elizabeth Miksztal’s class, students were told that they would not need to study certain material for a quiz. “It turned out that the things that [were] not going to be on the quiz were on the quiz,” she said. Since the quiz was ou r
te
sy
o
h fC
sc
Definitions of cheating At the beginning of the school year, students attended an assembly that analyzed various results from the 2015 Challenge Success Survey about student life. The survey revealed that only 13 percent of students had not cheated in any way in the past year. Various forms of academic integrity violations included copying someone’s homework, collaborative work without permission and passing on test questions from someone who had already taken it. The results also provided data on students’ own cheating habits, such as using cheat sheets, plagiarizing and using others’ work as their own. According to Gunn’s academic policy, “cheating is taking (or lending), at inappropriate times a person’s work, information, ideas, research, and documentation, without properly identifying the originator, and/or acting dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage—a deliberate act of deception.” If 87 percent of Gunn’s 2000-student population has cheated, then the underlying question of it all is: why?
tic
It’s test day. You’re sitting at your desk, nervously tapping your pencil. You’ve prepared to the best of your ability, but you need to do especially well on this test to maintain your A in the class. Anxiety increases as you open the test booklet. One problem in particular is worth a lot of points, but you don’t know how to do it. The teacher exits the classroom into the back of the science department’s atrium to converse with his teaching assistants. Do you pull out your phone to Google the answer? Senior Gregory Duvall (name changed) answered yes. “If you ask around, everybody’s getting such high grades and high SATs and things,” Duvall said. “You just feel the need to be better or be at least as good as them.” Duvall, then a sophomore, calls the incident his most egregious act of cheating. “I feel pretty bad about that, but I got an A minus in that class and barely an A minus,” he said. “If I hadn’t looked up that answer, I definitely would’ve gotten a B plus.”
“Sometimes they just have too much on their plate, sometimes they have been afraid to ask clarifying questions in class, sometimes they think they understand it but they get home and they don’t.” One of the most common forms of cheating at Gunn is copying answers from a peer’s assignment or the solutions manual. Senior Maritha Wang often observes students comparing and exchanging answers before big lab assignments are due in science classes. “I don’t think people cheat because they don’t think they’re capable of doing the assignment,” she said. “I think they just run out of time, and I feel like homework is easy points, so you kind of just feel dumb if you don’t end up getting an A in the homework category.” Gunn’s cheating culture is further perpetuated, says sophomore
St a t is
Shawna Chen and Janet Wang Editor-in-Chief and Copy Editor
taken on a laptop on Schoology, students were able to easily open an additional tab and search up the answers. Because her teacher misspoke about the content on the quiz, Miksztal believes that her cheating was justified. “I talked to people after the quiz and about 40 percent said that they had cheated not because of stress, but because of the fact that they thought it was completely unfair,” she said. “They felt that they [shouldn’t] have to have their grade suffer because of a teacher miscommunicating something and not being held responsible for it.” A bigger issue is Gunn’s broad and overarching definition of cheating, says senior Ben Lee, which is incorrectly applied on campus. “I feel like cheating at this age just naturally occurs, just like other things in life like stress and bullying,” he said. “Cheating is not asking someone for help or asking someone what they thought of the test. Cheating is taking someone’s test and using it for your own test.” Using such an umbrella term, Lee says, is a disservice to students. By Gunn’s definition, a number of real-world businesses should be facing consequences too, but Lee notes that ramifications for the corporate industry do not exist. “Lyft, Uber and Wingz are basically the same thing with tiny changes and you can argue that they copied each other. They’re companies and they have certain rights,” he said. “But [the administration doesn’t] look to companies and accuse them.” Psychology teacher Warren Collier believes students consider cheating when they become desperate. In Collier’s experience, when it comes to deciding between moral or utility values on the spot, one is not compelled to be honest. “When we are in that desperate situation, the moral issues usually don’t become the main motivating factor,” he said. “When I’m sitting in that test, and I have no idea how to answer the question, I don’t usually think. ‘What is the right thing to do?’ I think, ‘I need to get this right.’” Collier has witnessed students cheating in his classroom, and followed necessary guidelines set by the administration. Though he does not handle direct ramifications, the relationship between the teacher and student shifts. “For the teacher, it’s hard not to think, ‘Why doesn’t this student care about my class,’” he said. “Things get awkward because I’m emotional about it and the student is emotional about it.” CHEATING—p.4
District examines adding a new secondary school at Cubberley Shannon Yang
Oracle-SEC Liaison
At the Dec. 8 Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD) Board of Education meeting, the Enrollment Management Advisory Committee (EMAC) will recommend that the district charter a new Design Task Force (DTF) to research the details of adding another school at Cubberley Community Center and implementing small learning communities within the existing secondary schools. In March, the district charged EMAC, a group of 11 parents who applied for and were accepted to the committee, to assess the district’s needs for enrollment, including the need for a new secondary school. EMAC has been informing their decisions through
different types of data, including interviews and focus groups, national averages of all American high schools, schools comparable socioeconomically and academically, the history of Palo Alto schools and 57 academic papers about ideal school size. According to EMAC secondary chairman Joe Lee, the committee found that the current school sizes at the secondary level are too big to be effective. “We didn’t have a prejudgement when we started the work; we wanted to see what the data showed us,” Lee said. “And even though we didn’t any single smoking gun that said our schools are too big, the preponderance of data suggested that a new school would be good.” According to Lee, a parent survey showed a dramatic dropoff in community satisfaction. “Parents at the elementary level were satisfied by a seven to one margin—seven
satisfied with one unsatisfied—but when it came down to the middle and high schools, it went down to something like a two to one margin or a one to one margin,” he said. The committee used the academic papers and talked to administrators, finding the ideal school size to be 600 to 900 students for middle schools and 1,200 to 1,700 students for high schools. “Academic research say there’s an inverted U-curve to school size and learning efficacy,” she said. “In other words, as you grow, you can offer more and more electives and programs for your students and that’s a good thing; you have more classes you can choose from, but beyond a certain point, there’s diminishing returns, and the larger a school is, the worse it is for learning effectiveness.” CUBBERLY—p.2