Cheating and Technology: How Modern Technology Has Affected Education

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Cheating and Technology: How Modern Technology Has Affected Education

Isn’t technology a wonderful thing? Ask 100 people this question and you will probably get 100 different opinions. Most would agree that it is. However, as wonderful as it may be, it doesn’t always mean it is a good thing. There is no doubt technology has made our lives easier, more manageable, and most things can be done faster and in many cases simpler. Has technology also made it simpler for people to cheat?

We might want to first follow that question with another question. What is cheating and why do so many people do it? Most people would agree that cheating is deceitful and one who obtains answers by cheating is not practicing good integrity. We could further add that cheating also prevents the student from having to put in long hours of studying and preparation. Recent technology has made this “time saving method” even more efficient.

A few years back there was a movie which was set on a Ivey League campus in the late 1990’s and the plot revolved around one student who managed to steal a copy of his professor’s final exam and proceed to copy it and give out copies to all his classmates. Cheating? Yes. Technology? Yes and no. The copy machine is considered technology but in light of innovations in technology over the past decade the copy machine is archaic. The part of his plan that did not require technology but did make his scheme rather difficult as well as dangerous was the actual stealing.

The advent of the cell phone and internet has offered ways of cheating that as little as ten years would have been unimaginable. Technology is on the rise, and most people don’t know the real capabilities of the new technological advances. The younger generation has been brought up

around the new technology and is finding newer and better ways to use the technology to their advantages.

The internet offers a plethora of information and with a cut and paste, a few word re-arrangements, the average student can be made to appear as a very bright prospect. There are many websites out there that offer cheating tools. Free papers and mock test all are very useful tools that kids are using.

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