The Ease of Cheating in School
Students Begin to Cheat with the Aid of Electronics in Middle School
Because students are able to download so easily, more are cheating than in the past. Many websites on the Internet show students just how easy it is.
Cheating in school is an age old problem. However, now it is so much easier, and many students have no qualms about doing it.
An example of this problem is what happened recently in a rural Midwestern town in a one week time period. A middle school teacher caught three different students cheating. One student copied another student's homework in the classroom. One student used another student's identification number and took an online quiz for the student. Lastly, one student copied and pasted information directly from an online book summarizing website and turned it in as her essay.
Many Use the Internet or Electronics to Cheat
Academic cheating takes many forms. Taking a person’s work and taking credit for it is even easier with the Internet and electronic devices. Computers allow students to download papers from websites, to easily copy and paste information, and to take online assessments for other students. Electronic devices, such as PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) or cell phones, allow students to send test answers through text messages or photos to other students. Or, students store test information on programmable calculators.
It does not help that the Internet is chocked full of websites that offer free or cheap papers to download at the click of a button, such as CheatHouse, FreeEssays and Blur of Insanity. Some websites brazenly give tips on how to cheat. Blur of Insanity gives a link to a fake gum wrapper in which to hide exam notes. YouTube even has cheat videos. One example is (How) to cheat on your term paper video that shows students how to stretch the length of a paper by enlarging the font size of all the periods in a paper.
Surveys Prove Students Are Willing to Risk Getting Caught for the Grade
In the Educational Testing Service’s Ad Campaign to Discourage Academic Cheating: Cheating is a Personal Foul article, a survey of 3,123 college-bound 16 to 18-year-olds in the 29th Who’s Who Among American High School Students released in 1988 found that 80% of the country’s top students had cheated in school. Most (95%) said they were never caught.
The Josephson Institute of Ethics in 1998 completed a survey of 20,829 middle school and high school students. Of the high school students, 70% came clean about cheating on an exam in the past year, while only 54% of the middle school students confessed to it.
According to The Josephson Institute of Ethics, "The evidence is fairly clear that cheating begins in the middle school fairly seriously and escalates in the higher grades, 10th, 11th and 12th grades, because that's when the stakes are highest." The institute also found that cheating is more apt to happen if the student is focused on receiving high grades.
For athletes, the need to cheat for top grades was greater. Stuart Laidlaw’s article Kids in organized sports more likely to cheat, study shows [Toronto Star, March 5, 2007] showed another study by The Josephson Institute of Ethics. This two-year survey of 5,275 high school athletes from across the U.S found that around 67% percent of athletes acknowledged that they cheated on an exam once in the previous school year compared to 60% of the rest of the students. Football players cheated the most at 72%.
Students Need to Understand that Cheating Is a Serious Offense
Cheating is a problem that is exacerbated by the ease of gaining information from the computer and electronic devices. Most schools have Internet and plagiarism policies. However, the vast majority of students get away with cheating because teachers do not have police-like investigative skills or have the time to check everything. Parents need to talk to their children about the seriousness of cheating, and in turn, students need to understand that cheating is a “big deal.”
