In an ongoing research project called “cribbed notes” the aim is to understand how young people deal with the tension between school work and norm system in school and universities and society at large (Hult et al, 2004). In that respect a great interest is given to students’ attitudes to issues related to cheating and plagiarism. In my paper I will present tentative results from a field study in two boy dominated classes at a vocational programme in the Swedish upper secondary school. During this field study I observed that the pupils sometimes were engaged in activities commonly seen as cheating. During tests they used crib notes, they copied the homework or other types of tasks from one another. They also plagiarized student essays from the Internet. In the eyes of the boys cheating was nothing extraordinary because most of them did it in one way or another, and a majority of the pupil saw it as a sensible way to deal with educational demands. The pupils also claimed that their cheating only occurred in subjects that had an academic nature and not in subjects that was related to their future work. The boys said that they were the kind of student that did not appreciate schoolwork and that they experienced the academic curriculum as boring and “of no use” for their future work as construction workers. The purpose of my paper is to analyse the boys’ ways to justify their cheating as an identity work. In doing so, the paper draws upon a theoretical framework of identity (Jenkins, 2004, Hall, 1996, Barth, 1969), and theories of resistance and schooling (Willis, 1977, Giroux, 1983), and masculinity and schooling (Frosh & Phoenix; et al, 2002). To analyse cheating as a ´identity work´ could be seen as a contribution to research on cheating. Of course, recently cheating and plagiarism has increasingly been scrutinized. Although, very few studies has focused on motives and attitudes to learning among pupils who cheat (see Hult & Hult, 2003, Hult, et al, 2004). How pupils value their education could be seen as an issue of identity. Thus, different life projects and strategies regarding education contain notions of self images, thoughts of what individuals values as important and unimportant for their lives. In their article, Voelk Finn & Frone (2004) use the concept ´school identification´ (“the extent to which students feel a sense of valuing and belonging in school” 2004:118), to partially explain cheating. Their results show that a high level of ´school identification´ reduces the liability of cheating regardless of the students’ academic performance otherwise. However, in my paper the interest is on how pupils use cheating in their identity work and as a meaningful device to construct their identity in an educational setting, rather than to se it as an indicator of a lack of identification with norms of the school. In my paper I suggest that cheating among the boys was more dynamic than something that could be explained by a polarization between high and low levels of identifications to schooling. Methodological the papers draws on data generated from at ethnographic study. By using observations, formal and informal interviews this methodological design differs from how most of research on cheating is conducted. Primarily it seems that much of the prior research has used surveys and focused on correlates between cheating and individual characteristics such as: values, intelligence, gender, age or integration to society (e.g. Hult & Hult, 2003). The ethnographic approach in my study could therefore be seen as a methodological contribution to the field of research on cheating.

Ethnography (interviews and observations).

The data presentation consists of three themes, 1, the rationale of utility; 2, Cheating as time saving; 3 Cheating as a joint activity of having fun A tentative conclusion is that, the cheating aming the boy´ is more dynamic than something that could be explained by a polarization between high and low levels of identifications to schooling. But also that, their resitance- that become visible in their cheating activities- towards the academic subjects differ from the resistance that describes in concept like school counter culture. The resitance among the boys is discussed as relutance rather than a school counter culture. Relutance is in that sense a less strict and firm form of resitance.