Now let’s change the situation a little bit. Suppose that during the class discussion, it turns out that everyone thinks the exact same thing about the book.

Such a situation doesn’t seem possible, but it actually happened in a high school class in Montgomery County, Maryland. According to the Washington Post magazine, teacher Nancy Abeshouse had told her Advanced Placement students read The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, and write a paper on whether the governess who narrates the story really saw ghosts or not. She thought she had planned “one of the intellectual highlights of the year.”

But it didn’t quite turn out that way, Post writer Brigid Schulte reports:

The discussion falls flat. Everyone in the class has the same opinion — that James didn’t believe in ghosts and was parodying sexually repressed Victorian society. And most of the papers include variations on the same sentence: ‘Unable to express her desires, she imagines that she sees the ghosts of luckier souls who did express their desires.’

As you might expect, Abeshouse got suspicious. She typed some of the sentence into an Internet search engine, and sure enough, there it was — on one of the dozens of Cliffs Notes-type sites that can be found all over the Web.

Sad to say, this isn’t such an uncommon story these days — although the fact that the entire class copied from the same source may be a bit unusual. Stories of plagiarism, both in high school and in college, are popping up everywhere these days:

• Two months ago, the University of Virginia expelled 45 students and revoked three diplomas for plagiarism in a physics course.

• A little over a year ago, 118 seniors at a Kentucky high school were caught plagiarizing from an Internet source.

• In 2001, the University of Maryland dealt with 250 cases of cheating — “four times the number of cheaters a decade ago,” according to the Post.

• In a 2001 survey by the Center for Academic Integrity, Schulte reports, “seventy-two percent [of 4,500 high school students who participated] reported serious cheating on a written work. . . . More than one-third admitted to repetitive, serious cheating.” Forty-one percent of college students confessed to plagiarizing from the Internet.

Such statistics aren’t that surprising when you consider that only 27 percent of participants claimed to believe that such copying was “serious cheating” (down from 68 percent two years ago, according to The New York Times). Donald McCabe, president of the Center for Academic Integrity, explains, “Students were certainly cheating before the Internet became available. But now it’s easier. Quicker. More anonymous.”

“By our standards, it’s cheating. By theirs, it’s efficiency,” says Nancy Abeshouse. Or as one respondent to the survey put it, “You do what it takes to succeed in life.”

The danger posed to all of us by the idea that it’s perfectly OK to cheat as long as it helps you get ahead is fairly obvious. (Haven’t any of these kids heard of Enron?) But there were a couple of other points about the story that caught my eye as well — problems just as serious as the widespread erosion of integrity.

When I was in college, my class had to do an assignment on The Turn of the Screw similar to the one described above. As the plagiarized sentence in the example above suggests, the most popular interpretation of the novel nowadays is that the governess saw imaginary ghosts because she was sexually repressed. I chose to argue instead that Henry James meant to say that the governess really did see ghosts. I had three reasons: (1) Sexual repression gets blamed for pretty nearly everything that’s wrong with the world today, and I find that tiresome; (2) I thought that the story was more intriguing (and, incidentally, made more sense) if the ghosts were real; and (3) if the majority of people hold a certain opinion about a book, I like to hold a different opinion. Not all of these were the best of reasons, perhaps. But that didn’t matter much; what mattered was whether I was able to provide a strong defense for my position.

But the students at the Maryland high school entirely missed that point — the point of the whole assignment. As Abeshouse puts it, “I wanted them to go through an intellectual exercise. And they just wanted the answer.”

Students who “just want the answer” to an assignment like this, and are willing to cheat to get it, aren’t just compromising their integrity. And they’re not just learning that anything that can be done through technology is morally permissible (although they’re picking up that valuable little lesson as well.) They’re also developing dangerous mental habits.

Henry James wrote The Turn of the Screw so that we couldn’t know anything for certain. The motives of everyone involved — the governess, the children she cares for, their uncle, the ghosts (if they’re real) — are so complex and obscure that you could read the book half a dozen times and get something different out of it every time. That’s why a debate is still raging over the book more than a century after it was written. Yet it’s likely that almost every student who copied from that essay on The Turn of the Screw — an essay that Abeshouse says has an “anti-intellectual, cynical, what’s-the-bottom-line tone” — now has it settled in his or her mind that the story is definitely about a deranged woman who sees things that aren’t there.

Now, it’s true that most high school students aren’t going to give another thought to Turn of the Screw after they’ve turned in their assignment and received their grade. (Of course, having got caught, the group of students in this example may be forced to think more about it than they would like.) But the damage is done. Instead of studying the evidence, formulating a theory, and explaining their reasoning, they’ve learned to rely on someone else’s opinion without evaluating it. What the opinion was based on, whether it was a good opinion, or whether they would have agreed with it if they’d read the book didn’t matter a bit. Think what that means for a generation being raised in the media age, when any given news broadcast or front page of a newspaper is full of opinions masquerading as facts.

And think about what this trend is doing to inhibit the development of students’ own judgment. After reading the story in the Post, I went online and looked at some of the sites the article mentioned that are frequented by high school and college students. Some of the essays about various literary texts that I found were reasonably good; several were mediocre; and quite a few were dreadful. (Here’s a gem from a paper on The Great Gatsby: “Another interesting detail is Gatsby’s car is yellow instead of the standardized black of the era stresses the thought that he is engrossed with the obsession of displaying his material wealth to get the love of Daisy. The Death car is yellow, and in the novel yellow symbolizes money and corruption in the novel.” If you think that’s bad, you should see the rest of the paper.)

Additionally, in some cases, the authors’ biases were clear. A paper from the same site that featured the Turn of the Screw essay, this one about Les Misérables, was eloquent about how Jean Valjean’s “love for others . . . keeps him going and . . . rescues him in times of need.” But as anyone who’s actually read the book — or even seen the musical — would notice, there’s not one word about the central experience of Valjean’s life, when the hardened criminal discovers the love of God and is transformed.

But kids who lift their own opinions from such papers aren’t learning to judge writing styles, to weigh various sources against each other, and to decide whether how well they interpret the novel. All they’re learning to do is decide whether a given essay provides an answer to fit their teacher’s question (and to play around with a few sentences to make it harder for the teacher to locate the original essay in a search engine).

English professor Gillian Silverman wrote about this mentality in an article in Newsweek:

My personal favorite involved a paper cribbed from an Amazon.com reader’s report for the Cliffs Notes of Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. Really, why take the trouble to cheat directly off the Cliffs Notes when you can simply crib from the reviews? . . . They will mooch just as readily from an adolescent chat forum as they will from an online academic journal.

The student who is overloaded with homework, a job, and extracurricular activities and feels under pressure to earn high grades — and we’ve all been there — may think he’s doing himself a favor by letting someone else do the thinking for him. But the purpose of an education is, or should be, to study the work of those who have come before us and learn to form our own opinions and judgments — to think for ourselves. I don’t know about you, but the scene described above, with a classroom full of students all in perfect agreement, gives me the creeps. It’s like something out of George Orwell’s 1984, where “Big Brother is watching you” and everyone is supposed to parrot what he says. More to the point, though, it dramatically illustrates a major dilemma facing students today: Take the time and effort to learn to think for yourself, or just follow the crowd wherever it goes?

Modern technology notwithstanding, that isn’t a new or modern dilemma at all. And the one correct answer to this particular question isn’t very hard to find.