Using Technology to Cheat
Cheating in the classroom has been happening since the first schoolhouse was built; however, it has more than doubled in the last decade due to the emergence of new technologies that give students high tech alternatives to looking at their classmate's paper. "A 2002 survey by the Josephson Institute of Ethics of 12,000 high-school students found that 74 % of students had cheated on an exam at least once in the previous year. According to Donald McCabe, who conducted the Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, study, the Internet is partly to blame. The Internet makes plagiarism very simple. In-class cheating has also gone high technology. Experts say students who cheat are not just scribbling tiny crib sheets anymore. They are using their cell phones to instant message questions and answers or storing notes on their graphing calculators." ("Eye on Cheaters," 2004)
Over the past decade or so, we have seen a huge increase in cheating in our schools. The introduction of the Internet into most homes and schools and other technological advances are some of the main causes. Students are misusing the new technologies to find new and more high tech ways to cheat. During testing students are receiving answers via text messaging devices, they are downloading notes to iPods and graphing calculators, they are picture messaging exams with their mobile phones, and they are even hiring look-alike experts to take the exams for them. They can use the internet to easily plagiarize a paper; they can pay a company to write the paper for them, they can even pay to use a prewritten paper from a database. The internet and technology are making it easier and easier for students to cheat, and as technology continues to advance, we will continue to see a rapid rise in cheating.
Many self respecting and honest people can be motivated to cheat in this day and age. Will the prevalence of computers, text messaging cell phones and even the ipod in the classroom students have technology at their fingertips and therefore the accessibility to cheat. The computer allow you to Google almost anything. The cell phones allow you to text another student or even someone sitting at a computer. The iPod® allows you to listen to almost anything including the speech you may be writing about. We all want that edge over the person sitting next to us.
If a teacher is unfamiliar with current advancements in the digital world, it is possible that they will miss the most obvious of cheaters. Because the student is never punished or caught, they assume the teacher does not consider it cheating. In some cases, schools are responsible for the rise in cheating because of the way curriculum is presented. In an article written by the Atlantic, a teacher received an anonymous letter from a successful college student stating that he had cheated all throughout high school. He told the author he cheated “because the grade [he]would have otherwise been given was not reflective of [his] true learning” (Lahey). In other words, he felt the teachers were giving him exams that were not accurate representations of the material he had learned. If students are giving themselves excuses for their cheating, that feeling of guilt will subside, and they will not view the action as wrong. Many think they are not at fault if they do not get caught or because they are just trying to keep up with their classmates who are cheating as well. These are the students that contribute to the statistics, the ones who are adding to
Since teachers have given assessments of any kind, students have attempted to find ways to cheat. Whether they were looking at another student’s paper, attempting to gain answers prior to the test, or directly copying another student’s work, these students were trying to gain a favorable grade without performing to the required standard. Today’s digital age has not only added more opportunity for students to copy the work of another, but it has also added an air of ambiguity to what is and is not cheating, or plagiarism. Some of this stems from, as Taylor (2003) states, “different mores and values than in the past [that] all contribute to cheating;” therefore, “working to understand underlyin...
Strom, P., & Strom, R. (2007). Cheating in middle school and high school. Educational …..Forum,71(2), 104-116. doi:10.1080/00131720708984924
Pressures from society to obtain a successful career require achieving an education in most cases. In today's economy having a thriving career could depend on our educational background as part of the ingredient to fuel our lifestyles. Students attending high school or college can relate to the pressures of sustaining adequate grades. Students who are overwhelmed with trying to maintain higher GPA standards push the academic barriers using technology to cheat. Our society is more advanced with technology such as computers, cell phones, text message systems, as well as various other electronic devices that could provide the avenue for a desperate student seeking a way to cheat in order to receive a higher GPA score. According to Ad Council (1999),"Grades, rather than education, have become the major focus of many students" (Ad Council, 1999). For those students in high school maintaining high GPA's could equal college scholarship programs needed to attend college. Students with peer pressures as well as pressures from parents to achieve higher grades could thrust students who are not motivated to study, to resort to cheating as an easy solution to an unethical problem. This research paper will discuss ways in which students are using technology to cheat. Other aspects of this paper will include statistics on academic cheating as well as ways instructors are catching students cheating. The pros and cons after using cheating detection programs as well as statistics that show significant changes after using the detection programs will also be discussed.
There is an ever broadening problem spreading throughout colleges all across America: cheating. Is it a serious offence or just a harmless crime? Cheating is on the rise, but schools and colleges are not far behind with ways of dealing with it. Mark Clayton deals with this issue in his essay entitled “A Whole Lot of Cheatin’ Going On.”
Cheating by students in American schools has become a serious and growing problem. A 2005 poll of 12,000 college graduates in the contiguous United States with a 62% response rate showed the following: 45% of all students cheated on an examination that counted toward 10-20% of their grade and 51% cheated on an exam that counted toward 33-50% of their final grade. When asked why they cheated, 70% of cheaters stated that they did not fear failing the exams on which they cheated and that cheating for a "higher grade" was the primary motive. The most common method of cheating involved electronic technologies such as instant messaging via telephone, e-mail, internet searches, and other devices holding electronic versions of material covered on an exam. For outside classroom work, 71% of all poll responders admitted to copying homework from someone they considered "smarter". Of all the reponders, 43% of students stated that they had turned in an essay copied from the internet. Of the cheaters, 88% had turned in an essay copied from th...
...ble to over come such a habit will undoubtedly give you greater control over your life. Understanding why students cheat and will help us better see the signs ahead of time and hopefully provide the individuals with the help and resources they need in order to really get the value of a college education. In the end cheating gets you nowhere and just lowers you ability to perform at a higher level.
Situations of cheating have seemed to become more and more commonplace when the student is bored by the subject material, poor teaching and or feels they have no use for the knowledge. Kohn even states in his article, “cheating is more common when students experience the academic tasks they’ve been given as boring, irrelevant, or overwhelming.” This infers that if a student were attending a school interested in learning about art, the student maybe more inclined to cheat in a business accounting class due to the fact the student would find the subject material irrelevant to them and their future. Students seem to be less inclined to cheat and it “is relatively rare in classrooms where the learning is genuinely engaging and meaningful to students and where a commitment to exploring significant ideas hasn’t been eclipsed by a single-minded emphasis on “rigor”” (Kohn). To simplify everything mentioned above; students are inclined to cheat in school when they are disinterested in the subject material and or are overwhelmed by in assignment or finally the result in a poor teacher. Everyone who has attended school can relate to this in some way or another, most people do not want to retain knowledge they have no interest in or use for in their
Cheating is a big issue that has reached the most competitive campuses around the United States. It is increasing more and more with the new technology that we have in the 21st century because students have easy access to many sources of information. Cheating is something all students have done at some point in their lives, but as they reach a higher academic level, they are faced with more rigorous consequences that can affect their futures in many different ways. Cheating might be seen as an easy way to obtain a good grade, get into a good college, or maintain scholarships or financial aid, but the consequences could affect the life and the future of the student.
Cheating has always been a problem in school and Marie Pearlman tells us about cheating in a quote from “Cheating in School Reflects Basic Confusion in Society”. Cheating has been increasing a whole decade and it will be another decade of cheating when 2019 begins. Cheating can be found anywhere, but it is mostly found in schools where many students influence each other to cheat or students find their influence somewhere besides school.
But one question that is being asked is why students get to that point of risking everything that they have worked for. What can be a way of preventing students from using technology to cheat? Some reasons that can be mentions for the cause of a student having to cheat are: getting a good grade, lack of time to do the assignments, not being able to study on time and or just being lazy and not willing to put fort the effort.
Academic knowledge is the basis on which future prosperity, and financial security has been determined. As a consequence, students feel inclined to perform above average in school. Now, as students perform less and less, they sink to obtain good grades by cheating. This method to acquire the desired grades will only harm the student, instead of the imagined result. Prompted by a child’s inability to perform basic tasks throughout his education , academic cheating spawns numerous negative consequences.
Children are taught to use computers at incredibly young ages, and according to Ann Lanthrop plagiarism has become a problem even in the lowest levels of elementary education. It has become so easy for students to access information for their homework and papers on the Internet that some students feel they should not have to work even a little to receive the grades that they desire. High school students get out of reading novels for their English classes by reading "book notes" online. While in the past students had access to these materials, websites such as Spark Notes, Monkey Notes, and a number of other websites have made access to these "study guides" free to students, causing the temptation to cheat to be even harder to ignore. The Web also offers many ways for students to obtain term papers or essays at a low cost. In many cases, these students do not even bother to change any piece of the paper! The simplicity of the Internet has made cheating on assignments much more effortless than in the past, even if students are not directly copying and pasting from Websites, they can also email homework problems and essay questions to every member of the class. Plagiarism is a severe issue that needs to be addressed by both teachers and parents with children while they are still young enough to fear the consequences of their actions.
Modern students face many pressures for academic success. They are often unwilling to disappoint their parents or spouses. Some fear that not cheating will weaken a student’s ability to compete with their peers. They rationalize their unethical behavior, unwilling to accept a poor grade, consequently justifying cheating as the only means to that end.
Temptation is another reason for cheating in exams. The birth of internet brought the ability to quickly and efficiently transmit information on anything from anywhere, right to our fingertips with sites. The sites cater for students by providing pre-written reports and essays that you can purchase or download for free. Mobile phones with internet increases the chance of cheating in exam rooms.