Performance and Cheating

There was an interesting article in the Times last week, lamenting the six figures that parents were paying for tutoring. - yes tutoring - on top of the approx $38,000 annual tuition they were already paying for private school.

In the article, and the letters to the editor that followed, two themes emerged.  The first was that the tutoring demonstrated the presence of socioeconomic inequality in education (huh? this is new?). The second, and of more interest to me, was the suggestion that hyper-competitive parents and their children were cheating, or at the very least, engaging in morally questionable conduct.  Moreover, a number of commentators lamented the "academic culture" that would breed such activity.

This of course contributed to my continuing interest in the difference between cheating and performance.   Why are the students who hire tutors labeled "cheaters" and not persons intent on securing good performance?  Why is seeking help from the school's own teachers an appropriate source of performance-enhancement (as suggested by the article), whereas paying a third party for the assistance morally questionable?

Surely, it can't just be the fact that one source of help costs additional money whereas the other source is included in school tuition.   Once you accept the fact that there are private schools at all, tutoring imposes only a marginal increase on educational inequality.  In other words, the difference between the opportunities provided by an inner city public school and those provided by Riverdale (one of the private schools profiled in the Times article) is far greater than the inequality that exists between those Riverdale students who receive ouside tutoring and those who decide to stay "in-house" and seek help solely from the school's teachers.

Moreover, inequality has long existed among students within even relatively homogeneous populations.  Some students will have the blessing (curse?) of having a mom or dad like Amy Chua.  Some will have laid back slacker parents.  Some will be saddled with a mom who teaches high school French and a dad who is a mathmetician (thus, my decision to take Spanish in jr. high and stick with the humanities in college).  Finally, in a world where both spouses work, some students will have parents who decide to outsource the oversight and attention that was provided directly by parents and other relatives in the past.  Why are the offspring of the Chua's of the world deemed smart but overworked, whereas the offspring of the outsourcers deemed cheaters and morally bankrupt?

All this comes back to my question: what is the difference between cheating and preparation, and how do we distinguish "true" performance from "fake" performance?  The primary angle of the Times article on tutoring was to stress the sheer amount of money involved and the resulting inequality between students.  A better angle, I think, was hiding toward the end of the article, and it was this: some of the tutors possessed very specific information and advice regarding a very specific course taught at Riverdale.  Now, to the extent these guys were offering up private knowledge of the course, that sounds a lot like cheating to me.  But there is a very easy way for the school to fix the problem: change the course every year.  But if that is all the article were about, it would come off as a very specific complaint about a specific school.  Instead, the Times turned it into an article about how a bunch of rich Manhattan jerks are spending six figures to improve junior's already decent, but not spectacular, SAT score and high school grades.  Yuck.

The problem I have with the article is its implication that preparation is somehow bad, particularly if aided (for money) by a third party outside one's family.  I sometimes see this among my students as well: the "natural" who gets an A without even trying is somehow better than the "tool" who toiled in the library and studied like mad for the final.  Why?

To my mind, preparation is not cheating, and tutoring (assuming it does not involve advance notice of the content of a specific test or exam) ought not to be morally questionable.  Indeed, I find this anti-preparation strain in American media both tiresome and dangerous.  This idea that ability is "natural" and that we therefore should not try to perfect it in ourselves or our children is ridiculous.  No, I have no intent on spending six figures on tutoring (heck, I don't have the money anyway), but I see no problem with others who do.  Better they spend their money on preparing their children for school than on fancy parties, souped-up cars, or any number of items that provide short-term gratification with very little return on investment.