Text:
“Did you cheat in school when you were my age?” My 12-year-old niece looked at me as she asked the question, then turned to her father, my younger brother.
We were talking about her school, a gymnasium outside Munich. Because I knew about the intense pressure at these elite German schools, I wondered whether German students cheated as much as their American counterparts. In surveys of American students, more than 70% admit to cheating on an exam at least once in the past year, with close to 50% admitting to cheating two or more times. My niece confessed that once she ‘helped some friends’ on a test by giving them answers, and that other kids did the same thing.
And now that she had ‘fessed up, she was turning the tables on us.
