Does Integrity Matter?

I was thinking about Auden's poem "The Unknown Citizen" today after reading this article, in which students at the competitive Stuyvesant High School in New York explain the rationale behind the rampant cheating and plagiarism at their school.  

The article notes that many of these students who cheat "have internalized a moral and academic math: 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."  Tragically, these students are reducing their entire high school experience to mere statistics--a grade, a GPA, a college acceptance (or rejection).  Through a combination of external pressures to excel and internal pressures to achieve, these kids have either been taught, or they've taught themselves,  that who they are isn't nearly as important as what they've scored.  After all, you can't see integrity on a transcript.  

The final couplet of Auden's poem, then, seems all the more chilling to me.  After commemorating a man known only by a number and who, by all quantifiable measures,  was a model of conformity, the speaker--ostensibly a representative of a government that knows "everything" about its citizens-- asks:

         Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: 

         Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard. 

My students astutely concluded that the irony in the poem lies in how the state knows everything about the Citizen it honors, but doesn't bother to know him at all.  Unfortunately, though, I fear that's what lots of high school students think about the way they're perceived by their teachers, college admissions officers, maybe adults in general. "Free" and "Happy" aren't exactly quantifiable measures of achievement or predictors of future success.

I worry that my students genuinely believe that the world sees them as merely grades on a transcript, SAT scores, lists of accomplishments. Yes, the college admissions process does invite students to express themselves in their essays and through their choices of courses and extracurriculars.  But in an effort to attract or please the eye of an admissions officer who must choose from among tens of thousands of worthy applicants, I wonder how many students genuinely believe they can afford to be "free" or honest at this stage in their lives.  Sadly, from what I read today, it seems that for some students, integrity is potentially quite costly:  an Ivy League degree, a high-paying job, or a successful future could be the cost for academic honesty, and for some students, that's clearly "absurd."