Why do you suppose that so many students cheat?

[veritas]

Do you suppose that the cheating epidemic partly related to the fact that few students have developed a sincere love of learning. Rather, many students consider school as a means to an end--the ends being graduation and earning a comfortable living. The student then focuses on the easiest/shortest possible way to get from A to B.

 

In addition, does our purported culture of instant gratification also play a role--the fact that many are concerned with the product (wealth, social standing, looks, material things) rather than the journey/process? Below (in purple) is an excerpt from an article in Psychology Today:

 

 

 

I wish I could say that I was one of those rare students who never cheated in their lives, but I can't. I can remember two instances somewhere between 7th-10th grade in which I tried to get other students' answers during exams. To my knowledge, I never cheated again. I am fortunate that I encountered a newspaper article while in high school that helped me internalize a reason for not cheating. The article made the point that one would not want to be treated by a doctor who had cheated his or her way through medical school and was incompetent. For whatever reason, that article really stuck with me.

 

Teachers and professors' efforts to combat student cheating are heavily based on deterrence. Deterrence, through proctoring and other means, should be supplemented, in my view, with attempts to convey reasons to students why they should not cheat. My concern with a heavy deterrence focus is that some students may feel that if they can avoid getting caught, then there is nothing more to think about.

 

Read more here: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-campus/201202/academic-dishonesty-prevalent-preventable

 

 

What do you think? What do you make of all this?

 

[mathmarm]

I cheated sporadically in elementary school. Later, quite often in 4th and 5th grade.

I cheated because I hated the subject enough to make deals with other kids who were willing to cheat. I hated reading-for-readings sake. Books didn't excite me, I didn't enjoy made up stories that to me, were just very, very stupid. I preferred to play, sing, run, climb, hang out than sit and read from a book. I would've let the school have 1 finger at the beginning of each grade rather than have to do all those reading assignments starting around 3rd grade.

 

I would do my friends math homework if she would read my books and tell me just enough to write a semi-respectable book report. In 6th I got another kid to write my book report for me, neatly removing me from the equation. I hated reading for readings sake and I went to some pretty elaborate lengths to avoid it/get out of it.

I also cheated on a couple of history and geography exams in middle school by letting other kids copy my answers in exchange for money because we were pretty poor and we kids never had pocket money to spend.

 

My mom found out about the cheating when I let other kids copy my answers and punished me pretty severely, that punishment plus the threat of getting 5x worse if it ever happened again was my impetus for going on the straight and narrow.

[Anne in CA]

I tried to cheat on my freshman algebra final. The teacher was HORRIBLE (after all these years I still think so, no one who did pass his courses was able to pass college courses later), he had not taught the subject. He spent lecture time skipping around subjects in an ADD like manner and then telling us the figure out the rest from the text book, which was a typical ps math text. I did not want to ruin my GPA for that idiot. I got caught, I never tried to cheat again. I had to retake algebra with a different teacher the next year and I studied so hard I got the highest grade on her final that I had in the class. When someone tried to point out that it was my second year and I should have known more than the other students I made sure the poor individual was well aware that I had not really had algebra the year before and the current teacher backed me up, saying that from the beginning of the class me and other person who had to retake the class had no previous knowledge of algebra at all.

 

So, I do think that sometimes people feel entitled to cheat if they do not feel they had to opportunity to learn the subject. There are other reasons, for other people, but that was my reason. Getting caught was good for me. I have never wanted to cheat on anything again, lol. It was soooo embarrassing at the time, but worth it later. 

 

That said, I still think it was more wrong of the teacher not to teach and tell us to read a dry, uninformative text than to cheat. But I suppose that is still self justification, lol.

[Joker]

The only time I ever cheated was in high school Chemistry. I hated it, didn't get it, and had a teacher that was known for sleeping with athletes. So, I never felt a need to go to her for help.

 

I also don't remember any of my public school education being about developing a love for learning. I don't remember my parents ever trying to instill that in us either. I still only ever cheated in that one class.

 

ETA: I was never caught, but I never cheated again. (I also don't feel any guilt about it.)

[mathmarm]

Yeah, fortunately I never cheated in high school or beyond. I don't think I'd respect myself much now if I had cheated through college. But I was much more mature by then and able to better handle my stress/frustration about reading and was asked to read "stupid" books less and less often.

 

ETA: And School was not about love of learning. It was work. It was about a better future for the next generation. Now my mom taught us math and we did enjoy math, but math was more than school. School, by and large, was about if you wanted a way out of the poverty-stricken inner city then you tried hard to get into a college so that you could 'break away' from the sicker bonds/ties you had to those city blocks and you didn't look back. My parents worked themselves to the bone to get us out of that area, they were raising college bound kids, no matter what anyone else said.

[idnib]

I only cheated once, in 3rd grade. The teacher had a grid on the wall for tracking kids' progress through the multiplication tables and I was humiliated that I was stuck at 4 and everyone knew it. I cheated, got caught, was terribly embarrassed and never did it again. And I did plan to learn the 4s for real the next week, because I knew the 5s were easy.  :D

 

So I guess my reason was humiliation. I don't think I would have done it if my stalled progress was kept away from the classroom, but being left behind so publicly was more than I could bear at the tender age of 8.  :o

[momma2three]

I only remember cheating once... on a history test in 8th grade.  And the thing is that history was my favorite subject, and I was really good at it.  But I hadn't studied.  I think I didn't want to let my teacher down, because she was my favorite teacher.  So I looked at the test of the kid sitting next to me, and copied his answers.

 

 

The thing that makes NO SENSE is that the kid next to me was dumber than a box of rocks.  Which I totally knew.  He regularly cheated off of me.  So I probably did worse on that test than if I'd just chosen random answers, or made educated guesses.   :lol:  It was just all so dumb.

 

[zoobie]

We cheated in a "gifted" 9th grade geography class with a horribly clueless, disengaged teacher. No one put his/her name on the paper. We'd answer a question and pass it back. You put your name on it when you answered the last question. We were all BORED out of our minds! It was more of a game than anything. We also did this with vocabulary in 10th grade, similar group of kids. The teacher told us we could use a dictionary.  :huh:

[mom2bee]

I cheated in math one time when I was in 2nd grade (I was homeschooled). We wanted to go out to play, my brother, sister and I but I was stuck at the desk doing my math. So we climbed the shelf, got down my older sisters fully completed identical 2nd grade math book and found the same pages. It was my brothers idea and I could NEVER have reached the top of that cabinet without another person because I was only about 6 at the time. I copied all her answers in a few minutes and we went out to play.

 

My mom quickly figured out what I'd done and spanked me thoroughly when I went back in for water later on. When my dad got home he spanked me again.

After that I was done cheating. Oddly enough, they figured out that I'd cheated but they never realized my brother and/or sister HAD to have helped me because I simply couldn't reach that top shelf alone--even by standing on the table.

 

Either way, I didn't give up my partners in crime and I didn't cheat again.

[Crimson Wife]

nm

Edited February 10, 2014 by Moderator
Um, nope.

[T'smom]

We cheated in a "gifted" 9th grade geography class with a horribly clueless, disengaged teacher. No one put his/her name on the paper. We'd answer a question and pass it back. You put your name on it when you answered the last question. We were all BORED out of our minds! It was more of a game than anything. We also did this with vocabulary in 10th grade, similar group of kids. The teacher told us we could use a dictionary. :huh:

We did this too! A group of us that sat together in a history class would all take one page of the test and do it and then pass it around. It was ridiculous, there was no reason to do it. We all knew the material. I guess we were just doing it to see if we could get away with it.

 

I never thought that school was about learning. School was about getting the grade. I didn't cheat much, but I didn't really do the work either. I was good at figuring out what the teacher wanted and parroting it back to them. I would pay attention the day before a test when they would review the material and then I'd ace the test and move on.

 

Another thing that occured a LOT in my school that could be considered cheating was that only the top student in any type of group assignment would do any of the work. There was a very strict hierarchy, sometimes I was the top student and I did the work and sometimes I wasn't. The top student would never let anyone else do any work because they didn't want their grade to reflect the lower student's work. I felt that way when I was the top student and there wasn't much to be done if you were paired with someone smarter and they're telling you "just shut up and let me do this". I was nicer about the phrasing when I was the smarter one. But, if the group isn't contributing, it could be considered cheating.

[Dory]

I cheated in 4th  and 5th grade because I was annoyed at having to waste my time thinking through stuff that was so boring. I always made sure I put a few wrong answers in. Getting everything right would've raised red flags. I mostly cheated in math class because it's the only class where regardless of whether I knew the stuff or not, I had to spend time figuring it out. Usually the other stuff I either didn't know or I knew it and wrote the answer down.

I was a lazy kid I guess.

 

 

[LucyStoner]

I never cheated. Once my 7th grade teacher intimated that my writing was too good to be my original work. I walked out of 7th grade and never went back to school until 9th grade. Not only were those words 100% my own, it was a half hearted effort for me so I was insulted. He just didn't think a 12 year old would have the vocabulary.

 

I personally never observed any cheating in high school.

[celticmom]

I think that a lot of the problem is the relatively high stakes testing that takes place and puts more pressure on kids than they are mature enough to cope with. That is a major reason that I like the mastery approach. If dd does not do well we just keep going over it until she does.

[BrookValley.]

Yeah I never cheated, either. I'm not sure why. Now I'd say because it's wrong, but as a kid, I don't know. I probably didn't care about my grades enough to cheat. I didn't really have the drive to do well and investment in getting good grades 'till I hit college.

[LucyStoner]

I think that to some degree cheating is more common in impersonal and high stakes environments. Also where a lot of busywork is assigned.

 

I said I never saw cheating in high school and that was true but it was a competency based program with a lot of projects and presentations and oral exams and class discussions. No grades were awarded, and credit was only earned at all for fairly high quality work. It's hard to cheat on an oral exam or a discussion with your teacher. My high school was very small. It wouldn't have been practical in the setting to cheat at all. Working together was encouraged but that wasn't cheating and if you didn't pull your weight you'd find yourself without a partner.

[HRAAB]

I tried cheating one time on a history exam in 4th grade.  I remember it vividly.  I didn't make time to study so I tried to copy some answers that were in my seat.  Sr. Esther caught me.  She didn't say a word, simply removed the sheet of paper.  I never, ever tried that again and always found time to study.

[Sisyphus]

I cheated in high school, I would write essays and papers for people. For me, it was fun- I got to do a whole new essay on the same topic in a different enough way not to get caught. When one of my contraband essays got a higher score than the one turned in with my name, I'd be miffed, though, lol.

 

I never cheated to benefit me, but only because school was ridiculously easy for me except for math. And I didn't care enough to bother cheating in math. I don't think I had any real internalized prohibition against it.

 

My oldest Ds is horrified at the amount of cheating that goes on in his ps classes- he is very, very black and white.

 

Do you suppose that the cheating epidemic partly

 

Is there any evidence that there is an "epidemic"?  Seems like everyone here either cheated or knew someone who did back in the day.

[momma2three]

I cheated for my sister once... it was right when my parents had decided to pull her out of public school, because the education was just SO BAD.  She was in 10th grade, and doing stuff that was less advanced than what she'd done in 6th grade at a private school.  I came home from college about a month before her school let out, and for some reason my mother, my sister and I decided that we'd split up my sister's end-of-year assignments and we'd each do 1/3 of them.

 

I can't even remember what the essays I wrote were about, but I made them pretty bad on purpose, and she still got As on them.

[readinmom]

The parents at my school raise heck when they find out their little darling will received a zero for the assignment.  They ask for extra credit to offset the grade... :cursing:

Totally misses the point of morals, character, etc. 

[Word Nerd]

One of our star basketball players copied off me during a history exam. I was too intimidated by him to do anything about it or say anything to the teacher, but I made sure I didn't sit anywhere near him after that.

[ThatHomeschoolDad]

I cheated on one chemistry quiz in 10th grade, got caught, and it so flipped me out I never did again, not thru college. I was such a straight arrow, as a coping mechanism in hindsight, but still.

 

Looking at cheating as a trend would have to include a host of factors, just as in any other trend. Reduced parental oversight & increased distraction stemming from more work and more gadgets? Check. Media celebration of cheaters who face little consequence? Check. Increasing test-centric education models? Check. Parent obsession with college admissions, especially to a small group of selective schools? Check (in my area, at least).

 

There's more, to be sure.

 

Prob lots more.

 

Edited to compensate tiny keyboard + thumbs = Middle English Spelling.

[Night Elf]

I cheated in high school but I can't tell you how often. I can't remember that far back. But for me it was about grades. I didn't like C's or below. I just thought they looked bad on my transcript and I wasn't even a college bound student. No one put me up to it though. My cheating was by myself, like writing answers on a slip of paper up my sleeve. I always hoped no one saw me, not even peers.

[MSNative]

Based on the responses above some students cheat cause they panic, some because they are desperate, some cause they are lazy, some because of pressure. That sounds about right to me based on my experience. We seem to be a pretty good sampling of students.

 

I'm more concerned when teachers cheat, but that's a whole 'nother thread.

[Onceuponatime]

An interesting book on this topic is The Honest Truth About Dishonesty by Dan Ariely.

[T'smom]

Y'know I had another thought about this (I was a pp that said i cheated kindof for the fun or thrill of it, when it didn't really have a benefit)

 

One year I was involved in a church group where I missed several days of school for traveling to these retreat/conferences. It was the year I was taking physics and my physics teacher was kind of crazy, the type that screamed at office aides that were delievering things and interrupting his class or throw erasers across the room. Well, I missed a test and when talking to him about when to reschedule he was very irritated and told me I would have to wait a few days because he would have to make up a new test for me. Well, he passed back the other tests and I used them to study. Then when I went in for my makeup test it was the same test! I was very apprehensive, but I told him that I had seen all the problems because I used other students tests as a study guide. (He had specifically told me he was making me a new test). He just said " well, be glad that you studied." The only physics test I got 100% on.

 

In retrospect it is weird that in some classes I would cheat just to see if I could get away with it and in others, I was very honest.

[TechWife]

I think students cheat for a few reasons: 

1 - There is too much at stake in our test-centered educational model. 

2 - They don't think it's wrong to do so unless they get caught. 

3 - The grade is more important than character.

 

 

[MysteryJen]

I think students cheat for a few reasons: 

1 - There is too much at stake in our test-centered educational model. 

2 - They don't think it's wrong to do so unless they get caught. 

3 - The grade is more important than character.

  :iagree:

 

Also

1. Pressure to be perfect

2. Grades mean more than learning the material

3. Not able to see the long view, i.e. getting through Calculus by cheating will result in a fail in your Freshman engineering year. This seems not to occur to kids. Or some parents even.

 

I personally witnessed a lot of cheating in high school and college. And it was mostly the kids trying to keep their high GPAs. I also think that growing up with lots of collaborative projects in school makes it harder for kids to see when the cheating line is crossed.

[shawthorne44]

The stories of the clueless teachers reminded me of one in college.  I never cheated in college, but this one was a gray area. 

I took a summer course on Russian translation.  Only the language-dunces like me took the summer language classes.  Every day we were assigned a pretty long text to translate.  As in 7 hours to just look up all the words in the dictionary.  So, people quickly formed groups that was roughly divided into left side of class/ right side of class.  Everyone got one sentence to translate and you had to make it neat and make enough copies that everyone in your group got one.  Then we met ahead of class and passed them out.  Then during class she was call to us to verbally say our translation.  What I remember was that the teacher knew precisely what we were doing.  Sometimes one person wouldn't do their work, and she would pick someone from the other side of the class.  We weren't precisely left/right so she had to learn who was in which group. 

[Wheres Toto]

I cheated once in high school and was caught.

 

It was on a Honors Spanish 3 test.  I had spent a week in the hospital very very anemic, then another week off at home recovering from something I caught in the hospital.  My second day back I had to take a test on the unit that they did while I was out.  I had so much work to make up, I wrote up a cheat sheet to get through the test and figured given more time I'd be able to learn what I needed to continue in the class (it was early Spring so there was one more semester left).  I had those jeans with the pockets on the knees, kept the cheat sheet in there and was caught peeking.    I confessed to my mother before the teacher could call her (and the teacher DID call her, on the phone!) and had to go talk to my guidance counselor the next day.  I found out later the teacher wanted to fail me for the entire year but my counselor told her she could only fail me for that one test due to the circumstances.  I ended up with a D that quarter and a C+ for the year.

[Dory]

I think students cheat for a few reasons: 

1 - There is too much at stake in our test-centered educational model. 

2 - They don't think it's wrong to do so unless they get caught. 

3 - The grade is more important than character.

 

I guess I was an strange kid. Those do sound like normal reasons and yet none of them fit why I cheated.

[T'smom]

I guess I was an strange kid. Those do sound like normal reasons and yet none of them fit why I cheated.

Same here. And the other people I knew who cheated weren't doing it for those reasons either.

[Gil]

...

Edited July 18, 2016 by Gil

[El...]

Maybe we should be asking what compels people who do not cheat!  The author of the article you posted seems to have associated cheating with incompetence, which deterred her because being competent was important to her.

 

I didn't cheat at home because... what would be the point?  We didn't do a lot of testing.  If I missed math questions, I did them again until they were right.  We didn't do grades.

 

In college, I was in ROTC.  I saw the consequences of even minor cheating: immediate loss of scholarships and dismissal from my main peer group.  I was ok at my academics, so I didn't feel a lot of pressure to cheat. 

 

Today I don't cheat in small ways because honesty is a deep value to me.  I want it; I disdain those who aren't.  It is a form of incompetence to me.  Only losers who can't hack it cheat.  Wow, that sounds harsh.  I'll have to be careful if one of my kids slips into it one day!

 

Seeing military personnel exposed for cheating in the news lately really chills me.  Something is going wrong. 

 

What drives those who do not cheat?

[sassenach]

I cheated all the time in high school. Nothing high stakes, but the occasional whisper for an answer, and homework copying (all the time). It went both ways- I copied off friends and they copied off me. Looking back I would say that grades were the goal, learning didn't matter. No one batted an eye at cheating. It pretty much felt like students vs teachers and cheating was how we won. I think it's a combo of character issues and the culture of my school at that time.

[readinmom]

 I think it's a combo of character issues and the culture of my school at that time.

 

Good point. 

 

[ondreeuh]

At first I thought I never cheated but ... the memories are coming back. I had a teacher whose final exams consisted of 2 essay questions. She came up with 6 potential ones, and you were supposed to prepare for all of them. On test day she would reveal the two questions and you could use an outline but nothing else. OMG. I was hopeless; she used a college lecture type format and I didn't have a clue how to take notes, and I don't think we even had a textbook. My friends and I all shared outlines and tried to help each other with notes. On the day of the exam, she let you leave whenever you wanted and come in during your breaks to work on it. We would literally leave the classroom, huddle right outside the door, discuss the essay questions, go back in there and write some more, back & forth. She totally knew what we were doing, and I guess she didn't care.

 

Copying math homework never felt like cheating. I also stopped answering questions once I reached the bottom of the page because I knew the teacher only looked at the front side when he marked it off.

 

I never cheated on my own stuff in college, but I heavily edited all of my husband's papers. His writing sounds and looks like it was written by a (non-WTM) 5th grader. Spelling, punctuation, verb tense, parallel sentence structure, it's all a mess. He is pretty brilliant in all other ways but his writing makes him sound ... uneducated. So I clean it up. I have attempted to teach him how to use a comma between a dependent and an independent clause but I don't think he will ever get it. I edited some of his papers for content as well - never because he was lazy, but because he was massively overworked. I wouldn't do it for anyone else.

 

My daughter says kids pass around tests all the time and take photos. I had to tell her that that could get you kicked out of college. NOT WORTH IT.

[Haiku]

I don't think that there is any more of a cheating epidemic than there used to be. My dad has told me many tales of himself and his fellow students cheating when they were in school. Honestly, some of the stories are funny. I think there is a bigger emphasis now on cheating/plagiarism than there was when I was in school, but I don't really think cheating is a bigger problem in that more students are doing it.

 

[Haiku]

3 - The grade is more important than character.

 

I think we see evidence of that every day in real life. Powerful people cheat and lie and are not held accountable. Why does character matter if you can live the good life through dishonesty? Why should a good person be held back because he or she gets a worse grade honestly and someone else gets a better grade dishonestly? Why should someone be cut out of life's opportunities because of one (or a few) poor grades? (These questions are not necessarily reflective of my opinion on the matter of cheating.)

[Miss Mousie]

What drives those who do not cheat?

 

This (as you said - I couldn't get the quote function to include your name):

 

 

Today I don't cheat in small ways because honesty is a deep value to me.  I want it; I disdain those who aren't.  It is a form of incompetence to me.  Only losers who can't hack it cheat.

 

 

IMO, honesty is a large component of personal integrity, and personal integrity is, to me, supreme.

 

I also agree with you here:

 

Seeing military personnel exposed for cheating in the news lately really chills me.  Something is going wrong. 

 

When this thread began, my thoughts went immediately to the recent rash of news items about rampant cheating in the military.  In that arena, cheating is no longer "merely" a disgrace.  In the military arena, such actions can cause people to die.  Apparently, the cheaters can shield their consciences from such thoughts, and that terrifies me.