When we take all the intrinsic value out of learning, we leave only the extrinsic contest in its stead. Students feel the need for a high score, and they may not care about how they get that score. People generally believe that cheating has risen because our community attitude toward cheating has become more accepting. In cursory glance on the Internet, I found the following:
80% of the country's best students cheated to get to the top of their class.
More than half the students surveyed said that they don't think cheating is a big deal.
95% of cheaters say they were not caught.
40% cheated on a quiz or a test[56]
When we look at the dominator meaning perspective of the testing and rewards processes as we find them now, and have done for many years, cheating becomes their natural outgrowth. This tells us the only value in education comes in what the dominator gives us to show its approval of our education, of our conformity to that education. It makes for a purely extrinsic model of learning; we learn only for the payoff. Learning has no value in itself. The dominator controls the payoff; therefore the dominator our learning. The extrinsic motivates high levels of dominator dependant identify and ego. The becoming self has little or no place.
When we look at intrinsic model of learning, we find that the value of learning comes in the thing itself and how we feels it add to our ability to make effective form out of our world and voluntary participation in the communities we build and are available to us. We find through learning we become more of individuating, autonomous ourselves and more capable of extending ourselves to other in unconditional positive regard. Our dependence on domination and the dominator decreases and our independence and interdependence of our becoming self and the becoming selves of others increases.[57]
In extrinsically driven learning, the value in education comes only in getting the highest score. How you arrive at the score becomes something of minimal if any importance. The information demanded on such tests calls for little or no personal or intellectual involvement on the student's part. They just have to remember data and how to match the data to the form of the test. Although no one considers test preparation classes a form of cheating, we can look at these programs as a cynical approach to beating the test at its own game.[58] They do not teach subject matter of any kind. They just teach how to get around the test themselves.[59] Students exchange time and money to gain an advantage over the test. It looks and feels like some kind of game, but the result of this game has powerful and fearful, in unwanted, outcomes.[60]
When learning offers intrinsic value to students, they learn in ways that standardized tests cannot measure. If a student responds to a question based on her/his intrinsic understanding of some point, each response takes on a different and highly individualized cast. Indeed, that's why testing itself is not only in question in terms of the becoming self. The entire enterprise of so-called objective grading falls under negative scrutiny. Grading degrades every student and turns learning into a competitive process in which cheating becomes more and more likely depending on the extrinsic value students place on their learning. However, when a student invests value and a sense of themselves into their learning, the intrinsic value, they scarcely need external grading at all. They can rate the level of their own work quite accurately. When I adopted this form of student grading, everyone's work got better. Entire classes became more active, involved, and even joyful. Students didn't check each others' grades out of competition: "What did you get on the test?" They were excited to hear others students' ideas out of genuine interest not looking for who had the competitive edge. When students value learning intrinsically, cheating makes no sense. It's really becomes moot, a null set. Competition on such material also makes no sense. Extrinsic learning serves as a having way of living. Intrinsic learning enhances our being way of life and our search for and connection with our becoming self. When we take the risk out of our learning exchanges, we take out the need to cheat and the sense of desperate competition we find in the standardized test driven classroom.
Competition itself does little if anything positive in our search for the self. Such competition has become an inextricable part of not only our learning experience but almost every experience we find in our lives. This unquestioned meaning perspective drives a good deal of our conduct and makes all others not companions in life but competitors for life.