Opinions Archives: Censorship and Cheating
by JEFF DELAUTER

It is rare when an issue raised in The Spectator fails to elicit at least one response from some reader within the Stuyvesant community, be it a student, a teacher, a parent, or an alumnus. Some topics of concern, however, not only elicit a response, but spark written debates on the Opinions pages that last for several issues. At least two such discussions have occurred in the past four years: cheating and censorship.

In the December 6, 1999 issue, Opinions writer Tim Von Hollweg brought to light the New York City Board of Education's disturbing practice of blocking students' Internet access in "Warning: Access Denied." According to Von Hollweg, "The plan implemented by the city, which involves creating a general word filter that denies access to all pages containing the word 'sex,' would essentially make it impossible to search for anything from gamecocks to Middlesex county." He warned Stuyvesant students that although "our school trusts students enough to allow us free reign on the Internet," we were in fact "condemning ourselves to a more limited environment by taking advantage of the system."

In January 2000, three poems sponsored by the Writing on the Wall club were posted in a designated space in the building. Administrators demanded that the three poems be removed from the wall because they contained sexually explicit language. In the January 16, 2000 Spectator, an editorial entitled "What We Really Learn From Censorship" criticized Principal Teitel and the administration for forcing Stuyvesant creativity to be "sterilized and purged of all honesty and emotion," and for "deciding to circumvent Writing on the Wall's faculty advisor, Katherine Fletcher."

In the same issue, Eugene Oh and Steven Blau wrote a piece entitled "Not All Writing Belongs on the Wall" which argued that "Graphic imagery does not belong on the school walls." Oh and Blau contended it was the responsibility of the administration "to provide a safe and comfortable learning environment for all students," by removing "any content, no matter how artistically valid, they feel inappropriate for the entire Stuyvesant community."

Junior Shari Abrams wrote a letter entitled "Writing Does Belong on the Wall" in response to Oh's and Blau's piece, saying that she had "never seen anyone force anyone else to read any of the pieces posted on the walls of our school." Abrams also expressed her resentment of Oh's and Blau's statement "Stuyvesant students hold nothing more sacred than the freedom to do whatever they want, whenever they want," saying that she respected the views of her fellow students and does so "on a basis of whether or not I feel their opinions are valid."

Cheating plagued Stuyvesant long before our arrival at the school and will be problematic long after we graduate. During our years here, many have used The Spectator to voice their concerns and to propose their solutions. In "Against (Multiple) Choice," Robert Lindquist argued that Scantron tests did not accurately assess students' understanding of the material taught in classes. "Let's address that the Scantron facilitates the revolting practice of cheating. We must eliminate the Scantron form and the multiple-choice test. They allow for dishonesty and are unfairly harsh."

In response, Candace Nuzzo defended the use of Scantrons in the October 9, 2000 article "The Upside of Scantrons." According to Nuzzo, "Multiple choice tests are the most logical form of testing for a school like Stuyvesant. Fill-ins and long answers could not cover all the required material in the manner that multiple-choice ones do. Getting rid of multiple choice tests will in no way solve these problems."

Douglas Goetsch's February 1, 2001 article entitled "Cheating at Stuy: What Goes On" provided a teacher's very extensive analysis of the academic honesty problem at our school. Goetsch wrote that while cheating is a way of life at Stuyvesant, "with more sanity and less stress around here, our students can rise to academic challenges without resorting to cheating." Goetsch cited extraneous busy-work and number grades as two unanimous influences to cheat. He also directly criticized our school's "obsessive preoccupation with college admissions," and "daily announcements over the loud speakers haranguing seniors about college deadlines and forms." Goetsch asserted that it is not the job of Stuyvesant teachers to get students into college, remarking that "When students behave like walking college applications, they cheat, they brown-nose, they contest grades, they lose their love of learning, and they forfeit their character." Goetsch proposed a switch to letter grades and the establishment of an honor code to remedy Stuyvesant's insidious cheating problem.

In a February 13, 2001 letter to the editor, College Advisors Carol Katz and Pat Cleary rebuffed Goetsch: "Our College Office does not determine the college admissions process. He has implicated the wrong institution. We would be doing our students a disservice by making them less competitive than their peers at other schools." The two writers stressed that it was time to "tackle the real issues rather than making one office a scapegoat (an office that is replicated in every high school in the United States) is counterproductive to students and faculty."

In the same February 13, 2001 issue Class of 1997 alumnus Meghan Norling expressed her amazement that the cheating problem at Stuyvesant had not improved since she had graduated. Currently a student at Haverford College, she candidly discussed the benefits of an honor code and her own academic transgressions at Stuyvesant: "I cheated at Stuyvesant. I'll admit it. I couldn't have gotten through a certain semester of physics without my graphing calculator and friends in the third period class. But I cheated because I felt that I had to." Norling also criticized the use of multiple-choice tests "taken straight from the textbook," and stressed the importance of learning for learning's sake and not for grades.

In "Testing Encourages Cheating," (March 7, 2001) writer Ben Magarik took a more radical stance on Stuyvesant's problem. He claimed: "Testing alienates students. How many great lessons and discussions have been instantly ruined when teachers mention the 'T' word? The simplest answer is to reduce our school's emphasis on examinations." Magarik added that students often respond responsibly and actively to assignments such as oral presentations, essays, and creative projects. "Let's lower the number of mandatory exams from seven to four, while carefully monitoring those test that are given. Less testing as well as new methods of evaluation will eliminate or reduce the feelings of estrangement."

These two conflicts clearly display the valuable role of an unbiased student publication in discussing school affairs.