Stuyvesant Students Describe Rationale for Cheating Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. In June, 71 students at the public school were caught exchanging answers on an exam. The night before one of the "5 to 10" times he has cheated on a test, a senior at Stuyvesant High School said, he copied a table of chemical reactions onto a scrap of paper he would peek at in his chemistry exam. He had decided that memorizing the table was a waste of time - time he could spend completing other assignments or catching up on sleep. "It's like, "I'll keep my integrity and fail this test" - no. No one wants to fail a test," he said, explaining how he and others persuaded themselves to cheat. You could study for two hours and get an 80, or you could take a risk and get a 90. A recent alumnus said that by the time he took his French final exam one year, he, along with his classmates, had lost all respect for the teacher. He framed the decision to cheat as a choice between pursuing the computer science and politics projects he loved or studying for a class he believed was a joke. "When it came to French class, where the teacher had literally taught me nothing all year, and during the final the students around me were openly discussing the answers, should I not listen?" he said. These are the sorts of calculations many students at Stuyvesant, New York City's flagship public school, learn to make by the middle of their freshman year: weighing two classes against each other, the possibility of getting an A against the possibility of getting caught, keeping their integrity against making it to a dream college. By the time they graduate, many have internalized a moral and academic math: Copying homework is fine, but cheating on a test is less so; cheating to get by in a required class is more acceptable than cheating on an Advanced Placement exam; anything less than a grade of 85 is "failing"; achieve anything more than a grade-point average of 95, and you might be bound for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Yale. In interviews this month, more than three dozen students, alumni and teachers said that large-scale cheating, like an episode in June when 71 juniors were caught exchanging answers to state Regents exams through text messages, was rare at Stuyvesant. But lower-level cheating, they said, occurs every day. Most often, it takes the form of a few math homework answers copied wholesale from a shared note on Facebook, or the form of tip-offs from classmates who took a history exam a few hours earlier. Some go further, hiding formulas in a sleeve or in a bathroom stall, Googling facts on an iPhone or snapping a photo of test questions to send to a smart friend for help. Survival at All Costs At Stuyvesant, the alma mater of four Nobel laureates, students say the social currency is academic achievement. Although students enter the school knowing they are among the best in the city, they must compete with hundreds just like them. And, they say, the pressures only grow: they are convinced that they are bound for bright futures, yet not all are equipped for the work that entails. They are trained to hand in every assignment without always believing in its value. They described teachers as being relatively sympathetic, discouraging cheating, but not always punishing it as severely as school policy dictates. All this makes for a culture in which many students band together, sharing homework and test advice in a common understanding that they simply have to survive until they reach their goals: dream colleges and dream jobs. "I'm sure everybody understood it was wrong to take other people's work, but they had ways of rationalizing it," said Karina Moy, a 2010 graduate of the school. Everyone took it as a necessary evil to get through. It is not clear how common academic dishonesty is at Stuyvesant or other large, competitive schools, and several of those interviewed said that they had never cheated. When the school's newspaper, The Spectator, conducted a survey of 2,045 students in March, 80 percent said they had cheated in one way or another. Michael Josephson, the president of the Josephson Institute, which researches ethics in society, said a 2010 survey of 40,000 high-school students found that 59 percent had cheated on a test during the previous year, with one in three admitting they had used the Internet to plagiarize - and one in four admitting they had lied on the survey itself. For Stuyvesant freshmen, who are admitted based on a citywide exam, receiving their first test score can be a moment of reckoning, said Josina Dunkel, who teaches global studies and Advanced Placement European history. She said she began seeing so many freshmen submit the same answers to homework that she stopped allowing them to type their assignments, reasoning that if they had to write them by hand, they might be less likely to copy answers online. "It's a major eye-opener," Ms. Dunkel said. Suddenly, they're in an environment where every single kid is really just as smart as they are. How do you distinguish yourself as being a top student, which is where their identity has always been? By the time they reach junior year - when it is not uncommon to have three tests in a week and when May and June bring a cascade of Advanced Placement, Regents and final exams, along with the SAT - many students have become adept at beating the system.