Why Some Students Believe They Have to Cheat (and How to Teach Them Not to) American students are cheaters. Not all of them - but pretty close. Varying surveys of both private and public high school students showed from 80 to 90 percent admitting to some form of cheating during the school year, from copying another student's work to cheating on a test. Cheating has been the subject of many a worried headline, while cheating scandals have hit high schools from Stuyvesant in New York to Clear Lake in Houston. A few weeks ago in this space, Michelle Blake argued that our society teaches our children to cheat. "We seem, she wrote, "to have created a culture in which getting what we want is more important than doing what we should." Madeline Levine, author of "Teach Your Children Well" and "The Price of Privilege," has been working with her colleagues at the nonprofit organization Challenge Success ("Success is measured, not at the end of a semester, but over the course of a lifetime") to create strategies for schools and parents working to send our children a different message. "We're overly preoccupied with numbers," says Ms. Levine. There's this misperception that the parent's role is to ask 'Did you get an A or a B?' but what you really want to ask is the question that has to do with learning. Did it test what you learned? 'Were those the questions you would have asked?' Students at Stuyvesant High School, justifying and rationalizing what was described as a culture of "low-level cheating" there to a New York Times reporter, could not have been more preoccupied with numbers. "You could study for two hours and get an 80, or you could take a risk and get a 90," said one. "It becomes kind of a number game," said another of the school's practice of listing the grade-point averages and SAT scores of those who were rejected or accepted to dozens of colleges on its Web site. It was kind of addictive, in a bad way, in a sick way. People will assume, well, I have a 92, most kids who got into that school got a 94, so there's no way I can get in. Those students have internalized what Vivian Yee described as the "moral and academic math" of Stuyvesant: "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." Cheating is not, by any measure, the upper middle class problem reflected in these Stuyvesant anecdotes. When everything that seems to matter is measured in numbers that anyone can see don't truly measure worth or success, then manipulating those numbers begins to seem like fair game, whether you're cheating to gain time for lacrosse practice or for your night shift. But the Stuyvesant students made headlines, and so it's their words that reflect that rationalization. If a homework assignment is unimportant, if a class is "a joke," if the impact of a test is disproportionate to its overall importance, then why not cheat? If our culture is overly forgiving of cheating, then it's up to parents to answer that question. Why not cheat? Because integrity is important. Because unearned success is not true success. Because you don't have to. Because our family finds its values outside the numbers. In their white paper on academic integrity, Ms. Levine and Challenge Success have a series of suggestions for parents (and educators) interested in fully supporting the message that honesty is more important than grades. To their ideas (model integrity, watch how you talk about grades, avoid external rewards), I would add: make a point of valuing achievements that cannot be cheated. There is no texting someone all the lines in the school play; there are no short cuts to success with a slap shot or on a skate board. And value, too, the other qualities that are less easily measured: the child with dozens of friends and no enemies, and the child who joined the rec team happily after failing to make the travel team. I'm not proposing we effectively give every child a participation trophy for life, but only that we make sure to recognize the times when work or character triumph. Is it possible to go too far in the other direction? I'm a parent who values those things, and not a parent who went to a competitive high school or to a top college. I value the education I got stage managing plays at a high school that's never been considered for a "top schools" list as highly as the one received at the name-brand graduate school I eventually stumbled into. I sometimes worry that I don't actually place enough importance on "the numbers" in my efforts to ensure that my children's work is their own, and is, as well, their own responsibility. When I put that worry in front of Ms. Levine - isn't it my job to push them to do well in school? - she laughed. To paraphrase a story she told me about her own children, everything around the children of successful parents says that "grades matter." It's not a dichotomy, she told me, just a shift in emphasis toward the importance of mastery and effort and away from scores. "Too many of us are short-term, bottom-line C.E.O. parents," she said, "and not always for good reasons." Grades are an easy way to keep score of how we're doing as parents, and our children are well aware of it if that's our focus. What we really need to remember, said Ms. Levine, is that "what your kid gets in fifth grade spelling" (or on the Advanced Placement calculus test) "has no reflection on you."