essay student cheating

The Real Roots of Student Cheating

Let's address the mixed messages we are sending to young people..

Updated September 28, 2023 | Reviewed by Ray Parker

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• Cheating is rampant, yet young people consistently affirm honesty and the belief that cheating is wrong.
• This discrepancy arises, in part, from the tension students perceive between honesty and the terms of success.
• In an integrated environment, achievement and the real world are not seen as at odds with honesty.

The release of ChatGPT has high school and college teachers wringing their hands. A Columbia University undergraduate rubbed it in our face last May with an opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled I’m a Student. You Have No Idea How Much We’re Using ChatGPT.

He goes on to detail how students use the program to “do the lion’s share of the thinking,” while passing off the work as their own. Catching the deception , he insists, is impossible.

As if students needed more ways to cheat. Every survey of students, whether high school or college, has found that cheating is “rampant,” “epidemic,” “commonplace, and practically expected,” to use a few of the terms with which researchers have described the scope of academic dishonesty.

In a 2010 study by the Josephson Institute, for example, 59 percent of the 43,000 high school students admitted to cheating on a test in the past year. According to a 2012 white paper, Cheat or Be Cheated? prepared by Challenge Success, 80 percent admitted to copying another student’s homework. The other studies summarized in the paper found self-reports of past-year cheating by high school students in the 70 percent to 80 percent range and higher.

At colleges, the situation is only marginally better. Studies consistently put the level of self-reported cheating among undergraduates between 50 percent and 70 percent depending in part on what behaviors are included. 1

The sad fact is that cheating is widespread.

Commitment to Honesty

Yet, when asked, most young people affirm the moral value of honesty and the belief that cheating is wrong. For example, in a survey of more than 3,000 teens conducted by my colleagues at the University of Virginia, the great majority (83 percent) indicated that to become “honest—someone who doesn’t lie or cheat,” was very important, if not essential to them.

On a long list of traits and qualities, they ranked honesty just below “hard-working” and “reliable and dependent,” and far ahead of traits like being “ambitious,” “a leader ,” and “popular.” When asked directly about cheating, only 6 percent thought it was rarely or never wrong.

Other studies find similar commitments, as do experimental studies by psychologists. In experiments, researchers manipulate the salience of moral beliefs concerning cheating by, for example, inserting moral reminders into the test situation to gauge their effect. Although students often regard some forms of cheating, such as doing homework together when they are expected to do it alone, as trivial, the studies find that young people view cheating in general, along with specific forms of dishonesty, such as copying off another person’s test, as wrong.

They find that young people strongly care to think of themselves as honest and temper their cheating behavior accordingly. 2

The Discrepancy Between Belief and Behavior

Bottom line: Kids whose ideal is to be honest and who know cheating is wrong also routinely cheat in school.

What accounts for this discrepancy? In the psychological and educational literature, researchers typically focus on personal and situational factors that work to override students’ commitment to do the right thing.

These factors include the force of different motives to cheat, such as the desire to avoid failure, and the self-serving rationalizations that students use to excuse their behavior, like minimizing responsibility—“everyone is doing it”—or dismissing their actions because “no one is hurt.”

While these explanations have obvious merit—we all know the gap between our ideals and our actions—I want to suggest another possibility: Perhaps the inconsistency also reflects the mixed messages to which young people (all of us, in fact) are constantly subjected.

Mixed Messages

Consider the story that young people hear about success. What student hasn’t been told doing well includes such things as getting good grades, going to a good college, living up to their potential, aiming high, and letting go of “limiting beliefs” that stand in their way? Schools, not to mention parents, media, and employers, all, in various ways, communicate these expectations and portray them as integral to the good in life.

They tell young people that these are the standards they should meet, the yardsticks by which they should measure themselves.

In my interviews and discussions with young people, it is clear they have absorbed these powerful messages and feel held to answer, to themselves and others, for how they are measuring up. Falling short, as they understand and feel it, is highly distressful.

At the same time, they are regularly exposed to the idea that success involves a trade-off with honesty and that cheating behavior, though regrettable, is “real life.” These words are from a student on a survey administered at an elite high school. “People,” he continued, “who are rich and successful lie and cheat every day.”

In this thinking, he is far from alone. In a 2012 Josephson Institute survey of 23,000 high school students, 57 percent agreed that “in the real world, successful people do what they have to do to win, even if others consider it cheating.” 3

Putting these together, another high school student told a researcher: “Grades are everything. You have to realize it’s the only possible way to get into a good college and you resort to any means necessary.”

In a 2021 survey of college students by College Pulse, the single biggest reason given for cheating, endorsed by 72 percent of the respondents, was “pressure to do well.”

What we see here are two goods—educational success and honesty—pitted against each other. When the two collide, the call to be successful is likely to be the far more immediate and tangible imperative.

A young person’s very future appears to hang in the balance. And, when asked in surveys , youths often perceive both their parents’ and teachers’ priorities to be more focused on getting “good grades in my classes,” than on character qualities, such as being a “caring community member.”

In noting the mixed messages, my point is not to offer another excuse for bad behavior. But some of the messages just don’t mix, placing young people in a difficult bind. Answering the expectations placed on them can be at odds with being an honest person. In the trade-off, cheating takes on a certain logic.

The proposed remedies to academic dishonesty typically focus on parents and schools. One commonly recommended strategy is to do more to promote student integrity. That seems obvious. Yet, as we saw, students already believe in honesty and the wrongness of (most) cheating. It’s not clear how more teaching on that point would make much of a difference.

Integrity, though, has another meaning, in addition to the personal qualities of being honest and of strong moral principles. Integrity is also the “quality or state of being whole or undivided.” In this second sense, we can speak of social life itself as having integrity.

It is “whole or undivided” when the different contexts of everyday life are integrated in such a way that norms, values, and expectations are fairly consistent and tend to reinforce each other—and when messages about what it means to be a good, accomplished person are not mixed but harmonious.

While social integrity rooted in ethical principles does not guarantee personal integrity, it is not hard to see how that foundation would make a major difference. Rather than confronting students with trade-offs that incentivize “any means necessary,” they would receive positive, consistent reinforcement to speak and act truthfully.

Talk of personal integrity is all for the good. But as pervasive cheating suggests, more is needed. We must also work to shape an integrated environment in which achievement and the “real world” are not set in opposition to honesty.

1. Liora Pedhazur Schmelkin, et al. “A Multidimensional Scaling of College Students’ Perceptions of Academic Dishonesty.” The Journal of Higher Education 79 (2008): 587–607.

2. See, for example, the studies in Christian B. Miller, Character and Moral Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, Ch. 3.

3. Josephson Institute. The 2012 Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth (Installment 1: Honesty and Integrity). Josephson Institute of Ethics, 2012.

Joseph E. Davis is Research Professor of Sociology and Director of the Picturing the Human Colloquy of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.

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Why Do Students Cheat? One Student’s Perspective

Sarah Gido is a Marketing and Communications major at Anglo-American University in Prague, Czech Republic

Cheating has always been an issue in school. When I asked my friends if they had ever cheated in school, the response was almost always yes. Some said that in high school they wrote answers on water bottle wrappers or even on their legs to be seen through the holes of their jeans. Another said they took an online public speaking course and had their script written above their computer. But if we all know it’s morally wrong, why do students cheat? And why are more students cheating now in 2023 than ever before?

Online learning makes cheating easier

The shift to online learning in 2020 drastically changed the relationship between students and learning. From a student perspective, it is much easier to cheat on virtual tests and homework assignments. With any answer at their fingertips on the internet, students turn to search engines for help on exams. Digital learning puts a barrier between students and professors, but also between students and learning content.

It’s difficult to feel connected and interested in information through independent learning that arises from digital assignments. When students don’t have an emotional stake in the learning process, they retain less of what they learn and cheating is an easy solution. From splitting screens between tabs and studying websites, technology has made student cheating easier—and harder for instructors to detect—than ever before. When it’s that easy, students often find that it doesn’t feel as wrong. Furthermore, it’s easier on the conscience to cheat without a professor or your peers looking at you.

Students are losing motivation

Students’ plates are fuller than ever before. The switch back to fully in-person learning was jarring but a welcome change for many! However, many students fell into a cycle of choosing convenience over studying during virtual and hybrid learning courses. Being back in the classroom meant the return of intense schedules, public speaking, and rising stress levels. Staying motivated in class is much more difficult when balancing the stress of a job, relationships, sickness, or hunting for an internship. According to a survey completed by the American Addiction Centers, 88 percent of students reported their school life to be stressful. Dwindling levels of motivation can lead to procrastination and resistance to do assignments that weigh on students’ minds. Homework, essays, and exams turn into dreaded obligations completed with haste by cheating rather than opportunities for enhancement.

Students are focused on passing courses

In the minds of many students, there’s more emphasis on passing classes than there is on learning. In the stress of coursework, focus on exam scores can be overwhelming. Finishing a degree is difficult and there has been a distinct shift in the perception of college courses and the end goal. The COVID-19 pandemic put an abrupt halt to the “normal” progression of school life, and many students now are just looking to finish.

Curb your students’ desire to cheat

The students of today are unique and are looking to regain motivation. Making content relatable is the best way to tap into the minds of students and have them invest time and energy into the course. This is as simple as using relevant real-world resources and references. I look forward to courses that challenge me in a fun way as a learner and individual. As a Marketing student, my favorite college course I have taken utilized nontraditional assignments, including oral exams and examining current advertisements. Fostering a classroom that welcomes opportunities for career and personal development may energize your students and make them less likely to cheat.

Want to learn more about how and why students cheat, plus strategies for preventing and detecting cheating? Download our free eBook, “Cheating and Academic Dishonesty: How to Spot it — and What to Do About It.”

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Cheating, Inc.: How Writing Papers for American College Students Has Become a Lucrative Profession Overseas

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By Farah Stockman and Carlos Mureithi

Tuition was due. The rent was, too . So Mary Mbugua, a university student in Nyeri, Kenya, went out in search of a job. At first, she tried selling insurance policies, but that only paid on commission and she never sold one. Then she sat behind the reception desk at a hotel, but it ran into financial trouble.

Finally, a friend offered to help her break into “academic writing,” a lucrative industry in Kenya that involves doing school assignments online for college students in the United States, Britain and Australia. Ms. Mbugua felt conflicted.

“This is cheating,” she said. “But do you have a choice? We have to make money. We have to make a living.”

Since federal prosecutors charged a group of rich parents and coaches this year in a sprawling fraud and bribery scheme , the advantages that wealthy American students enjoy in college admissions have been scrutinized. Less attention has been paid to the tricks some well-off students use to skate by once they are enrolled.

Cheating in college is nothing new, but the internet now makes it possible on a global, industrial scale. Sleek websites — with names like Ace-MyHomework and EssayShark — have sprung up that allow people in developing countries to bid on and complete American homework assignments.

Although such businesses have existed for more than a decade, experts say demand has grown in recent years as the sites have become more sophisticated, with customer service hotlines and money-back guarantees. The result? Millions of essays ordered annually in a vast, worldwide industry that provides enough income for some writers to make it a full-time job.

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How Students May Be Cheating Their Way Through College

Tovia Smith

Concern is growing at the nation's colleges and universities about a burgeoning online market, where students can buy ghost-written essays. Schools are trying new tools to catch it.

Contract Cheating: Colleges Crack Down On Ghostwritten Essays

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Doing away with essays won’t necessarily stop students cheating

Honorary Fellow, The University of Melbourne

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Julie Hare does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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It’s never been easier for university students to cheat. We just need look to the scandal in 2015 that revealed up to 1,000 students from 16 Australian universities had hired the Sydney-based MyMaster company to ghost-write their assignments and sit online tests.

It’s known as contract cheating – when a student pays a third party to undertake their assignments which they then pass off as their own. Contract cheating isn’t new – the term was coined in 2006 . But it’s becoming more commonplace because new technologies, such as the smart phone, are enablers.

Read more: 15% of students admit to buying essays. What can universities do about it?

Cheating is taken seriously by universities and the national regulator, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency . Much of the focus has been on changing assessment tasks to ones deemed to be harder for a third party to undertake. This is called “ authentic assessment ”.

This type of assessment has been widely adopted at universities . They are comprised of tasks that evaluate knowledge and skills by presenting students with real-world scenarios or problems relevant to the kinds of challenges they would face following graduation. But new research found authentic assessment may be as vulnerable to cheating as other more obvious examples, such as essays.

What the research shows

This new study was conducted by academics from six universities, led by Tracey Bretag and Rowena Harper from the University of South Australia. The research – part of the federal government’s Contract Cheating and Assessment Design project – surveyed 14,086 students and 1,147 staff.

The goal of this research was to collect and understand student’s perceptions of the likelihood of cheating on 13 different assessment tasks. The research then asked teaching staff which of the 13 tasks they used.

The researchers have previously reported from this data set that 6% of students admitted to cheating. The purpose of the current round of analysis was not to understand the extent of cheating, but perceptions of how easily it might be done, and if that correlated with the tasks educators set.

They found, for both students and teachers, assessments with a short turnaround time and heavily weighted in the final mark were perceived as the tasks which were the most likely to attract contract cheating.

Assessments perceived as the least likely to attract contract cheating were in-class tasks, personalised and unique tasks, vivas (oral explanations of a written task) and reflections on practical placements. But these tasks were the least likely to be set by educators, presumably because they’re resource and time intensive.

Contract cheating and assessment design

The research confirms the relationship between contract cheating and assessment design is a complex one. There was no assessment tasks for which students reported a 0% likelihood of contract cheating. Students who engage in contract cheating both see and look for opportunities to cheat regardless of the assessment task.

For universities, that means they must assume cheating is always possible and simply changing what assessments they use will not combat the problem.

Many experts have advocated the use of supervised exams to combat cheating. But this new research adds to a growing body of evidence that exams provide universities and accrediting bodies with a false sense of security. In fact, previous data has shown students reported engaging in undetected cheating on supervised exams at higher rates than other types of cheating.

Another common approach is to use a series of small, graded tasks, such as spontaneous in-class tests, sometimes called continuous assessment . Even here, students indicated these were the third most likely form of assessment to be outsourced.

Who’s most likely to cheat?

There has been much attention , particularly during the MyMaster scandal , on international students’ use of contract cheating. The new research suggests both international students and domestic students from non-English speaking backgrounds are more likely to engage in contract cheating than other students.

Read more: Don't assume online students are more likely to cheat. The evidence is murky

The research also found business and commerce degrees were more likely be perceived as attracting contract cheating. Engineering was also particularly vulnerable to cheating.

Students from non-English speaking backgrounds hypothesised cheating would be most likely to occur in assessments that required research, analysis and thinking skills (essays), heavily weighted assignments and assessments with short turnaround times.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, students who indicated they were satisfied with the quality of teaching were less likely to think breaches of academic integrity were likely. In other words, this confirms previous research which showed students dissatisfied with their educational experience are more likely to cheat.

So what do we do about it?

This research provides yet more compelling evidence that curriculum and changes to teaching strategies and early intervention must be employed to support students’ academic endeavours.

The researchers also point out high levels of cheating risks undermining the reputation and quality of Australia’s A$34 billion export sector in international education.

The data demonstrates assessment tasks designed to develop relevant professional skills, which teachers are highly likely to set, were perceived by students as tasks that can easily be cheated on. These might include asking accounting students to memorandums, reports or other communication groups to stakeholders, such as shareholders. In fact, among students from a non-English speaking background, the risks of cheating might actually increase for these tasks. This means authentic assessment might run the increasing risk of being outsourced.

Read more: Assessment design won’t stop cheating, but our relationships with students might

This research shows the relationship between contract cheating and assessment design is not a simple product of cause and effect. In fact, the nature of the task itself may be less relevant to the prevalence of cheating than other factors such as a student’s from non-English speaking background’s status, perceived opportunities to cheat or satisfaction with the teaching and learning environment.

All educators must remain vigilant about cheating. Teachers must be properly resourced by their universities to ensure they can create rich learning environments which uphold the integrity of the higher education system.

Burdened with large debts and facing a precarious job market after graduation, it’s perhaps unsurprising some students, particularly those who are struggling academically, take a transactional approach to their education. This new research provides more clear evidence contract cheating is a systemic problem that requires a sector-wide response.

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• Essay mills
• Exam cheating
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How to Stop Cheating in College

Can new technologies help counter today's ever-evolving strategies for cheating—and discourage students from doing it in the first place?

Cheating is omnipresent in American higher education. In 2015, Dartmouth College suspended 64 students suspected of cheating in—irony of ironies—an ethics class in the fall term. The previous school year, University of Georgia administrators reported investigating 603 possible cheating incidents; nearly 70 percent of the cases concluded with a student confession. In 2012, Harvard had its turn, investigating 125 students accused of improper collaboration on a final exam in a government class. Stanford University , New York State’s Upstate Medical University , Duke University , Indiana University, the University of Central Florida and even the famously honor code-bound University of Virginia have all faced cheating scandals in recent memory. And that’s just where I stopped Googling.

The nationwide statistics are bleak, too. The International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI), which has studied trends in academic dishonesty for more than a decade, reports that about 68 percent of undergraduate students surveyed admit to cheating on tests or in written work. Forty-three percent of graduate students do the same.

It’s easy to blame high levels of student dishonesty on new technologies, which can make cheating a matter of a swipe of a finger, rather than a stolen answer key or elaborate plot to share answers in the testing room. In a 2011 Pew study , 89 percent of college presidents blamed computers and the Internet for a perceived increase in plagiarism over the previous decade. Meanwhile, colleges are turning technology against the cheaters, using software products that proctor tests with webcams or check written work for plagiarism.

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But Don McCabe, a retired professor at Rutgers University who led the ICAI student surveys for many years, is hesitant to blame today’s student cheating rates on easy access to the Internet, computers, mobile phones, and more. His survey data shows a more complicated portrait: The percentages of student cheating did begin to increase once the Internet became ubiquitous, but now are actually trending down again, toward pre-Internet levels. But he also sees a diminishing level of student participation in his surveys—fewer responses, and fewer thoughtful responses. His theory is that there’s a growing apathy toward school and cheating at school among today’s students.

What is the best way for universities to catch today’s ever-evolving cheaters—and discourage them from cheating in the first place?

One approach is to take advantage of a number of new technological tools like Turnitin that are designed to make academic dishonesty easier to sniff out. Turnitin, for its part, is a web service used at institutions around the globe to analyze written schoolwork, giving students who run their papers through it computer-generated advice on their writing’s organization and sentence structures. And it gives professors a grading platform that compares every sentence in a student essay to a big database: billions of archived web pages, millions of academic articles and—perhaps most interestingly—most of the other student papers submitted on Turnitin in the past, more than 337 million, according to the company’s website .

Some new ways of uncovering cheating may feel a little creepy. Proctortrack , a software that monitors online test-takers through a webcam, identifies slouching, stretching, shifts in lighting and picking up a dropped pencil as potentially dishonest behaviors. The company behind it, Verificent Technologies, says that Proctortrack is currently installed on 300,000 student computers, with over 1 million online exams proctored since its release.

Other data experiments happening in higher education could have implications for how schools patrol for cheating in the future: many universities are starting to use demographic data like the student’s age and family education history alongside information on classroom engagement to predict a student’s likelihood of passing a course or even of graduating in four years. It doesn’t take much to imagine how quantifying expectations for how well a student will do in class might sharpen the search for cheaters.

But some worry that over-reliance on technological methods in the fight against student cheating risks a technological arms race, with students inventing still-more-ingenious ways of beating the system and institutions using more and more invasive means of catching them.

Indeed, Teddi Fishman, the current director of ICAI, sees a link between the technological environment and the popularity of different strains of cheating. For the past decade, for instance, she’s seen cut-and-paste plagiarism increase steadily. But now, with the advent of plagiarism-checking technologies like Turnitin, cut-and-paste is falling by the wayside, replaced with what Fishman refers to as “bespoke essays or contract cheating”—services that write papers on behalf of a cheater, a much more difficult practice to police with the technologies currently available.

And even as existing algorithms get scary good at identifying student behavior that deviates from the expected norm, Turnitin, Proctortrack and other tech tools can’t pass nuanced ethical judgements on human actions. Particularly in cases where a student’s intentions aren’t clear, deciding whether a student did their work with integrity is a tricky business.

A quick read of case notes from the Williams College Honor and Discipline Committee’s rulings on cheating accusations bears this out. In one situation, “[t]he student was a first year student from a high school abroad in which citation was not taught at all,” but still was punished by flunking a paper that didn’t have appropriate citations. In another, a student who had taken a test early tried to respond in a “vague yet supportive” way to a classmate who wanted to know if her notes had been useful to him in studying for the exam—and lost a letter grade on his test for his trouble. In a third, a freshman claimed that he hadn’t cited ideas taken from footnotes in the course’s text because he had thought that they were his own. The committee failed him on the assignment, but not the course, “because some felt that he genuinely was unaware that the ideas had their origin outside of his own thinking.”

Fishman points out that while students usually understand the “gross boundaries” of cheating, the specifics are much fuzzier, especially when it comes to paraphrasing and citation. “Frankly, I’ve been in many, many groups of teachers who are discussing where the borders are of plagiarism, and most of the time [they] can’t agree on where the exact boundaries are,” she told me. The definition of common knowledge—which determines what information needs attribution, and what doesn’t—is one such point of contention. “That’s a really complicated idea,” she explained. “There’s no one box of stuff that we can say, ‘Okay, this is common knowledge,’ because it varies from community to community. What’s common knowledge amongst a group of medical students, and what’s common knowledge amongst a group of engineering students is going to be different.”

Elizabeth Kiss, the president of Agnes Scott College, says that one way to achieve this is an honor code. “Fundamentally, it’s about creating a culture which focuses on membership in the community being connected with academic honesty, and then also having the critical conversations that reinforce that culture,” she says. The student handbook echoes her: “The cornerstone of the entire structure of Agnes Scott life is the Honor System,” it states.

At Agnes Scott and around a hundred other schools across the country, students sign an honor code, a promise to act with integrity on campus. In exchange for their trustworthiness, the students receive privileges that indicate the community’s trust in them—in Agnes Scott’s case, these even include self-scheduled, non-proctored exams and a leadership role in the judicial process when a student violates the code.

There’s evidence that honor codes do, in fact, deter cheating. Behavioral research shows that people who were reminded of moral expectations—by writing out or signing an honor code, or copying down the Ten Commandments—before they took a test reduced cheating. McCabe’s surveys have found that honor code schools have lower rates of cheating than other institutions by around a quarter, provided that honor code was made a central part of campus culture.

At Agnes Scott, that translates to a number of things: Students under investigation for honor code violations can request a public hearing, open to the whole community. The student-run Honor Court and the faculty, administrators and students who serve on the Judicial Review Board work to have guilty students reflect meaningfully on their behavior before dispensing a punishment. Kiss recalls a Judicial Board hearing where a student had copied an incorrect answer off of a neighboring student—despite the fact that her own calculations were correct. “She compounded it by trying to come up with more and more ridiculous and outlandish reasons for why she would have gotten that answer. So our job was to get her to have a breakthrough.”

Fishman argues that these kind of academic community-wide discussions about what constitutes integrity reverberate beyond the classroom. “What we hear from employers is that when they get students from a Bachelor’s degree, they’re really good at doing what they’re told to do, but they’re not necessarily good at looking at the situation and figuring out what needs to be done. So that points to the idea that instead of more structure and more consistency, what we need to do is provide a range of problem-based scenarios and let the students try to figure it out.” Even McCabe, who thinks that today’s students are apathetic about school, is convinced that honor codes are universities’ last best hope. “The only reason I imagine students stop cheating is because they’re being trusted,” he says. In other words, chicken or egg?

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Cheating In School Essay | Why Students Cheat? and What We Do About It?

November 1, 2021 by Prasanna

Cheating In School Essay: Cheating is a crime. Whether you cheat your friend, parents, or an unknown person, it is an unethical way of achieving your aim. For example – Cheating in exams is wrong as you’re supposed to study, practice, and understand the concept before answering in exams. If you skip all the previous steps and try to copy it from someone else or any other source, it is considered cheating.

Cheating is an act where a person acts dishonestly or in an unfair way to gain some advantage. Cheating in any manner or anywhere can not be justified. Cheating is also used by our children and most commonly they use it at school. Cheating in school is done in many ways like copying in exams, doing someone else’s work, copying the work from someone’s notebook without their permission.

You can also find more  Essay Writing articles on events, persons, sports, technology and many more.

Nowadays children have also started using mobile phones for Cheating in their exam papers and to tell the answers to their fellow students. All these forms of Cheating are wrong and unethical, no doubt they are the shortcut to the goal. But not all the students are involved in Cheating. Cheating has many major after effects like they can get expelled from the school which can make them lose their self respect, integrity, etc. So, as elders we should try to make our children understand that Cheating in no way is acceptable.

Long Essay on Cheating in School 750 Words in English

Cheating in school means an unethical way to get early and easy access to your aim. Cheating in school means when a student tries to get good academic grades through a dishonest and unfair way. Cheating is a false representation of the child’s ability which he may not be able to give without Cheating. It is unfair to everyone involved as it deprives the true one of the chance to come on the top.

In reality, the cheater, the teachers and the classmates all are getting deprived of the benefits. Actually Cheating is like a bad temptation which pulls you towards itself when you are able to get something easily with the help of it. Like if a child is able to get good grades in an exam by Cheating, he will try to do the same in other exams also as he will start finding it easy. It’s like an addiction which is not easy to get rid of. You can get an A grade in an exam through Cheating but you know that you didn’t earn it through fair means and will start self-doubting. It makes the student less self confident and gradually losing his sanity and integrity which hampers the overall growth.

The child is not trying to learn, rather he is trying to find ways which are easy but not right. Cheating also has major setbacks like suspension, repeating the same class, etc. Cheating is morally wrong because it gives the cheater an undue advantage over the others truly deserving. Students resort to Cheating because of many reasons – desire to get good grades, the fear of failing, competition with friends and classmates to excel in the class, parental pressure, etc. Cheating affects the child mentally as it increases the anxiety levels in the child. He may start feeling bad for himself as he knows that whatever he has achieved is not because of his own hard work, which will gradually make him feel helpless and trapped. The teachers and parents should make it a point to make the children realize that Cheating is not a good habit.

They can do so by giving their own life examples, making them understand and stressing that winning is not everything, teaching them how to cope with failure, and being compassionate with them while discussing this topic so that they do not feel embarrassed. Ask the child to do more practice of the topic he finds difficult, praise him in the little efforts he is putting to improve himself, try and explore new areas in which the child is good so that he can regain his self esteem.

Short Essay on Cheating in School

• Cheating is an act of behaving in a way that is unethical. Trying to achieve our goal through dishonest and unfair ways is not a way.
• We all at some point of time resort to Cheating whether consciously or unconsciously. Our children also follow us.
• Children follow the practice of Cheating in school in various ways and mostly during their exams.
• In our education system, children get so many opportunities to work hard and get good grades. But instead of doing hard work, some children feel encouraged to take Cheating as a shortcut.
• Students at that time don’t understand that Cheating is not the correct way to deal with it as it is leading them on a wrong path.
• Cheating in school can be due to many different reasons like peer pressure, parental pressure, etc. and can have negative effects on a student in the future.
• Cheating makes a child make wrong decisions as he is blinded by the aim of success. The student loses his ability of self confidence, honesty and critical thinking.
• To excel in education or a subject, one must be clear with the basics of the topic. But when a child resorts to Cheating he is making way for future Cheating also as he will not be able to understand high level topics because he is not clear with the basics.
• Cheating as all other unethical habits have serious consequences like suspension and expulsion from the school, spoiled academic reputation.
• Parents and teachers as the well wishers of the students should try to make them aware of the severe consequences of it and try to make them come out of this bad practice as soon as possible.

FAQ’s on Cheating In School Essay

Question 1. Is Cheating in school common?

Answer: According to a survey, Cheating is very common at school level and 86% of students have cheated in school at one or another level.

Question 2. Why is Cheating in school so common?

Answer: Students cheat in school due to poor study skills, lack of confidence and the pressure to get good grades.

Question 3. What are some consequences of Cheating?

Answer: Cheating can lead to expulsion or suspension from school, class failure, degraded academic reputation, lowers self respect.

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8 Ways to Reduce Student Cheating

Clarity about learning objectives and questions that focus on the thinking process can reduce the chance that students will cheat.

How can I prevent students from cheating on tests and exams?

The pandemic has made this question even more frequent, since many educators are concerned about the quality of learning and the possibility of cheating. Yet, it’s always been a common question among educators.

There’s a flaw in this question, though: It assumes that students want to cheat and will cheat. It also is reactive instead of preventive. My advice and coaching, as a discipline-based education researcher in science, has always been to avoid Band-Aid fixes and solve the root of the problem. I encourage teachers and professors to reflect on two questions:

• Why do students cheat?
• How can we, as educators, create a culture that eliminates the desire to cheat?

To eliminate the temptation of cheating, we need to adopt strategies that reduce anxiety about tests and exams, increase clarity of learning expectations and students’ learning progress, and emphasize the process of learning. We want students to be relaxed with tests and exams and see them as nothing more than an opportunity to demonstrate their current knowledge and skills.

8 Strategies to Change Class Structure and Shift Students’ Perspectives

1. Change your language: Sometimes, unintentionally, our language and behavior reinforce an emphasis on correct answers and grades. During instruction, try to use more open-ended questions that begin with “Why” or “How.” Emphasize process instead of final, definitive answers.

As a science, technology, engineering, and math educator, I have students explain how they solved the problem, and I assign more points on assessments for showing the thinking process and problem-solving. I resist answering students when they ask for a correct answer. Instead, I reply with a question to encourage them to think through the problem.

2. Constructive alignment:  The alignment of learning objectives, instruction, and assessment is critical to reduce cheating. Learning objectives provide clarity of the expectations. When students know that the learning objectives are representative of the exam, they do not have as much test anxiety about the unknown. They can better prepare for the assessment.

3. Frequent low-stakes assessments: Frequent low-stakes assessments reduce the anxiety of a heavily weighted test or exam, and they also provide timely feedback to the student about their learning, which brings clarity and again reduces the unknown. I encourage improvement in my courses. I will replace any low-stakes assessment with their test or exam grade, if they demonstrate improvement. This creates a culture in which students can be rewarded for their growth and learning from mistakes.

4. Diagnostic tests:  One week before a large unit test in my course, students independently complete a diagnostic test. They review the diagnostic in groups using a specific protocol. They determine the correct answer, what made the problem difficult, what was essential to know, and how they could better study or prepare for similar questions. At no point do I provide correct answers. Students love brainstorming study strategies with their peers. They then have a week to study and seek further guidance.

5. Test design: There is so much cognitive processing that goes on during a test, and much of it is not related to the actual content. Let students know the structure and format in advance. Use a cover sheet that has a cartoon or other funny, topic-related joke to activate dopamine boosters to calm students. I include mindfulness prompts to reduce anxiety and remind students to break problems down into smaller steps.

Additionally, line dividers between questions, rubrics for point breakdowns, clearly defined places to write answers and show work, and plenty of spacing between questions are all formatting structures that help reduce the cognitive load on students. Minimal effort should be spent trying to figure out how to take the test.

6. Question design:  We can ask questions that eliminate a single definite answer and reinforce the process of learning. Ask questions that focus on students’ problem-solving or thinking process. Another option is to use creation-style questions. Ask students to explain an example or create a scenario with certain criteria. I also give a problem fully solved, and students analyze the response and justify their analysis with evidence. If students know that questions are more about their individual thinking, they will respect the assessment process more.

7. Review and reflect with exam wrappers:  Emphasize the process of learning by explicitly teaching students to reflect on their learning. Using exam wrappers, which are guides with reflective questions, will help students identify their performance and strategies to improve. It’s not enough for students to know what their mistakes were; they need to understand why they made these mistakes.

8. Metacognitive check-ins: After the exam wrapper, students answer four questions. First, they identify their strengths in the course; second, they note their areas of improvement; and third, they describe actions to improve and change. The fourth question empowers them to think about how they can advocate for themselves and seek help from their teacher. I have student conferences in which we discuss the four questions. This reduces the anxiety of talking with a teacher and not knowing what to talk about.

Why Students Cheat

Students cheat because they’re desperate. This isn’t a mystery novel. No need to bury the lede. Sure, there are other reasons that students cheat—laziness, arrogance, disposable wealth. But these motives are secondary to, and not mutually exclusive from, desperation. For the majority of students who cheat—and for a large percentage who may consider but never actually resort to cheating—the educational experience is shrouded in anxiety, dread, and the feeling of being overwhelmed and underprepared.

Ask the average educator about the problem of underprepared students. Most would no doubt regale you with tales of daily struggle, about the challenge of overcoming student learning deficiencies, unsupported mental health issues, and structural failures in the broader education system.

Now ask the average educator about the problem of cheating. Many teachers can tell you from personal experience that some students are simply dishonest, unmotivated, and unmoved by the honor system.

But how many educators recognize the connection between these two patterns? How many are willing to acknowledge the causal relationship between the former and the latter? And how many are willing to move beyond the punitive approach to academic integrity, to consider a more constructive way that addresses cheating at its root?

Students Are Underprepared and Overwhelmed

If the surveys are to be believed, most students have cheated at least once during their formal education. The International Center for Academic Integrity reports that between 2002 and 2015, 58% of surveyed high school students admitted to cheating on a test, and 64% admitted to committing some form of plagiarism.

As long as we’re throwing stats around, here’s a big one. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America , 80% of surveyed students report feeling stressed sometimes or often, with 34% of respondents reporting feelings of depression.

In other words:

• Students cheat in such large numbers that one could suggest school cheating has achieved mainstream acceptance; and
• Students are under intense pressure-both struggling students attempting to keep their heads above water and elite students in fierce competition with one another-and the result is a widespread vulnerability to stress, anxiety, depression, fear, and dread.

These are two patterns that most educators intuitively understand. It is less intuitive, perhaps to recognize the connection between these patterns.

During my 10-year career as an academic ghostwriter, I wrote thousands of papers for cheating students. As I got to know the clientele, I noted some common themes. I wrote papers for hundreds of students every semester. On the surface, these students fell into countless different categories: ESL students facing language barriers, adult learners raising kids, average high schoolers muddling through college admission essays, online students completing impersonal computer module courses, Ivy Leaguers overmatched by their course content, doctoral candidates far too deep into the dissertation process to turn back. All were fairly typical customers.

But whatever their personal differences, each of them was just as likely as the other to exhibit or express feelings of stress, anxiety, depression, fear, dread-all symptoms of endemic student despair. Desperation.” TWEET POST

But whatever their personal differences, each of them was just as likely as the other to exhibit or express feelings of stress, anxiety, depression, fear, dread-all symptoms of endemic student despair. Desperation.

While researchers don’t always connect these feelings with the act of cheating, students understand the connection quite well. Whether it is ethically right or wrong, many students are overcome by the feeling that cheating is their only option .

Lazy, Arrogant, and Unmotivated Students Can Also Be Desperate

On the surface, students cheat for a lot of reasons that educators would rightly characterize as indefensible. Some students are lazy. Some are arrogant. Some are unmotivated. Many are all three, and these characteristics can be readily spotted in many a cheater. I saw these features constantly in my work as a ghostwriter.

But here’s the thing. That’s just what you can see. The fact that students are lazy, arrogant or unmotivated does not mean they aren’t also desperate. Sometimes, these defense mechanisms are rooted in a hidden kind of desperation.

Desperation is the unspoken root condition shared by too large a number of students to really quantify. It is shared by high achievers and remedial stragglers; by middling students with elevated ambitions and brilliant students facing enormous expectations; by student demographics traditionally classified as at-risk and by student groups whose risk factors are obscured by their privilege.

To the earnest educator, American education is defined by opportunities for enrichment, personal growth, and intellectual enlightenment. But those kinds of opportunities are a relic from a time when only wealthy, white men had access to higher education. Most were born into a kind of comfort that affords the luxury of a Classical education-the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.

American education is defined by high stakes testing, costly college tuition, and a near-constant emphasis on competition-besting one's peers, gaining access to the limited number of seats at top universities, and emerging with an edge in the job market.” TWEET POST

For today’s student, American education is defined by high stakes testing, costly college tuition, and a near-constant emphasis on competition-besting one’s peers, gaining access to the limited number of seats at top universities, and emerging with an edge in the job market.

These observations are not meant as a broadside critique of education in America. This is merely to draw a distinction between the antiquated idea of education for its own sake and the very actual reality thrust upon students today-it’s a sink or swim, dog-eat-dog world out there; you either succeed or fail; either vanquish your fellow classmates or risk one day shining their shoes for a living. This means that wherever students are on their educational journey, and whatever track they find themselves in as they proceed on that journey, the prospect of desperation is very real and therefore so is the allure of cheating.

The Cure is in the Classroom

If you expelled every student that cheated, sued every contract cheating company out of business, and installed a monitoring chip into the brain of every single student with the expressed intent of eliminating the impulse of cheating, you would probably succeed. Schools would be free of cheaters.

But the desperation would remain. This is not to suggest that students shouldn’t face the prospect of punishment. Learning accountability for one’s actions is as important as any lesson one could receive in school.

But addressing this problem in a universally punitive way will not address what’s at the heart of student cheating. In this fantasy world where we’ve eliminated cheating, students may not have the option of cheating, but they’ll be no less desperate. Whatever it cures, this approach would leave struggling students twisting in the wind.

An interesting project from the Harvard Graduate School of Education offers a more nuanced look at student cheating, one that moves beyond the reductive debate over right vs. wrong. Researchers consulted a group of “youth informants,” students from high schools in Texas and Massachusetts, to explore the question of why students cheat. The reasons these informants said they opted to cheat run a wide gamut-from peer pressure and high stakes testing to the apparent desire to seem cool.

But deeper reading suggests these aren’t exactly the reasons students cheat. These are merely the rationalizations supplied, which is not to say that they aren’t true. It’s simply to note that these rationalizations share a common origin in desperation.

According to the Harvard project , students “want teachers to enable ethical behavior through holistic support of individual learning styles and goals. Similarly, researchers describe ‘horizontal support’ as creating ‘a school environment where students know, and can persuade their peers, that no one benefits from cheating,’ again implying that students need help understanding the ethics of cheating. Our youth informants led us to believe instead that the type of horizontal support needed may be one where collective success is seen as more important than individual competition.”

...students “want teachers to enable ethical behavior through holistic support of individual learning styles and goals.”” TWEET POST

This observation is worthy of further consideration. Whether the “informant” means to or not, he seems to suggest that schools can’t really justify confronting cheating in strictly ethical terms in their current structure. Where students are pitted against one another in competition, where practical goals far outweigh ethical constructs, where educational experiences are uniform and impersonal, the idea that academic integrity is first and foremost in the minds of students is out of step with everything they’ve been trained to do.

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education recognizes as much, noting that “students are mostly focused on success and achievement, a bottom-line mentality that has helped them gain admittance to the highly selective institutions that are, in fact, trying to enforce the norms of academic citation. If students pursued education for its own sake - as do most professors - they would try to produce academic work that increases learning and to model their behavior on their professors’. But many students don’t especially value the process of classroom learning - so, in fact, any process will do.”

If you’re looking for some practical tips on exactly how to deal with instances of cheating or plagiarism in your class, this CHE article offers a good starting point. Much of it revolves around acknowledgment that the rules of citation can be somewhat hazy, especially as digital technology shifts the way we use and share intellectual property. There is an appropriate emphasis on helping students improve their own use of information, their ability to conduct research, and their ability to report effectively on this information.

But more than any other steps that can be taken in the classroom, educators need to consider their role in magnifying and perpetuating student desperation. Are there ways to improve outcomes that aren’t academically punitive? Are there ways to encourage students to be their best without pitting them against one another? Are there ways to deemphasize high-stakes evaluation in favor of experience and progress?

To reiterate a point, the era of the Classical Education is long behind us. Students must gain practical skills and meaningful credentials to succeed in their careers and lives. But there must be ways of creating enrichment and encouraging intellectual progress that are both practical and non-punitive. Sam, another of Harvard’s youth informants , observes that “A school where cheating isn’t necessary would be centered around individualization and learning. Students would learn information and be tested on the information. From there the teachers would assess students’ progress with this information, new material would be created to help individual students with what they don’t understand. This way of teaching wouldn’t be based on time crunching every lesson, but more about helping a student understand a concept.”

As a former ghostwriter, I can’t say for certain that such a school would have produced zero customers for my business. But this approach to education would be about as effective a strategy for putting cheating companies out of business as I can think of. Students who are fully supported, who are given the opportunity to struggle and grow without the crushing stigma of bad grades, who have the chance to refine individual learning styles rather than conform to one expected approach-these are students who may also have the support and attention needed to manage and navigate stress, anxiety, and depression.

And if they have this type of support, they have far fewer reasons to cheat. If I’m wrong, and somehow improving outreach to struggling students isn’t the answer to cheating, the worst that can happen is that you’ll actually improve the educational experience, outlook, and outcomes for those students who might otherwise while their education away in quiet desperation.

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Does A.I. Really Encourage Cheating in Schools?

For my columns during the back-to-school season, I thought it would be useful to go over the state of public education in America. This series will be similar to the one I wrote on parenting a few months back in that it will be wide-ranging in subject, so please bear with me.

This past spring, Turnitin, a company that makes anti-cheating tools to detect the use of A.I. in student papers, released its findings based on more than two hundred million samples reviewed by its software. Three per cent of papers had been more or less entirely written by A.I. and roughly ten per cent exhibited some traces of A.I. It’s never a great idea to rely on data that a for-profit company releases about its own product, but these numbers do not suggest some epidemic of cheating. Other research has shown that there hasn’t been a significant increase in student plagiarism since the unveiling and mass popularization of large language models such as ChatGPT. Students seem to cheat a lot, generally—up to seventy per cent of students reported at least one instance of cheating in the past month—but they cheated at the same rates before the advent of A.I.

What has increased is the number of teachers and adults who seem convinced that all the kids are cheating. A study by the Center for Democracy and Technology found that “a majority of teachers still report that generative AI has made them more distrustful of whether their students’ work is actually theirs.” Such suspicions have been paired with real questions about the efficacy of A.I.-detection tools, including one concerning finding that showed A.I. detectors were more likely to flag the writing of non-native English speakers. This uncertainty, along with the failure of many school districts to implement a clear and comprehensive A.I. policy, has led to another layer of debate among educators about how to handle instances of alleged cheating. A set of guidelines on the use of Turnitin, which was recently released by the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Kansas, warned teachers against making “quick judgments” based on the company’s software and recommended that educators instead “take a few more steps to gather information,” including comparing previous examples of the student’s work, offering second chances, and talking to the student. (Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, had built its own detection tool, which was much more accurate than its competitors’ software, but had held off releasing it, because admitting that students did indeed use ChatGPT to cheat might be bad for business.)

Educational data is notoriously unreliable. There’s a whole lot of it—kids take tests every day and have nearly every part of their educational journeys tracked from the age of five—but, if you dig into many education studies, you’ll find a whole lot of noise and almost no signal. When trying to parse what, for example, a small increase in statewide reading scores might mean about the efficacy of a given program, the best one can do is look at the data, try to eyeball some larger trend, and then present it somewhat halfheartedly. Here’s what I believe is happening in schools with ChatGPT: teachers are probably a little overly suspicious of students, in part because they have been given tools to catch cheaters. Those panoptic tools have likely scared some students straight, but cheats are going to cheat. When I was in high school, graphing calculators were blamed for student cheating. Ten years later, the ubiquity of cell phones in classrooms stirred up visions of kids across the country texting one another test answers whenever a teacher’s back was turned. Wikipedia also had its moment as the destroyer of research and knowledge in schools; today, it’s clear that Wikipedia has been a net good for society and probably more accurate and less biased than the Encyclopædia Britannicas it replaced.

The situation reminds me of the problem with sports-gambling apps . Gambling, like plagiarism, isn’t new. If you stick a hundred people who have never placed a bet in their lives in a casino, a small number of them will come back the next day, and the next, and the next. The rest will either never bet again or gamble only occasionally and in a responsible manner. Cheating in school strikes me as a similar phenomenon—maybe it’s true that most kids engage in a little bit of unethical schoolwork, but some portion of kids never will and many more likely do so only in the most trivial (or trying) situations. Technology does change the experience; it can encourage edge cases to start tossing dice at a craps table or asking ChatGPT to write a paper. But, for the most part, it’s not why adults gamble on sports or why kids cheat at school. And just as Wikipedia didn’t ruin the written word—and likely deepened the research of many student papers by simplifying the introductory task of getting to know a subject—the five-paragraph essay will survive large language models.

The rush to solve A.I. cheating and the myriad educational tools that have been developed and sold to schools across the country raise a tertiary, and far more interesting, question than whether or not the written word will survive. When we think about students’ work, where do we draw the line between what has sprung out of their developing mind and what has not?

In STEM subjects, the lines are a little clearer. If a student just looks over a neighbor’s shoulder and writes down the same answer, most people agree that’s cheating. But if a student is trying to prove that he understands how to solve a complicated math problem that involves some multiplication, does the use of a calculator mean that the student is cheating? He is not being tested on whether he knows how to multiply or not, so why waste time and potentially introduce careless errors? I do not think that having ChatGPT write a paper is the same thing as using a calculator for more menial and elementary tasks within a larger math problem, but it’s worth asking why we feel differently about the automation of research and the written word. Even in the fine arts, patrons and appreciators have long accepted that the artist doesn’t need to actually perform each brushstroke, construct every sculpture, or build every bit of a large installation. Small armies of uncredited assistants have their hands all over the works of Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, and Jeff Koons, which has kicked up periodic controversies, but not enough to end the practice. Would we think less of these artists if a machine just did all of the assistants’ work?

These questions are abstract and ridiculous, but they also reflect the arbitrary way in which we think about what constitutes cheating and what does not. Outside of blatant acts of plagiarism, the line between cheating and not cheating in the humanities seems to rely on the amount of time it takes to complete a task. For example, if a student visited a library archive to research what happened in the week after D Day, spooled some microfiche into an ancient machine, and dutifully jotted down notes, we would likely think more highly of that effort than if the student found the same article in a Google search, and certainly more so than if he paraphrased some Wikipedia editor’s reading of that article.

Under this logic, school isn’t about creating new scholarship or answering questions correctly—it’s about teaching proper work habits. A young person who takes the time to go into a library is more likely to develop the types of work habits that will allow him to find accompanying bits of information that might be useful in creating a novel, an algorithm, or a convincing argument. Setting aside the obvious offense of dishonesty, the problem with cheating isn’t so much that the student skips over the process of explaining what they learned—it’s that they deprive themselves of the time-consuming labor of actually having read the book, type out the sentences, and think through the prompt.

One of the fundamental crises that the Internet brought to classrooms was the sense that, because references to facts and history no longer needed to be stored in your brain, nothing really needed to be learned anymore. Search engines, Wikipedia, and ChatGPT all demanded the same explanation: If we have these tools, what’s the point of these lessons? Schools tend to change slowly, even if education trends come and go. This is a good thing and mostly owes to the fact that good teachers tend to have long careers. But, since the days when I was a teacher, in the mid-two-thousands, I’ve noticed a subtle shift in the way people think about what kids should learn in the humanities. The idea of memorization, for the most part, has gone away; children are no longer forced to rattle off the date of the First Defenestration of Prague (1419) or commit the same lists of vocabulary words to memory. At the same time, most of the political fights that people get into over schools these days hinge on curriculum choices, which have always struck me as both silly and wildly beside the point. It’s actually pretty hard to shake a child’s beliefs with a stray book or lesson. But I sometimes wonder if the doctrinaire push in today’s schools, the intense fights over how to teach history or math, the censorious book bans in some states, come from a collective fear that the knowledge-retention part of school might now be outdated. Since it’s hard to justify why kids should learn dates and vocabulary words and the like, we have subtly shifted the purpose of school to teaching them what to believe and how to go through life as a good person. This is an admirable goal but will usually end in bitter conflict over which values matter.

Opinions in education, as a rule, move very quickly and oftentimes in a reactionary way. But the actual implementation of any consensus can take decades to complete. This inefficiency can be harmful—it’s taken far too long to remove phones from schools, for example—but it also allows for little panics like the current one around large-language-model cheating. I do not think A.I. encourages cheating in some revolutionary way, and I imagine any rise in plagiarism might have more to do with the extraordinary pressure of college admissions and the overly competitive atmosphere in many high schools. Until that changes, some population of kids will convert any new app into a cheating tool, educational technology will sell blockers, and the cycle will just repeat itself. It doesn’t have to be this way. The A.I.-cheating panic gives us a chance to reëmphasize the work-habit part of schooling and to walk away from claims that the books that children read are somehow dangerous or that only one version of history can be taught. This, it should be said, is not so different from the way that thousands of teachers across the country already think about their jobs, but the work part of school has become far more gauche than it used to be, with schools across the country eliminating homework and focussing more on developing a student’s love of a subject or the implied politics of a curriculum. A little revanchism, such as in-class essays written with a paper and pencil in elementary and middle school, might go a long way. The lesson is almost always the actual doing of the lesson, not the facts that are learned. ♦

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Essays About Cheating: Top 5 Examples and 9 Writing Prompts

Essays about cheating show the value of honesty, see our top picks for examples and prompts you can use in writing.

In the US, 95% of high school students admitted to participating in some form of academic cheating . This includes exams and plagiarism. However, cheating doesn’t only occur in schools. It’s also prevalent in couples. Psychologists say that 50% of divorce cases in the country are because of infidelity . Other forms of cheating exist, such as cheating on a diet, a business deal, etc.

Because cheating is an intriguing subject, many want to read about it. However, to write essays about cheating appropriately, you must first pick a subtopic you’re comfortable discussing. Therefore, we have selected five simple but exemplary pieces you can read to get inspiration for writing your paper.

See below our round-up of top example essays about cheating.

1. Long Essay On Cheating In School By Prasanna

2. the reality of cheating in college essay by writer kip, 3. why cheating is wrong by bernadette mcbride, 4. what counts as cheating in a relationship by anonymous on gradesfixer, 5. emotional cheating by anonymous on papersowl, 1. types of cheating, 2. i was cheated on, 3. is cheating a mistake or choice, 4. tax evasion and cheating , 5. when i cheated, 6. cheating in american schools and universities, 7. review a famous book or film about cheating, 8. a famous cheating quote, 9. cause and effects of cheating.

“Cheating is a false representation of the child’s ability which he may not be able to give without cheating. It is unfair to everyone involved as it deprives the true one of the chance to come on the top.”

Prasanna begins the essay by defining cheating in schools and then incorporates how this unethical behavior occurs in reality. She further delves into the argument that cheating is not learning but an addiction that can result in students losing self-confidence, sanity, and integrity. 

Apart from showing the common causes and harmful effects of cheating on students, Prasanna also adds parents’ and teachers’ critical roles in helping students in their studies to keep them from cheating.

“It’s human nature to want to win, and some of us will go against the rules to do so. It can be harmless, but in many cases, it is annoying, or even hurtful.”

Kip defines cheating as human nature and focuses his essay on individuals who are hell-bent on wanting to win in online games. Unfortunately, these players’ desire to be on top is all-consuming, and they’re willing to go against the rules and disregard their integrity.

He talks about his experiences of being cheated in a game called AoE. He also incorporates the effects of these instances on newbies. These cheaters will humiliate, dishearten, and traumatize beginners who only want to have fun.

Check out these essays about cooperation .

“A cheater is more than likely lying to themselves more than to the people around them. A person can only go so far before their lies catch up to them, begin to accumulate, and start to penalize you.”

Mcbride dedicates her essay to answering why cheating is wrong, no matter the circumstance. She points out that there will always be a definite punishment for cheaters, whether they get caught. Mcbride believes that students who cheat, copy, and have someone else do their work are lazy and irresponsible. These students will never gain knowledge.

However, she also acknowledges that some cheaters are desperate, while some don’t realize the repercussions of their behaviors. At the end of the essay, she admits to cheating but says she’s no longer part of that vicious cycle, promising she has already realized her mistakes and doesn’t want to cheat again.

“Keep in mind that relationships are not based on logic, but are influenced by our emotions.”

The author explains how it’s challenging to define cheating in a relationship. It’s because every person has varying views on the topic. What others consider an affair may be acceptable to some. This includes the partners’ interaction with others while also analyzing the individual’s personality, such as flirting, sleeping in the same bed, and spending time with folks.

The essay further explains experts’ opinions on why men and women cheat and how partners heal and rebuild their trust. Finally, examples of different forms of cheating are discussed in the piece to give the readers more information on the subject. 

“…emotional cheating can be described as a desire to engage in another relationship without physically leaving his or her primary relationship.”

There’s an ongoing debate about whether emotional cheating should be labeled as such. The essay digs into the causes of emotional cheating to answer this issue. These reasons include lack of attention to each other, shortage of affectionate gestures, and misunderstandings or absence of proper communication. 

All of these may lead to the partner comparing their relationship to others. Soon, they fall out of love and fail to maintain boundaries, leading to insensitivity and selfishness. When a person in a relationship feels any of these, it can be a reason to look for someone else who can value them and their feelings.

9 Helpful Prompts in Writing Essays About Cheating

Here are some cheating subtopics you can focus your essay on:

Some types of cheating include deception, fabrication, bribery, impersonation, sabotage, and professional misconduct. Explain their definitions and have examples to make it easier for readers to understand.

You can use this prompt even if you don’t have any personal experience of being cheated on. You can instead relay events from a close friend or relative. First, narrate what happened and why. Then add what the person did to move on from the situation and how it affected them. Finally, incorporate lessons they’ve learned.

While this topic is still discussed by many, for you, is cheating a redeemable mistake? Or is it a choice with consequences? Express your opinion on this matter. Gather reliable evidence to support your claims, such as studies and research findings, to increase your essay’s credibility.

Tax evasion is a crime with severe penalties. Explain what it is and its punishments through a famous tax evasion case your readers can immediately recognize. For example, you can use Al Capone and his 11-year imprisonment and $215,000 back taxes . Talk through why he was charged with such and add your opinion. Ensure you have adequate and reliable sources to back up your claims.

Start with a  5 paragraph essay  to better organize your points.

Some say everyone will cheat at some point in their life. Talk about the time you cheated – it can be at a school exam, during work, or while on a diet. Put the perspective that made you think cheating was reasonable. Did you feel guilt? What did you do after, and did you cheat again? Answer these questions in your essay for an engaging and thrilling piece of writing.

Since academic cheating is notorious in America, use this topic for your essay. Find out which areas have high rates of academic cheating. What are their penalties? Why is cheating widespread? Include any measures the academe put in place.

Cheating is a frequent cause of conflict on small and big screens. Watch a film or read a story and write a review. Briefly summarize the plot, critique the characters, and add your realizations after finishing the piece. 

Goodreads has a list of books related to cheating. Currently, Thoughtless by S.C. Stephens has the highest rating.

Use this as an opportunity to write a unique essay by explaining the quote based on your understanding. It can be quotes from famous personalities or something that resonates with you and your experiences.

Since cheating’s cause and effect is a standard prompt, center your essay on an area unrelated to academics or relationships. For instance, write about cheating on your diet or cheating yourself of the opportunities life presents you.

Create a top-notch essay with excellent grammar. See our list of the best grammar checkers.

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How to Catch Students Cheating

Last Updated: July 2, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by César de León, M.Ed. . César de León is an Educational Leadership Consultant and currently serves as an Assistant Principal for the Austin Independent School District in Austin, TX. César specializes in education program development, curriculum improvement, student mentorship, social justice, equity leadership, and family and community engagement. He is passionate about eradicating inequities in schools for all children, especially those who have been historically underserved and marginalized. César holds a Bachelor’s degree in Education and Biology from Texas State University and a Master’s degree in Educational Leadership from The University of Texas at Austin. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 331,064 times.

Academic cheating and plagiarism have increased dramatically as students struggle to keep up with expectations and demands of their parents or school, financial aid requirements, work schedules and so on. [1] X Research source Furthermore, the advent of new technologies makes it much easier for students to cheat than ever before. Discovering academic dishonesty depends on your awareness of the classroom, students’ interactions with each other, and other strategies.

Preparing to Monitor an Exam

• Make sure your students know the penalties for academic dishonesty. This should hopefully decrease the chance of them engaging in cheating behaviors.

• Ask students to store backpacks, books, or binders underneath their chairs.

• Glance at their arms, hands and hats to make sure there aren’t any notes written on those areas. Be wary of students who are constantly pulling their long sleeves down to cover more of their arms.
• Keep in mind that many students are anxious when they come into an exam. Don’t automatically assume that someone who looks nervous is going to cheat. However, it can't hurt to keep a closer eye on said students.
• In addition, don't assume a student who doesn't appear worried is not going to cheat. Some students have cheated many times before and became adept at their methods, so they may be more confident about the test.

Looking for Cheating Students During an Exam

• Monitor the students carefully by walking around the classroom throughout the exam.
• Use at least two different versions of the exam so students sitting next to each other do not have the same version. [2] X Research source This can more simply be done by changing the order of the questions. For example, say you have 8 seats, Seats 1, 3, 5, and 7 get version 1. Seats 2, 4, 6, and 8 get version 2.

• Students might have different signs for different answers; for example, on a multiple choice test, if the answer is A, they might tap their pencil. If the answer is B, they might shuffle their test around, and so on.
• Many people tap their feet or fidget when nervous, and a coughing or sniffing student may have picked up a cold, so don't immediately assume such actions mean a student is helping others to cheat.

• Many students are quite savvy about this strategy, bringing alcohol wipes to remove pen ink from their skin before turning in their test.
• Some students might try writing notes on their legs. They will then wear pants, shorts or a skirt of a particular length that covers the writing, but can be inched upwards to reveal the notes. Teachers should be wary of challenging a student who has writing on their legs; a student might cite sexual harassment if you are looking at his/her legs. [4] X Research source
• Look for writing on clothing. Many students will wear hats to an exam or test and will write notes on the bill of the hat. Ask students to remove hats or turn them around so that you foil their attempts at reading their notes. Other articles of clothing are often used in cheating, such as scarves, sweaters, coats, sunglasses, and so on.

• Other students have been known to write notes on very small pieces of paper and store them rolled up in a pen with a clear body.

• Some students cheat by planting notes in bathrooms before a test, then visiting the bathroom during the test to look at them. Have a teaching assistant check nearby bathrooms for suspicious notes just as the test begins.

Watching Students’ Use of Technology During an Exam or Test

• Another option is to ask your department to buy simple calculators that can be used for exams or tests. This way, students will not need to bring their own.
• If it is prohibitively expensive to buy calculators for students, you can instruct students to clear their calculators, and check if they have done so.

• A common trick students use to hide wired earbuds is to put an earbud through the sleeve of a jacket/long sleeved shirt and hold it to their ear. Others may hide wireless earbuds under their hair or a head accessory, such as a hat or sweatband.

• Some cell phone detectors are sensitive enough to allow teachers to walk around the classroom and identify active cell phone use based on proximity.
• This may indicate false positives, as some apps actively use data. You can prevent this by instructing students to switch their phones completely off during the test, rather than just leaving them on lock.

Catching Students Cheating on Written Assignments

• Search online for suspect passages from your student’s paper. Oftentimes, you’ll find the exact same passage in Wikipedia or another website.

• Many students buy papers from “paper mills” or “essay mills,” which are websites and other services which sell essays for a fee. If your student’s paper is phenomenal, they might have purchased the essay from one of these services. It is difficult to prove this, however, so proceed with caution.

Observing Students Outside of Class

• For example, keep an eye on students who leave your first period class after a test or exam. If they walk a little with a second period student, they may be sharing answers or passing cheat sheets. Creating a different version of the test for each period can prevent cheating by means of students from an earlier period sharing answers.

• Some course management systems, such as Blackboard, have an option of letting students email each other without the instructor seeing the emails. Change the preferences so that you also see the emails that students send out through the system.

• Create and memorize complex passwords for the computer and grade book log-ins; do not write this information on paper.

Catching Cheating Students in Online Courses

Confronting Students

• If you found plagiarism in your student’s paper, try to locate the original passage by searching online.
• Photocopy a random sample of exams, tests, or major assignments before returning them to students. A common temptation for cheaters is submitting a modified exam for a regrade, especially if they are close and want to be moved across a grade boundary.

Changing Your Assessments

• Alternately, use the same version of the exam or test but photocopy them on different colored paper and tell the students that there are two versions. However, show them the tests (don't let the students see the questions) and put them in front of them (on a blank page).
• Don't use color-coding methods if any students would look for others with the same color.
• Do not label the exam version on the test. This will make it easier for students to find who has the same version.

• Portfolios are often a good way for students to demonstrate mastery, as they can show how they have grasped concepts and improved over time.

Community Q&A

• Compare student answers. If people sitting near each other have exactly the same wrong answers, they may be cheating. This, however, is not foolproof, and should be considered only when it occurs in multiple instances and/or along with other suspicious behavior. It is often best to give the students the benefit of the doubt the first time, then wait to see if this behavior happens again. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• Some people's eyes give it away. The constant moving and roaming of eyes might be to get a better focus on someone's exam paper. Fidgeting could also be as they might try not to get caught by an invigilator. They might position themselves differently and frequently. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• Teach students about academic dishonesty at the beginning of the term. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

Tips from our Readers

• When the children enter the classroom, tell them to take their stationary out and keep their bag near you. This prevents them from removing cheat sheets. Don't let them sit besides their friends as they could cheat by asking the answers. Check around the class to see if someone has cheat sheet or is cheating.
• Beware of kids who suddenly sit far away from the teacher's desk in class. They could be trying to get away from your sight so they can cheat more easily.

• Don't immediately suspect your students of cheating. Some students get nervous and twitchy when taking an exam. Thanks Helpful 12 Not Helpful 1

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://www.buffalo.edu/academic-integrity/about/reasons-students-cheat.html
• ↑ https://www.inklingsnews.com/news/2012/05/25/the-war-against-cheating-why-some-teachers-create-different-versions-of-the-same-test/
• ↑ http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/plag/5240451.0001.010/--how-college-students-cheat-on-in-class-examinations?rgn=main;view=fulltext
• ↑ http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18157/how-can-i-determine-whether-a-student-has-written-an-excellent-paper-themselves
• ↑ https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-cheating-in-college-hurts-students
• ↑ https://www.csusm.edu/dos/facstres/precon.html

About This Article

You can catch students cheating by monitoring tests and listening to students’ interactions. While a test is in progress, keep your eyes on the students and look for some classic signs of cheating such as a student looking down at their lap constantly to look at their phone, or leaning over their desks to peek at another student’s test. To catch a student cheating on a written exam or paper, look for changes in writing ability to see if it differs from the student’s normal writing style. You can also run the text through an anti-plagiarism program to see if it’s been copied. Pay attention to what students talk about in the hallway or during a free period, especially students who leave your class after a test and talk with another student who may be taking the test in a later period to see if they’re sharing answers. For tips about how to catch students cheating in an auditorium setting, keep reading! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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94 Cheating Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best cheating topic ideas & essay examples, ⭐ good research topics about cheating, 👍 simple & easy cheating essay titles, ❓ questions about cheating.

• Education: Why Do Students Cheat? Lack of adequate skills and knowledge are some of the reasons that lead to the loss of confidence by students. Teachers should evaluate their students in order to determine the most important teaching methods that […]
• Why People Cheat In the world of sports, a lot of people have been perplexed by the tendencies of great teams to cheat despite prior warning regarding the consequences of cheating.
• Problem of Cheating in Nursing Programs The most common types of cheating in nursing include copying tests and homework, referring to materials during tests, and collaborations without permission. Investigations on the causes of academic dishonesty acts are critical to achieving academic […]
• “Why We Cheat” by Fang Ferric and Arturo Casadevall For example, if students cheat in class, their peers may start to do so too when they see that there is no punishment for lying. It is possible to say that many humans cheat because […]
• Is Cheating Okay or Not: Discussion The one involved in cheating is seen to do so at the expense of others and with the aim of getting more where one has invested less.
• Cheating in the Test: Issue Review He may have believed that the college entrance exam is not very significant at the moment and that there is nothing wrong in cheating for a test which will decide whether he should be admitted […]
• Academic Integrity: Addressing Contract Cheating It is also worth noting that academic integrity is an aspect that one acquires and develops in the process of gaining experience and awareness of the importance of such things as honesty and responsibility.
• Trust & Threat Messaging and Academic Cheating Each student was randomly assigned to one of the four conditions, with 71 in the traditional exam condition, 81 in the collective-punishment trust-exam condition, 82 in the individual-punishment trust-exam condition, and 62 in the no-punishment […]
• The Consequences of School Cheating Cheating also leads to corrupted morals since students begin to cheat more frequently and try to rationalize their dishonesty. Academic dishonesty also affects personal relationships since friends and family can begin to question one’s honesty […]
• Using Technology to Cheat: Discussion Easy access to the internet is one of the reason why there has been a drop in academic honesty and responsibility specifically in the case of plagiarism as there are indications of extensive plagiarism in […]
• Cheating in High Schools: Issue Analysis It is, therefore, right to say that cheating is widespread in every part of the world, and it is escalating in all levels of education.
• Cognitive Dissonance in Dealing With Exam Cheating John’s plan was to use less than two hours in the test with a plan to utilize the rest of the time texting his friends.
• Students’ Behavior and Cheating During Exams Another aspect demonstrating that the research does not warrant an informed consent is the consideration that an informed consent may diminish the merits of the research.
• Cheating and Plagiarism in Academic Settings Their main task is to show that the main objective of learning is to gain knowledge and skills, and that education cannot be reduced only to good grades and recognition of other people. This is […]
• Cheating: Making It a Teachable Moment This statement implies that the initiative of the authority to curb the vice of exam cheating should take into account the efforts of the both the teachers and students in a bid to obtain relevant […]
• Academic Integrity: Cheating and Plagiarism Instructors need to understand their students to find out what drives them to cheat in exams. Administrators and other stakeholders in educational institutions, need to discourage their students from cheating, to ensure they maintain high […]
• Reasons for Academic Cheating The students are on the other hand have to yield for the pressure and the easiest way of enabling this is by cheating in the examination.
• Why Students Cheat in Public Schools? However, even some of the students who retain a suitable connection to school take part in cheating. The majorities are found in public institutions and are a much diversified set of students.
• Cheating in the Internet The presence of ecommerce has increased the number of fraudulent deals in the internet. However, with the increasing number of transactions in the internet, fraudsters are taking advantage of the situation.
• Why Kids at Harvard Cheat It is a compelling issue to have students cheating in their examinations as this beats the logic and sole purpose of learning.
• Cheating in the Universities or in the Schools Cheating is condemned in the academic discipline as that which undermines academic integrity of the learner at different levels of their academic pursuits by causing students gain academic grades that do not reflect the academic […]
• Cheating, Gender Roles, and the Nineteenth-Century Croquet Craze The author’s main thesis is, “Yet was this, in fact, how the game was played on the croquet lawns of the nineteenth century?” Whereas authors of croquet manuals and magazines emphasize so much on the […]
• Cheating Plagiarism Issues Cheating in exams and assignments among college and university students is in the rise due to the access of the internet and poor culture where integrity is not a key aspect.
• Cheating on College Exams is Demoralizing The research focuses on the effect of cheating on the college exams. Indeed, cheating on the college tests is a transgression of the school’s policies.
• Marginal Analysis of Cheating Of the various forms of cheating in existence, arguably the most prevalent one is the use of cheat notes. The major disadvantage of this cheating technique is that there exists physical evidence of the cheating […]
• The Auditor and the Firm: A Simple Model of Corporate Cheating and Intermediation
• Cheating, Incentives, and Money Manipulation
• Marriage and High Technology: The Behavior of Cheating in Relationships
• Separating Will From Grace: An Experiment on Conformity and Awareness in Cheating
• Individual and Group Cheating Behavior: A Field Experiment With Adolescents
• Cheating and Loss Aversion: Do People Lie More to Avoid a Loss
• Firm-Oriented Policies, Tax Cheating, and Perverse Outcomes
• Does Bad Company Corrupt Good Morals? Social Bonding and Academic Cheating Among Teens
• Cheating, Its Consequences, and Findings on Cheating
• Cheating More for Less: Upward Social Comparisons Motivate the Poorly Compensated to Cheat
• Careful Cheating: People Cheat Groups Rather Than Individuals
• Cheating Spouse Infidelity Investigations
• Efficient Redistribution Using Quotas and Subsidies in the Presence of Misrepresentation and Cheating
• Cheating Ourselves: The Economics of Tax Evasion
• “But Everybody’s Doing It!”: A Model of Peer Effects on Student Cheating
• Decision Frame and Opportunity as Determinants of Tax Cheating: An International Experimental Study
• Marketable Permits, Market Power, and Cheating
• Academic Dishonesty: Internet Cheating
• Cheating and Technology: How Modern Technology Has Affected Education
• Honesty and Intermediation: Corporate Cheating, Auditor Involvement and the Implications for Development
• Can Cheat the Cheater: Consequences of Cheating
• Attitudes Toward Cheating Behavior Among College Students
• Cheating and Incentives: Learning From a Policy Experiment
• Cheating for Fun and Profit: If You Over-Fill, You Are Cheating Yourself; If You Under-Fill, You Are Cheating the Customer
• Cheating Explained Through Sociological Concepts
• Academic Dishonesty and Prevalent Cheating Strategy
• Dismissal Students From College for Cases of Cheating or Plagiarism
• Cheating for the Common Good in a Macroeconomic Policy Game
• Tax Evasion: Cheating Rationally or Deciding Emotionally
• Sabotaging Another: Priming Competition Increases Cheating Behavior in Tournaments
• Competition and Extrinsic Motivation as Predictors of Academic Cheating
• Catching Cheating Teachers: The Results of an Unusual Experiment
• The Impact of the VW Emission-Cheating Scandal on the Interrelation Between Large Automakers’ Equity and Credit Markets
• Cheating, Emotions, and Rationality: An Experiment on Tax Evasion
• Disguising Lies—Image Concerns and Partial Lying in Cheating Games
• All-Time Cheaters Versus Cheaters in Distress: An Examination of Cheating and Oil Prices in OPEC
• Cheating: The Ethical Dilemma All Junior Officers Face
• Episodic Future: Thinking About the Ideal Self Induces Lower Discounting, Leading to a Decreased Tendency Toward Cheating
• The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead
• Revisiting Revise: Testing Unique and Combined Effects of Reminding, Visibility, and Self-Engagement Manipulations on Cheating Behavior
• Are Competition and Extrinsic Motivation Reliable Predictors of Academic Cheating?
• Are Students Cheating Due to Pressure?
• Does Competition Enhance Performance or Cheating?
• Does Gen Z’s Emotional Intelligence Promote Cheating?
• Has Cheating Become the New Fair Play?
• How Chinese Students Are Cheating To Get Into U.S.?
• How Educators Are Preventing High-Tech Cheating?
• How Income and Tax Rates Provoke Cheating?
• Why Academic Cheating Occurs?
• Why Cheating and Plagiarism Are on the Rise?
• Why Schools Should Crack Down on Cheating?
• What Is the Major Cause of Academic Cheating?
• Why Is Academic Cheating a Problem?
• How Can Cheating in School Affect Your Future?
• What Are the Effect of Cheating?
• How Do You Deal with a Cheating Student?
• What Should a Teacher Do to a Student Caught Cheating?
• What Does Cheating Mean in School?
• What Are the Five Types of Cheating?
• How Common Is Cheating in School?
• What Leads to Cheating in School?
• Why Students Should Stop Cheating?
• Why Is Cheating in Schools Getting Worse?
• What Are the Advantages of Cheating?
• How Often Do Students Get Caught Cheating?
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• Cheating in College and Its Forms Words: 574
• Student Cheating in an Exam and Its Consequences Words: 758
• Academic Dishonesty and Its Detrimental Effects Words: 1122
• Class Size Effects on Student Achievement Words: 2702
• Negative Effects of Stress on a College Student Words: 873
• Excellent Academic Performance: Causes and Effects Words: 562
• Academic Honesty: Cheating & Plagiarism Words: 848
• Why Some Students Cheat Words: 361

Exam Cheating, Its Causes and Effects

Introduction, definition of cheating, works cited.

The ability of a nation to compete effectively on the international front hinges on the quality of its education. With this in mind, it is okay to conclude that cheating in exams undermines the standard of education in a country and consequently hinders its ability to compete at the world stage. Indeed, students who cheat in exams become poor decision makers in their careers. Their productivity and level of integrity is adversely dented by their belief of having everything the easy way. Academic dishonesty is not new but with the increase in competition for jobs, most students have resorted to cheating in order to qualify for these jobs (Anderman and Johnston 75). The purpose of this paper is to research in detail the causes and effects of cheating in exams.

In the education fraternity, cheating entails: copying from someone, Plagiarizing of academic work and paying someone to do your homework. There are numerous reasons why students cheat in exams however; this action elicits harsh repercussions if one is caught. This may include: suspension, dismissal and/or cancellation of marks (Davis, Grover, Becker and McGregor 16).

One of the major reasons that make students cheat in exams is the over-emphasis that has been placed on passing exams. Apparently, more effort has been directed towards passing of exams than learning due to the high competition in the job market. Similarly, most interviewers focus more on certificates rather than the knowledge of the candidate. It is no wonder most learning institutions these days focus on teaching how to pass an exam and completely disregard impacting knowledge to students.

In some cases, students cheat because they are not confident of their ability or skills in academics. Whenever this feeling is present, students resort to cheating as a way of avoiding ridicule in case of failure. In essence, some of these students are very bright but the fear of failure and the lack of adequate preparations compel them to cheat. The paradox is that when cheating, most students swear that they will never do it again but this only serves as the beginning of a vicious cycle of cheating (Anderman and Johnston 76).

Societal pressure is another major cause for cheating in schools. Parents, teachers and relatives always, with good intentions, mount too much pressure on students to get good grades in order to join good schools and eventually get high paying jobs. All this pressure creates innate feelings that it is okay to cheat in exams if only to satisfy their parents and teachers egos.

There are times when students justify cheating because others do it. In most cases, if the head of the class is cheating then most of the other students will feel they have enough reason to also cheat. The system of education is such that it does not sufficiently reprimand those who cheat and tends to hail those who pass exams regardless of how they have done—the end justifies the means.

With the advent of the internet, it has become very easy to access information from a website using a phone or a computer. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo have made it very easy for students to buy custom-made papers for their class work. It is very easy for students from all over the world to have the same answer for an assignment as they all use a similar website. Indeed, plagiarism is the order of the day, all on has to do is to have the knowledge to search for the different reports and essays on the net (Davis, Grover, Becker and McGregor 18).

Nowadays, most tutors spend most of their class time giving lectures. In fact, it is considered old fashioned to give assignments during class time. Consequently, these assignments are piled up and given during certain durations of the semester. This poses a big challenge to students who have to strike a balance between attending to their homework and having fun. As a result, the workload becomes too much such that it is easier to pay for it to be done than actually do it—homework then becomes as demanding as a full-time job (Jordan 234).

From a tender age, children are taught that cheating is wrong; yet most of them divert from this course as they grow up. In fact, most of them become so addicted to the habit that they feel the need to perfect it. Most often, if a student cheats and never gets caught, he is likely to cheat all his life. Research has shown that students who cheat in high school are twice likely to cheat in college. The bigger problem is that this character is likely to affect one’s career in future consequently tarnishing his/her image.

Cheating in exams poses a great problem in one’s career. To get a good grade as a result of cheating is a misrepresentation of facts. Furthermore, it is difficult for a tutor to isolate students who genuinely need specialized coaching. It becomes a huge embarrassment when a cheating student is expected to give a perfect presentation and fails to demonstrate his ability as indicated by his/her grades. In addition, students who cheat in examination do not get a chance to grasp important concepts in class and are likely to face difficulties in the future when the same principles are applied in higher levels of learning.

The worst-case scenario in cheating in an exam is being caught. Once a student is caught, his reputation is dealt a huge blow. It is likely that such a student will be dismissed or suspended from school. This hinders his/her ability to land a good job or join graduate school. It can also lead to a complete damage of one’s reputation making it hard for others to trust you including those who cheat (Jordan 235).

Cheating in exams and assignments can be attributed to many reasons. To begin with, teaching today concentrates so much on the exams and passing rather than impacting knowledge. Lack of confidence in one’s ability and societal pressure is another reason why cheating is so wide spread. Cheating cannot solely be blamed on the students; lecturers have also played their part in this. Apparently, most lectures concentrate on teaching than giving assignments during class time. This leaves the students with loads of work to cover during their free time.

Technology has also played its part in cheating—many students turn to the internet in a bid to complete their assignments. On the other hand, it is important to note than choices have consequences and the repercussions of cheating in an exams are dire. First, it completely ruins one’s reputation thereby hindering chances of joining college or getting a good job. It also leads to suspensions and/or expulsion from school. Furthermore, the habit is so addictive that it is likely to replicate in all aspects of life—be it relationships, work, business deals etc. It is important to shun this habit as nothing good can come out of it.

Anderman, Erick and Jerome Johnston. “TV News in the Classroom: What are Adolescents Learning?” Journal of Adolescent Research , 13 (1998): 73-100. Print.

Davis, Stephen, Cathy Grover, Angela, Becker, and Loretta McGregor. “Academic Dishonesty: Prevalence, Determinants, Techniques, and Punishments”. Teaching of Psychology , 19 (1) (1996): 16–20. Print.

Jordan, Augustus E. “College Student Cheating: The Role of Motivation, Perceived Norms, Attitudes, and Knowledge of Institutional Policy. Ethics and Behavior , 11, (2001): 233–247. Print.

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Cheating in Exams, Essay Example

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Cheating in exams can be defined as committing acts of dishonesty during an exam in order to score good grades. This is normally done by students when they fail to prepare for the exams or when they feel that the test is too hard for them and they want to score good grades.

Various acts are considered as cheating: first when a student gets access to exam papers be it part of them or all the exam papers before the exam is considered as cheating. Another way of cheating is by having materials that are not authorized in the exam room either electronic or non electronic in their reach from which the students copy or even copying answers from scripts of other candidates or allowing your script to be copied from by other candidates. Such materials include phones in which they store data; some phones have memory cards that store huge amounts of data and thus a student can even carry the whole syllabus in their phones from which they copy. Other electronic materials are calculators in which students store formulas especially for science and math exams. Science and math formulas may also be written on the desktop which they hide from their supervisors by covering with the answer sheet. Non electronic materials include small notes which the students make on something they suspect will be tested. Such writings are made on small pieces of paper, on the palm or on sole tapes which the students stick on their clothes. Another way of cheating is when a student impersonates another one and ends up doing the exam for them or even communicating with fellow candidates during an exam session. These forms don’t exhaust the many ways of cheating.

When students succeed in their first attempt of cheating they will always be tempted to repeat the act since it enables them to pass exams without struggling however this may bring serious consequences for the students. The problems may be short lived or long term. Short term consequences include being awarded a zero score by the lecturer because they believe that the candidate does not know anything. Getting a fail forces the student to repeat the unit .This means an addition on the other terms work a burden which may make the student fail other units hence causing a cycle of failing. Other lecturers punish these students by suspending them for a given period of time .Such students get it rough in explaining to their parents the reasons for being suspended. They may also become the laughing stock in the village when fellow students spread the rumours. Another short term consequence is when the lecturer forces the students to take remedial studies as others go for holiday hence denying them the opportunity to enjoy their holidays.

Long term consequences include being expelled from school. This means the student has to look for another school and hence the student delays from finishing college which consequently affects their chances in the job market because most job advertisements specify age limit. Cheating students also gain bad reputation from fellow students and lectrurers.Fellow students always see you as a liar and lecturers lose faith in you and it becomes difficulty to convince them that you didn’t cheat at times when you pass.

In the long term a student who passed her exams through cheating may have problems when it comes to delivering services in a job. This is because a student may cheat in exams, graduate from college but have difficulties when solving problems touching on their field of study in work environment since the certificates they present don’t really show their capability but what they pretend to be. When it comes to giving ideas during discussions in the office the cheaters will strain to contribute and also the manner in which they present themselves in such meetings will be affected since they fear that fellow workers will notice their dormancy. Without a question poor performance in the job will lead to job loss.

Cheating in an exam also denies a student important knowledge in their lives which they would have gained if they take their studies seriously A student may escape being caught cheating and get good grades which would sound okay   but the truth is they may lie to their teachers and parents but they cannot cheat themselves .the truth will remain that they waste their money and time in college but at the end of it they wont gain any knowledge since what they show to have gained is not theirs. In some colleges like the ones offering ACCA when a candidate is caught cheating they are discontinued from doing the other papers and this may kill the student’s dream of venturing in such a field.

The consequences of cheating in an exam are just too much to bear and so students should avoid such instances by ensuring they revise utilise their time well and revise thoroughly for their exams.

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• Artificial Intelligence

Can AI Be Used to Cheat on Multiple-Choice Exams?

A Florida State professor found a way to catch AI cheating on multiple-choice tests. He also found that ChatGPT got a lot of “easy” questions wrong.

By  Lauren Coffey

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A Florida State University professor has found a way to tell if students used generative AI on multiple-choice exams.

A Florida State University professor has found a way to detect whether generative artificial intelligence was used to cheat on multiple-choice exams, opening up a new avenue for faculty who have long been worried about the ramifications of the technology.

When generative AI first sprang into the public consciousness in November 2022, following the debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, academics immediately expressed concerns over the potential for students using the technology to produce term papers or conjure up admissions essays. But the potential for using generative AI to cheat on multiple-choice tests has largely been overlooked.

Kenneth Hanson got interested after he published research on the outcomes of in-person versus online exams. After a peer reviewer asked Hanson how ChatGPT might change those outcomes, Hanson joined with Ben Sorenson, a machine-learning engineer at FSU, to collect data in fall 2022. They published their results this summer.

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“Most cheating is a by-product of a barrier to access, and the student feels helpless,” Hanson said. ChatGPT made answering multiple-choice tests “a faster process.” But that doesn’t mean it came up with the right answers.

After collecting student responses from five semesters’ worth of exams—totaling nearly 1,000 questions in all—Hanson and a team of researchers put the same questions into ChatGPT 3.5 to see how the answers compared. The researchers found patterns specific to ChatGPT, which answered nearly every “difficult” test question correctly and nearly every “easy” test question incorrectly. (Their method had a nearly 100 percent accuracy rate with virtually zero margin of error.)

“ChatGPT is not a right-answer generator; it’s an answer generator,” Hanson said. “The way students think of problems is not how ChatGPT does.”

AI also struggles to create multiple-choice practice tests. In a study published this past December by the National Library of Medicine, researchers used ChatGPT to create 60 multiple-choice exams, but only roughly one-third—or 19 of 60 questions—had correct multiple-choice questions and answers. The majority had incorrect answers and little to no explanation as to why it believed its choice was the correct answer.

If a student wanted to use ChatGPT to cheat on a multiple-choice exam, she would have to use her phone to type the questions—and the possible answers—directly into ChatGPT. If no proctoring software is used for the exam, the student then could copy and paste the question directly into her browser.

Victor Lee, faculty lead of AI and education for the Stanford University Accelerator for Learning, believes that may be one step too many for students who want a simple solution when searching for answers.

“This does not occur, to me, to be a red-hot, urgent concern for professors,” said Lee, who also serves as an associate professor of education at Stanford. “People want to … put the least amount of steps into anything, when it comes down to it, and with multiple-choice tests, it’s ‘Well, one of these four answers is the right answer.’”

And despite the study’s low margin of error, Hanson does not think that sussing out ChatGPT use in multiple-choice exams is a feasible—or even wise—tactic for the average professor to deploy, noting that the answers have to be run through his program six times over.

“Is it worth the effort to do something like this? Probably not, on an individual basis,” he said, pointing toward research that suggests students aren’t necessarily cheating more with ChatGPT. “There’s a certain percentage that cheats, whether it’s online or in person. Some are going to cheat, and that’s the way it is. it’s probably a small fraction of students doing it, so it’s [looking at] how much effort do you want to put into catching a few people.”

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Hanson said his method of running multiple-choice exams through his ChatGPT-finding model could be used at a larger scale, namely by proctoring companies like Data Recognition Corporation and ACT. “If anyone’s going to implement it, they’re the most likely to do it where they want to see on a global level how prevalent it might be,” Hanson said, adding it would be “relatively easy” for groups with mass amounts of data.

ACT said in a statement to Inside Higher Ed it is not adapting any type of generative AI detection, but it is “continuously evaluating, adapting, and improving our security methods so that all students have a fair and valid test experience.”

Turnitin, one of the largest players in the AI-detection space, does not currently have any product to track multiple-choice cheating, although the company told Inside Higher Ed it has software that provides “reliable digital exam experiences.”

Hansen said his next slate of research will focus on what questions ChatGPT gets wrong when students get them right, which could be more useful for faculty in the future when creating tests.

But for now, concerns over AI cheating on essays remain top of mind for many. Lee said those worries have been “cooling a bit in temperature” as some universities enact more AI-focused policies that could address those concerns, while others are figuring out how to adjust their “educational experience” ranging from tests to written assignments to exist alongside the new technology.

“Those are the things to be ideally focused on, but I understand there’s a lot of inertia of ‘We’re used to having a term paper, essay for every student.’ Change is always going to require work, but I think this thought of ‘How do you stop this massive sea change?’ is not the right question to be asking.”

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APA Style for beginners

Then check out some frequently asked questions:

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Why use apa style in high school, how do i get started with apa style, what apa style products are available, your help wanted.

APA Style is the most common writing style used in college and career. Its purpose is to promote excellence in communication by helping writers create clear, precise, and inclusive sentences with a straightforward scholarly tone. It addresses areas of writing such as how to

• format a paper so it looks professional;
• credit other people’s words and ideas via citations and references to avoid plagiarism; and
• describe other people with dignity and respect using inclusive, bias-free language.

APA Style is primarily used in the behavioral sciences, which are subjects related to people, such as psychology, education, and nursing. It is also used by students in business, engineering, communications, and other classes. Students use it to write academic essays and research papers in high school and college, and professionals use it to conduct, report, and publish scientific research .

High school students need to learn how to write concisely, precisely, and inclusively so that they are best prepared for college and career. Here are some of the reasons educators have chosen APA Style:

• APA Style is the style of choice for the AP Capstone program, the fastest growing AP course, which requires students to conduct and report independent research.
• APA Style helps students craft written responses on standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT because it teaches students to use a direct and professional tone while avoiding redundancy and flowery language.
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High school students may also be interested in the TOPSS Competition for High School Psychology Students , an annual competition from the APA Teachers of Psychology in Secondary Schools for high school students to create a short video demonstrating how a psychological topic has the potential to benefit their school and/or local community and improve people’s lives.

Most people are first introduced to APA Style by reading works written in APA Style. The following guides will help with that:

Many people also write research papers or academic essays in APA Style. The following resources will help with that:

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In addition to all the free resources on this website, APA publishes several products that provide comprehensive information about APA Style:

The APA Style team is interested in developing additional resources appropriate for a beginner audience. If you have resources you would like to share, or feedback on this topic, please contact the APA Style team . 

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Instructing Your Kids About the Ethical Use of AI

Given how sophisticated these tools are becoming, it’s unlikely that students will voluntarily give up AI-assisted homework assistance anytime soon. This pervasive tool presents a complex moral and ethical landscape for parents: When does using AI go from being a helpful aid to cheating?

August 30, 2024 at 10:04 AM

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School is back in session, and along with backpacks and textbooks, students are bringing artificial intelligence (AI) into the classroom, too. The number of students using AI tools like ChatGPT and Copilot to write partial or even entire papers for school is on the rise. According to a recent survey by Intelligent.com, 69% of college students use ChatGPT for writing assignments, and 29% admitted to having ChatGPT write entire essays for them. Given how sophisticated these tools are becoming, it’s unlikely that students will voluntarily give up AI-assisted homework assistance anytime soon. This pervasive tool presents a complex moral and ethical landscape for parents: When does using AI go from being a helpful aid to cheating?

Artificial intelligence has rapidly become integral to our lives, from virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa to customer service chatbots for your local car dealership. In education, AI plays a significant role in how students learn, complete assignments, and even prepare for exams. While some educators view this as a natural evolution of technology in the classroom, others are concerned about the potential for academic dishonesty and the erosion of critical thinking skills.

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One NYU Student's 2024 Move-In Journey: A Photo Essay

For any first year student, move-in marks a major transition, whether the journey starts across the world or just a few miles uptown.

All photos by Jonathan King.

This year, NYU photographer Jonathan King tagged along with incoming Tisch musical theatre student Brooke Gomez Saturday, August 24 as she left her family home in the Bronx to start her  #NYU2028  adventure at Lipton Hall on Washington Square.

Brooke's day of farewells and hellos included a goodbye to the family's mini schnauzer Bruno, lugging suitcases in and out of elevators, making her new bed and finding the perfect placement for her Squishmallows, meeting her roommates, and, of course, one last tight squeeze from her mom (Keila), dad (Will), and brother (Ryan). More move-in rites of passage appear below.