I was talking to a data center executive and he got in serious trouble once with his PR team because he wasn't willing to lie about his PUE. Luckily he stuck to his morales, eventually left the company and the PR person. He is one of the respected in the industry meanwhile no one ever hears of the PR person who thought cheating on PUE was OK.
The WSJ has an article that discusses cheating in children and advises to understand what is causing the child to cheat.
Other children start feeling pressured at this stage by busy sports and activity schedules that don't allow time to study, says Kenneth Shore, an East Windsor, N.J., author and psychologist. "Parents can get a little panicky" and compound the problem by orchestrating kids' science projects, dictating sentences or typing their kids' essays, he says. Not only does this send the message that presenting someone else's work as your own is OK, but it suggests that grades are more important than learning—an attitude linked in research to higher rates of cheating.
Besides lying to cheat the numbers, the other type of cheating is taking credit for other people's work. This is used by those who are making it seem like the smartest in the class.
The lesson learned for the parent with 17, 20, 21 year old kids is a good one.
Looking back, Ms. Heffernan wishes she could correct one mistake—telling her sons that cheaters are always punished. "To say that kids who cheat will get caught and they will be punished—and they will not gain by cheating—isn't true anymore," she says. Insisting otherwise only leads kids to conclude, "Mom doesn't understand," she says. Her sons shot down that argument in elementary school, telling her they'd seen other students cheat without getting caught.
It worked better, she said, to tell her kids, "Cheating flies in the face of the values of our family and the rules of the school." She told them they'd be letting her down if they cheated, and she wouldn't defend them. "Not only will they be in trouble at school—they will be in hell at home."
The data center executive could have gotten away with cheating on PUE, most would not know and he would get a pat on back for supporting the company PR person. But, he would be seen by the insiders as some on who cheats to look good, and someone who cannot be trusted to do the right thing and tell the truth.
Being obsessed by performance metrics and looking like you are the smartest in the class, can lead people to cheat.
Good data center operators have a low tolerance for cheating, because cheating leads to bad behaviors and sloppy work that can affect the performance and availability of the data center. Wouldn't it be interesting if you see through a person's history how much they cheated when they were in school? Did their parents instill good values. The one way to see this is to see how a person is with their kids. Most likely if they took short cuts growing up they think it is OK that their kids do as well.
Ms. Avant explained to Kaci that cheating was wrong, said she was disappointed in her and met with her teacher and principal. She says she also spends more time now going over homework, lowering her voice and encouraging Kaci to "be more up front" when she doesn't understand something. Kaci has since been showing her mother all her papers, including answers she got wrong. The third-grader still gets mostly As, and she has learned that "cheating is bad," Kaci says in a phone interview. If she doesn't know a test answer, "I just do the best I can," she says.
For parents, stressing intrinsic goals, such as mastery, learning and doing one's best, can be tough. But research shows it is one of the best ways to prevent cheating.
