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Cheating is Bad in School

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Published: Mar 14, 2024

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The New York Times

The learning network | is cheating getting worse.

Is Cheating Getting Worse?

Commencement at Harvard. Officials said last month that they were investigating possible cheating on an undergraduate take-home test.

Questions about issues in the news for students 13 and older.

See all Student Opinion »

A recent study shows that more students are cheating — and that many are cheating not just to survive, but to thrive. What have you observed about cheating at your school? If there seems to be more of it, why do you think that is?

In the article “Studies Find More Students Cheating, With High Achievers No Exception,” Richard Perez-Pena writes:

Large-scale cheating has been uncovered over the last year at some of the nation’s most competitive schools, like Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, the Air Force Academy and, most recently, Harvard. Studies of student behavior and attitudes show that a majority of students violate standards of academic integrity to some degree, and that high achievers are just as likely to do it as others. Moreover, there is evidence that the problem has worsened over the last few decades. Experts say the reasons are relatively simple: Cheating has become easier and more widely tolerated, and both schools and parents have failed to give students strong, repetitive messages about what is allowed and what is prohibited. …“There have always been struggling students who cheat to survive,” said [Donald L. McCabe, a professor at the Rutgers University Business School, and a leading researcher on cheating], but more and more, there are students at the top who cheat to thrive.”

Students 13 and older are invited to comment below. Please use only your first name. For privacy policy reasons, we will not publish student comments that include a last name.

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i think cheating is wrong because you don’t learn anything from it you just get it from some one else.

I do not think that there is any cheating at our school. I think this because all of the teachers have made it clear that there is zero tolerance for it. But I do think that cheating in America has hit an all time high.

In my school we don’t have much cheating because we are constantly reminded of it being wrong. I do agree that many students are unclear as to the meaning of plagiarism. I believe this is because many schools are not properly teaching their students about cheating and plagiarism are wrong and what the consequences for the actions would be. I do believe that cheating is wrong because when you cheat, you cant learn, and when you don’t learn you cannot successfully finish tests or exams which would affect your grade or even cause you to fail the course.

What I have observed about cheating in my school is that there is not a lot because we are very small compared to most high schools. We are like a family so it is easy to tell if someone cheated by copying a paper from someone else or took it off the internet. It is always wrong to cheat but that never completely stops anyone from doing it.

Students: Tell us what you have observed about cheating in your school. Do you think there is more of it than ever? If so, why? Do you agree with an expert quoted in this article that “Students are surprisingly unclear about what constitutes plagiarism or cheating”? What or who is to blame? Do you think cheating is always wrong? Why or why not? ______________________________________________ Cheating in schools is become a problem in my opinion. With the use of the internet students are able to have access to the websites where some homework assignments come from. There are thousands, maybe millions of sites just devoted to giving the answers. Cell phones are also a problem in the school environment, students can send each other texts of the tests or homework’s, they can give each other the test via email, Facebook, etc. the real problem though is plagiarism, it is becoming a problem that students don’t understand, they don’t get the severity of their actions. Using someone else’s work and calling it your own will get you thrown out of school or even ruin your reputation and chances at a good school.

Tell us what you have observed about cheating in your school. Do you think there is more of it than ever? If so, why? Do you agree with an expert quoted in this article that “Students are surprisingly unclear about what constitutes plagiarism or cheating”? What or who is to blame? Do you think cheating is always wrong? Why or why not?

Ever since I came into High school, I have been seeing less and less cheating going on around my classmates. I think because students from high school have matured, they have more responsibility in studying for tests and exams than when they were in middle school. I do not agree with the expert quoted in the article that we students do not know of plagarism or cheating because, students who do cheat and plagrizes documents know that what they are doing is wrong, yet they still do it. I believe it is the student who is to blame for cheating because, they are one-minded individuals who always have a choice in cheating or not cheating, but they still cheat for their benefit. I believe cheating is and always will be wrong because, a cheater does not gain the proper knowledge and experience from cheating.

In my school i haven’t really notice a lot of cheating. The cases that i have observed have been small mishap that only occurred because of a forgotten assignment. I wouldn’t say that there is more then ever but it is more conversational then ever. This is because of the up roar of cases happening at the same time. Plagiarism and cheating do relate and is understandably unclear to some people. Educators are a little to blame. Most types of cheating are wrong unless it is important to survival.

Cheating is a problem depending on how the school deals with it. The teachers are always reminding us what plagiarism is and how to do assighnments the right way. I think if a student is unclear of plagiarism and cheating is then the teachers werent clear or did not go over it as much as they should.

I have observed that my school is very strong and strict they do not tolerate cheating they want you too use your brain not somebody elses. I do not think cheating is a big deal in my school if it is then I’m sure it would be solved immediately.If the teacher hasn’t explained to them about what plagiarism is or cheating then it would be the teachers fault.Cheating is always wrong.

Cheating in my old school was moderate. I remember people doing homework for others in a certain class. For example: Girl 1 doesn’t understand social studies very well; so girl 2 would do girl 1’s homework. And girl 2 doesn’t understand math very well; well girl 1 will do girl 2’s homework every night. This is how cheating was in my old school.

At my school their was no cheating everyone was honest. No I do not agree that students are unclear. I think they know what the difference is but it so easy to do that they do it.The only person to blame is youself. You know that it is wrong but you do it anyway. Yes i do think that cheating is always wrong because you are using someone else’s ideas not your own. When the teacher askes you to right your oppion on something and you cheat and look off of someone else’s paper that is not our own oppion.

I have observed that cheating has become a big impact in many high school in this generation. Honesty, Cheating has increased more now because the lack of effort kids put into work. Kids are starting not to care what so ever. Yes i agree with an expert from the article that quoted “Students are surprisingly unclear about what constitutes plagiarism or cheating” because they don’t know how much trouble they can get in for simply copying one little paragraph from a different school. No one is necessarily to blame because a big majority of kids are being told the consequences of plagerism but they just simply don’t care. Cheating is always wrong.

In the school I currently go to, cheating doesn’t seem to be very common from what I see.

At the last few schools I have been to, however, cheating was really common. It wasn’t exactly to help you do better on tests or something like that, though. It was the “honor” that came with it.

You see, kids would cheat so they could brag about how they did something wrong and didn’t get caught, and then got good grades.

cheating is horible when u cheat your not doing your work so u dont know if u got better at something . cheating happened everyday at my old school they cheated on every thing they didnt actually do the work there selfs and that showed people that they did give any effort to try and thats not good if u dont understand the work dont cheat ask for help

there has not been much cheating at my school but at other schools ive gone to people cheat all the time and i think cheating is wrong becuase if u copie someone else u dont always know if there wrong

In my old school there has been a lot of cheating but they never got honer roll. So I think that thay did it to survive and not to thrive. But I am thinking that one person i know well might have but I am not that shore.

I believe that cheating is prevalent in most schools, and to this day there are still high ammounts of children sharing papers on buses or looking up answers online… Some kids try to secretly cheat and do their work under binders to trade papers with another student, and others might ask or talk in another language to discuss even test answers! I believe this could be stopped by more monitoring over classes and for more students to be sectioned out for their intellegence.

cheating has gotten bad over the past years. the people at my old school loves to cheat. they would cheat in front of the teachers. they wouldn’t do anything. i think cheating is wrong, people who cheat shouldn’t allow to past to the next grade. website that we should blame is wikipedia. why becuase it give the answer sometimes and the kids are to lazy to thinck of doing it on their own. i agreed with the expert quoter that some child don’t understand that cheating is wrong, they dont understand that cheating is not going to help them in life

In my old school, there was quite a lot of cheating. I actually saw it all the time on homework, tests, etc. I think there is way more cheating than ever. I think cheating is worse now because i have seen it much more than i used to in elementary school and even in the beginning of middle school. People cheat because they don’t study and they forget the answers. I do agree with the quote because maybe some students don’t know what plagiarism is and they think it is okay to do it. If students don’t know about it, than the teachers are to blame. But if the students know what it is and do it anyways, than the students are to blame. I think cheating is wrong. I think cheating is wrong because if it is not your own work, teachers don’t know what you can really do.

I haven’t seen cheating. I believe it’s always wrong. I don’t cheat and I never will.

In my school, I have observed that cheating is a constant occasion. It has progressively gotten worse in my opinion and I really don’t notice anything that will make it stop. There isn’t much regulation or consequence so that, in my opinion, is why it is just getting worse. I do not agree with the expert’s quote. I believe that teachers and parents do address the problem enough for students to understand it. They talk about it but the students are still making the choice to not follow the rules. They’re still cheating even though they DO know that it’s wrong. In this case I think it’s the students that are to blame. Parents and teachers are making as big of an attempt as they can but kids have just become so disobedient in the past few years that I’d blame them. No matter the situation or instance I do believe that cheating is 100% wrong. It is just like lying and lying is wrong too. I think that everyone should be honest. If a student needs help then they should ask for it. Lying and cheating is not how society should be so I do strongly believe that cheating is wrong.

At my school, there is cheating but it’s not on things that are big, important assignments. Usually it’s just on little worksheets and things like that. There does seem to be more of it coming about but I think it’s because either we are just getting lazier, or the work just seems to be coming on more. I don’t think there is more cheating than ever though, I think that the kids who have always cheated in the past will continue, but I think it could be way worse. I do not agree with the expert quoted in the fact that students are very clear on what makes plagiarism or cheating. Students know what they are doing and make the decision. They may know it is wrong, but they’ll still do it. I think the students are to blame for making the decisions to cheat. I do think that cheating is wrong, and I admit to doing it from time to time. In most cases, cheating is very wrong, but other times, like on short little assignments that you forget to do, I don’t think it’s a huge deal. Yes, cheating is wrong, but most kids don’t cheat on the things that really matter.

In my school, Hanover-Horton, cheating is as abrupt as it is in any other school. I believe that people do it not only to pass the class, but for the thrill as well. It may even just be pure laziness. The teachers do obviously state; “this is what’s wrong, this is what’s right”, but I believe that most kids are taking it as a joke. The cheating policy is not taken seriously simply because more and more students are beginning to find cheating easy. The blame should not only be put on the teachers, but on the students as well. The teachers should be monitoring the children more, but at the same time, the children should know better. Right from wrong should not be hard to tell apart. It is the students choice, and they must accept their consequences if they do the wrong thing.

In my school personally I see people cheating pretty often, when I do see it it’s usually the same thing, they ask whoever they want to cheat off of and they usually allow it. People don’t necessarily mind when someone snags their homework just to hurry and get it done, they don’t get offended or angry; they just think it’s normal. I think that there’s more cheating going on now because more and more kids are getting overly concerned about their social lives and other things going on outside of school. When they get to school they don’t have anything done that they were supposed to so they resort to cheating, it’s becoming very common to see people “helping” others, giving answers, with homework in the halls.

I really have not observed much cheating in my school but there is some cheating that happens. I do not think that there is more cheating then ever most kids know how far to go and they wont go past a certain point so they wont get caught as easily. No, I do not agree with the expert that students do not understand what plagiarism or cheating is. Students do understand what cheating and plagiarism is, they may just act like they have no idea so if they get caught they will not get in as much trouble. I do not think anyone person is to blame for students cheating. I do believe that it is wrong to cheat, it causes you not to learn everything and when it comes to test time you will more then likely fail because you do not know the material.

What's Next

Why Do Students Cheat?

Posted July 19, 2016
By Zachary Goldman

In March, Usable Knowledge published an article on ethical collaboration , which explored researchers’ ideas about how to develop classrooms and schools where collaboration is nurtured but cheating is avoided. The piece offers several explanations for why students cheat and provides powerful ideas about how to create ethical communities. The article left me wondering how students themselves might respond to these ideas, and whether their experiences with cheating reflected the researchers’ understanding. In other words, how are young people “reading the world,” to quote Paulo Freire , when it comes to questions of cheating, and what might we learn from their perspectives?

I worked with Gretchen Brion-Meisels to investigate these questions by talking to two classrooms of students from Massachusetts and Texas about their experiences with cheating. We asked these youth informants to connect their own insights and ideas about cheating with the ideas described in " Ethical Collaboration ." They wrote from a range of perspectives, grappling with what constitutes cheating, why people cheat, how people cheat, and when cheating might be ethically acceptable. In doing so, they provide us with additional insights into why students cheat and how schools might better foster ethical collaboration.

Why Students Cheat

Students critiqued both the individual decision-making of peers and the school-based structures that encourage cheating. For example, Julio (Massachusetts) wrote, “Teachers care about cheating because its not fair [that] students get good grades [but] didn't follow the teacher's rules.” His perspective represents one set of ideas that we heard, which suggests that cheating is an unethical decision caused by personal misjudgment. Umna (Massachusetts) echoed this idea, noting that “cheating is … not using the evidence in your head and only using the evidence that’s from someone else’s head.”

Other students focused on external factors that might make their peers feel pressured to cheat. For example, Michima (Massachusetts) wrote, “Peer pressure makes students cheat. Sometimes they have a reason to cheat like feeling [like] they need to be the smartest kid in class.” Kayla (Massachusetts) agreed, noting, “Some people cheat because they want to seem cooler than their friends or try to impress their friends. Students cheat because they think if they cheat all the time they’re going to get smarter.” In addition to pressure from peers, students spoke about pressure from adults, pressure related to standardized testing, and the demands of competing responsibilities.

When Cheating is Acceptable

Students noted a few types of extenuating circumstances, including high stakes moments. For example, Alejandra (Texas) wrote, “The times I had cheated [were] when I was failing a class, and if I failed the final I would repeat the class. And I hated that class and I didn’t want to retake it again.” Here, she identifies allegiance to a parallel ethical value: Graduating from high school. In this case, while cheating might be wrong, it is an acceptable means to a higher-level goal.

Encouraging an Ethical School Community

Several of the older students with whom we spoke were able to offer us ideas about how schools might create more ethical communities. Sam (Texas) wrote, “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.”

Sam provides a vision for the type of school climate in which collaboration, not cheating, would be most encouraged. Kaith (Texas), added to this vision, writing, “In my own opinion students wouldn’t find the need to cheat if they knew that they had the right undivided attention towards them from their teachers and actually showed them that they care about their learning. So a school where cheating wasn’t necessary would be amazing for both teachers and students because teachers would be actually getting new things into our brains and us as students would be not only attentive of our teachers but also in fact learning.”

Both of these visions echo a big idea from “ Ethical Collaboration ”: The importance of reducing the pressure to achieve. Across students’ comments, we heard about how self-imposed pressure, peer pressure, and pressure from adults can encourage cheating.

Where Student Opinions Diverge from Research

The ways in which students spoke about support differed from the descriptions in “ Ethical Collaboration .” The researchers explain that, to reduce cheating, students need “vertical support,” or standards, guidelines, and models of ethical behavior. This implies that students need support understanding what is ethical. However, our youth informants describe a type of vertical support that centers on listening and responding to students’ needs. They 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.

Why Youth Voices Matter, and How to Help Them Be Heard

Our purpose in reaching out to youth respondents was to better understand whether the research perspectives on cheating offered in “ Ethical Collaboration ” mirrored the lived experiences of young people. This blog post is only a small step in that direction; young peoples’ perspectives vary widely across geographic, demographic, developmental, and contextual dimensions, and we do not mean to imply that these youth informants speak for all youth. However, our brief conversations suggest that asking youth about their lived experiences can benefit the way that educators understand school structures.

Too often, though, students are cut out of conversations about school policies and culture. They rarely even have access to information on current educational research, partially because they are not the intended audience of such work. To expand opportunities for student voice, we need to create spaces — either online or in schools — where students can research a current topic that interests them. Then they can collect information, craft arguments they want to make, and deliver their messages. Educators can create the spaces for this youth-driven work in schools, communities, and even policy settings — helping to support young people as both knowledge creators and knowledge consumers.

Additional Resources

Read “ Student Voice in Educational Research and Reform ” [PDF] by Alison Cook-Sather.
Read “ The Significance of Students ” [PDF] by Dana L. Mitra.
Read “ Beyond School Spirit ” by Emily J. Ozer and Dana Wright.

Fighting for Change: Estefania Rodriguez, L&T'16

Notes from ferguson, part of the conversation: rachel hanebutt, mbe'16.

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Articles & Advice > Majors and Academics > Blog

This Is What Happens When You Cheat in School

Lots of students admit to cheating in school. But even when it seems like a harmless shortcut, there are serious repercussions whether or not you get caught.

by Cathleen Freedman CollegeXpress Student Writer

Last Updated: Sep 29, 2023

Originally Posted: Apr 1, 2016

Between 75%–98% of college students admit to having cheated in high school. Typically when one thinks of a “cheater,” they think of some hooligan who doesn’t even try to learn the class material. But even top students who make good grades cheat. Cheating in school might seem like a harmless little shortcut, but there are real and seriously harmful repercussions—whether or not you get caught. Let's take a look at why students cheat, the serious consequences you can face, and more honest alternatives for when you need academic help.

Common reasons students cheat

There's no excuse for cheating, but many students still try to come up with reasons to try to justify it. Have you ever had one of the following thoughts?

“I want to get the grade, not the education”

With the pressure to achieve a high GPA and class rank, it’s easy to lose sight of what school is actually about: learning . You're in school to get a good education, first and foremost. Then you are expected to demonstrate your knowledge in your good grades. Learn the material; the grades will follow. And if you’re so overwhelmed that you think cheating is your only way to keep your grades up, there are much better options (keep reading!).

“If I cheat, I’m only affecting myself”

Wrong! By cheating, you’re stealing the work of another student who has put in the time to learn the material. By cheating and getting a good grade you didn’t actually earn, you can also hurt the curve for the entire class and make the students who are struggling with the material believe there is something wrong with them for not understanding.

“My teacher isn’t any good, so it’s okay if I cheat to get by in that class”

While it's unfair for any student to have a low-caliber teacher, it isn’t fair for anyone to cheat. When you cheat and make a good grade without understanding the material, the teacher thinks they’ve taught the criteria well, and they will continue to teach the same way or perhaps at a faster pace.

Related: Think Smarter and Work Harder: Never Use an Essay Writing Service

Consequences of cheating in school

It’s way more than a Saturday suspension. Here are just a few things that could happen when you cheat in your high school or college courses—it could affect a lot more than you think!

Cheating in high school

You could get an automatic failure for the assignment.
You could get an automatic failure for the whole course.
You could be expelled or punished in other ways.
Your teacher, friends, family, teammates, coaches, etc. could lose respect for you.
You could hurt your own self-esteem, mess with your ability to actually think critically and solve problems, and develop a warped sense of morality.
Cheating goes on your permanent record, which brings me to…

When applying to colleges

The black mark on your permanent record could cost you your chances of getting into your top college —or any college.
Scholarship providers could also see your permanent record and not offer you scholarships.
Teachers won’t provide you with good (or any) recommendation letters. Even if you don’t get caught cheating, when you need a teacher to write your recommendation letter for college or job applications, they’ll remember that one time your Scantron answers looked eerily similar to someone else’s, and they won’t hesitate to tell your dream college or future employer about it. (Your teachers aren’t clueless, even though you think they might be.)

Cheating in college

You could be suspended or expelled.
You could lose your scholarship(s) or, again, not get any in the first place.
You could face copyright infringement troubles. That’s right—you could be sued for cheating on a paper.

Then there’s the aftermath of cheating in the “real world.” You will not have developed that skill you cheated on. And if you think you “got away” with cheating in high school or college, you might be tempted to take other shortcuts in life. But out in the real world, those shortcuts have pretty bad repercussions too. You know, like getting fired—not to mention losing the respect of those around you.

Alternatives to cheating

Okay, so you’re struggling in class. Cheating seems like your only option. Obviously it's not, and you should try to learn the material and do the work on your own. But if struggling to do that is why you’re thinking about cheating in the first place, here are some ways to rise above:

Ask your teacher, friends, or upperclassmen for help. You might be surprised by how much people can and want to help you!
Get a tutor. Your high school, college, or local library might offer free tutoring. Or if there is NHS at your high school, many of the inductees need to get volunteer hours and would probably offer free tutoring. Check it out.
Rethink how you spend your time. If you’re so overwhelmed with school work and activities that you think cheating is a solution, it’s time to rethink your priorities. Maybe it’s time to quit a club, change your class schedule, or give up your Tuesday night bowling league. (Or at the very least, rethink how you budget your time .)
Remember what’s really important. Yes, the learning. But if you’re hell-bent on getting the grades so you can get into a super selective college, you’re missing the point of what college is all about.
Use resources online. There are study guides and advice for basically every academic subject, every book you’ve been assigned, and every kind of homework problem. Watch some videos, read some stuff. (Just be careful relying on the answers you get from public online forums and familiarize yourself with what counts as plagiarism!)

Long story short: You shouldn’t cheat. Besides all the reasons listed above, don’t you owe it to yourself to work honestly? In the words of Journey, don’t stop believing … in yourself and all that you can do—not the guy sitting next to you in Physics class.

Need help handling all your classes, tests, homework, and other assignments? Check out our Majors and Academics section for expert tips on acing everything the right way.

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About Cathleen Freedman

Cathleen Freedman attends the High School of Performing and Visual Arts, where she is preparing in the best possible way for college. She would also have to say that writing in the third person is as fun as you might think it is.

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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.

High school students taking an exam in class

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.

Education: Why Do Students Cheat? Essay

Introduction.

Cheating is a common phenomenon among students at all levels of education. It happens in high schools, colleges, and universities. In addition, it occurs in both traditional and online settings of learning. Students have sufficient time and resources that give them the opportunity to work hard and pass their exams through personal effort (Davis et al. 35). This begs the question: why do students cheat?

Research has revealed that several reasons and factors are responsible for cheating in schools. A study conducted to find out the prevalence of cheating in colleges found out that approximately 75 percent of college students cheat at one time in the course of their stay at school (Davis et al. 36).

There is need to find a lasting solution because cheating does not reflect the real potential of students. Effects of cheating are reflected in students’ performance at workplaces. Students cheat because many schools define excellence through grades, lack of self-confidence with one’s ability, pressure from parents and teachers to do well, and poor teaching methods that do not fulfill the goals of learning (McCabe et al. 51).

Students cheat because many institutions of learning value grades more than attainment of knowledge (Davis et al. 36). Many school systems have placed more value on performing well in tests and examination than on the process of learning. When assessment tests and examinations play a key role in determining the future of a student, cheating becomes an appropriate channel to perform well (McCabe et al. 51).

Few institutions encourage mastery of learning materials rather than tests. In such institutions, students develop a positive attitude towards education because they are not worried about their performance in tests (Davis et al. 37). They focus more on the attainment of knowledge and skills. Psychologists argue that placing high value on tests teaches students to value short-term effects of education and ignore the long-term effects.

True or false questions, multiple choice questions, and matching tests are examples of assessments used by institutions that value grades (McCabe et al. 53). On the other hand, essay questions, research papers, and term papers are methods used to teach in institutions that value the learning experience and attainment of knowledge more than grades (Davis et al. 39).

Lack of confidence in their abilities motivates students to cheat. Lack of adequate skills and knowledge are some of the reasons that lead to the loss of confidence by students. According to McCabe et al,

“Teachers who focus more on grades have poor methods of teaching compared to teachers who value knowledge.” (51).

Students who think that they are not smart enough to cheat are more likely to cheat in order to get good grades. Learning that puts emphasis on grades involves repetition and memorization of learning materials (Davis et al. 41). Students forget much of the knowledge gained after sitting for their exams. Bored students have little or no connection to their teachers and are therefore likely to cheat because they are never prepared.

Such learning methods make learning boring and uninteresting (McCabe et al. 53). It does not motivate students to work hard and attain knowledge that could be useful in their careers. Interactive learning endows students with the confidence, which makes them believe in their ability to handle all kinds of challenges and situations (Davis et al. 42).

Students cheat because of pressure exerted on them by their parents and teachers to attain good grades (McCabe et al. 54). Many teachers and parents gauge the abilities of students by their grades. Many colleges use grades as a way of choosing the students who are qualified to join college. Self-efficacy is an important aspect of learning because it gives students the confidence to handle various tasks (McCabe et al. 55).

Teachers can cultivate a sense of self-efficacy in students by believing in all students regardless of their grades. However, many teachers alienate students who get low grades and give more attention to students that get high grades. On the other hand, many parents promise to take their children to college only if they get high grades. This motivates students to cheat in order to gain entry into college.

It is important for teachers and parents to find the weaknesses and strengths of all students and help them to exploit their potential. Sidelining some students is wrong and a good enough reason to cheat.

Another reason that explains why students teach is poor leaning and teaching methods (Davis et al.44). Good learning methods involve movements, inventions, creativity, discussions, and interactions. These methods improve comprehension among students and facilitate proper sharing of knowledge. However, many teachers find these methods tedious and time-consuming.

The aftermath is resentment form students because the teachers use methods that make learning boring. People learning through various methods. In addition, different students have different learning needs (McCabe et al. 56). Therefore, using a single teaching method does not serve the needs of all students. Some students develop a negative attitude towards learning and their teacher.

These students are likely to cheat in exams. Teachers should evaluate their students in order to develop teaching methods that cater to them all (McCabe et al. 58). Otherwise, some students might feel neglected in case they fail to comprehend certain subjects or disciplines.

Finally, students cheat because of laziness and lack of focus. According to Parker, students cheat because of lack f goo morals and laziness. According to Parker,

“A startling number attributed variously to the laziness of today’s students, their lack of a moral compass, or the demands of a hypercompetitive society.” (McCabe et al. 59)

She further argues that society demands much of students. This leads to cheating because students feel under pressure to perform well. Laziness is common among students. Students who waste their time on unimportant things have little time to study and do their homework (McCabe et al. 62).

They are unprepared during exams and result to cheating in order to perform well. On the other hand, many employees determine the capabilities of potential employees based on their grades. This motivates students to cheat in order to get high grades.

Reasons for cheating include lack of self-confidence in one’s ability to perform well, pressure from parents and teachers, and poor teaching methods that do not fulfill the learning needs of all students. In addition, many learning institutions place great value on grades rather than the acquisition of knowledge. Cheating is a common phenomenon among students at different levels of learning.

More research needs to be conducted in order to ascertain why students cheat. Further research is necessary because different students cheat for various reasons. Moreover, it is important for teachers to lay more emphasis on the acquisition of knowledge and skills rather than good grades.

Students have different learning needs that are satisfied using different teaching and learning methods. Teachers should evaluate their students in order to determine the most important teaching methods that cater to the learning needs of all students.

Works Cited

Davis, Stephen, Drinan Patrick, and Gallant Tricia. Cheating in School: What We Know and What We Can Do . New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2011. Print.

McCabe, Donald, Butterfield Kenneth, and Trevino Linda. Cheating in College: Why Students Do It and What Educators Can Do About It. New York: JHU Press, 2012. Print.

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Bibliography

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Home Essay Examples Education Cheating

Cheating In School: Reasons And Consequences

Category Education
Subcategory Learning
Topic Cheating

The desire of every student is to achieve good results in school. However, the passion for good results in schools has pushed most students beyond the borders of integrity (Velliaris, 2016). Several students are openly engaging in exam cheating to score highly. The behaviour of cheating in schools is against school rules, guidelines, and core values. Therefore, cheating in schools is wrong, and the practice must be stopped.

Several students defend their cheating behaviours by stating that they are only interested in scoring high grades and not gaining education (Robinson & Simonton, 2019, p. 42). Also, the basis for cheating is incited by the pressure of attaining high levels of class ranking. Some students, therefore, claim to have lost the importance of schooling hence choosing to engage in exam cheating.

Our writers can write you a new plagiarism-free essay on any topic

Another reason for students engaging in exam cheating is the claim that they are only affected, persons. To them, it is their life, and nobody should interfere with their cheating tendencies since it is only them who are affected. In my response, this explanation statement is unreasonable. Cheating is wrong since engaging in it is equal to stealing the results of honest students who dedicated their time to learning and reading the appropriate examinable materials (Kingston & Clark, 2014, p. 39). More so, a student who engages in exam cheating and is not caught is likely to score a high grade. However, the truth is that the student does not merit the grade, and therefore, by earning the grade, the entire class curve is hurt. Thus, other students in the same class who scored lowly in the same exams are most likely to believe that they are missing something important because of their inability to perform well that is not the case.

The other idea that students use for their reasoning to engage in exam irregularities is the claim that their teachers are incompetent and unprofessional in the delivery of content (McCabe, Butterfield, & Treviño, 2012). Thus, some students consider adopting wrongful exam practices to go through a class by pointing a finger at accusation to their teacher. Though it is educationally wrong to subject students to poorly trained and incompetent teachers or instructors, the is no reason still for students to use such a claim to cheat in schools. More so, by students cheating and scoring highly, they mislead their teachers. The teachers are deceived in the sense that they perceive the dishonestly earned grades to be an accurate reflection of the students having appropriately understood the material which is not the case. Hence, such a teacher will maintain the same teaching method and possibly even consider increasing the pace of instruction.

There are several consequences arising from cheating in schools. However, it is essential to note that these consequences are spread across several spheres of daily human life. For example, lying in schools affects a person’s future career, level of trust and credibility, ethics and integrity, societal issues, among others (Mason, 2019, p. 54). Therefore, this paper explores the consequences of cheating from some of the viewpoints mentioned above.

One of the most important roles of all learning institutions is to produce individuals who are ethically and morally sound. Morally upright students are therefore expected not to engage in school cheating. Essentially, there is no difference between a student who is involved in school cheating and a thief or liar. Cheating in schools, just like stealing, is unethical and immoral behaviour. Students engaging in exam cheating from an ethical perspective lose their integrity just like the case of an apprehended thief. Submission of examinable schoolwork by a student involved in cheating is typically lying to the teacher that the work is genuine which is lack of integrity and stealing (Koretz, 2017, p. 22). Therefore, I firmly stand to emphasize cheating in school as an unethical and immoral behaviour due to its undeniable aspect of stealing and lying as well as the loss of integrity.

The establishment of trust between two or more individuals or parties is not a problem; however, the restoration of trust where it once existed is a big challenge. The loss of trust in a student only requires a single instance when a student is caught red-handed cheating. Once the trust has been lost, the student will always be a suspect to the people in authority, and his or her work will frequently raise suspicion (Benninga & Berkowitz, 2016, p. 66). More so, once the information of a student cheating in school spreads all over, the student’s credibility will be lost, and those who know the alleged student will compromise their opinion about the student. All the positive and good status of the student will immediately be replaced by the exam cheating comments thus damaging the overall reputation of the student among his or her fellow students, family, the community and teachers.

From an academic outlook, cheating in school only makes a fool of oneself. The person involved in cheating is primarily hurting him or herself. This is because lying is a short cut to score high grades, but the truth of the matter is that the individual involved in cheating learns nothing. Mostly, the student will be going to school to pass the time since he or she will not be gaining any relevant instructional information taught in school. Therefore, the learner will be wasting resources, the time of the teacher and most likely get into trouble with the authority.

Besides, going to school is not just tied to scoring good grades. The focus of schooling is learning. Hence, those who involve themselves in cheating only look forward to getting good grades. The significance of academics is for students learning the lesson even if they score lowly since they will be much better than the students involved in cheating and scored high grades (Balázsiová & Balázsi, 2019, p. 41). Cheating students will, therefore, lack knowledge of the subject matter and even though in the long run they will graduate, however, they will be unable to appropriately perform assigned duties in comparison to the students who scored low grades but were able to learn (Berry, 2013, p. 41). Hence, cheating students are incompetent and not well prepared to be hired in the job market.

Living in peace within a society demands equality and fairness. However, individuals engaging in cheating hurt their colleagues. Rules and regulations are set when doing assignments and exams in schools. This is the same in participating in a game such as a football match. Winning the game by compromising the rules is unfair. People who get involved in cheating, therefore, don’t play by the rules of the game. The ensuing effect on the honest students who are members of the society is high levels of frustrations. The honest students feel wasted and unfairly treated owing to the lots of time they dedicate in reading and learning (Cizek & Wollack, 2016, p. 30). More so, cheating students end up receiving undeserved grades and recognition that is otherwise deserved by the honest students.

The main consequence of cheating in school to a person’s career is a high level of career uselessness. Individuals who honestly accomplish their careers feel good since their self-confidence and self-esteem is strongly built. Students who cheat in school openly highlight the fact that they lack trust in their abilities. These students may get high grades, but deep within they are aware that they do not merit for their careers. As a result, they cannot take on work-related responsibilities when hired.

Additionally, cheating in school is a hindrance to career progress. Learning is a progressive process, and basic problems must be learned before complex problems. Failure to learn basic problems by cheating students, therefore, compels them to keep on cheating or go back and cover the unlearned instructions hence compromising career progress (Jones, 2019, p. 37). Thus, every cheating attempt usually denies a student the opportunity to acquire critical learning lessons and skills needed for career development.

In winding up, cheating in school is a wrong behaviour and needs to be stopped. The need to discourage cheating in school is based on its large share of negative consequences spread across people’s future careers, level of trust and credibility, ethics and integrity, societal issues among others. Therefore, by discouraging cheating in schools, society is assured of producing a morally sound, competent, and reliable breed of generation.

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Why Students Cheat and How to Stop It

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B.A., Classics, McGill University

Cheating in schools has reached epidemic proportions. The vast majority of young people (and adults for that matter) believe that cheating is wrong. Yet, by nearly every poll, most young people cheat at least once in their high school career. Why students cheat poses a challenging question for educators and parents. Here are some answers to these questions followed by possible solutions to minimize or eliminate cheating.

Why Students Cheat

Everybody does it: It's disturbing to discover that young people in middle school and high school think that it is acceptable to cheat. But the majority of tests that educators give encourage this behavior. Take multiple-choice tests, for example. They literally invite students to cheat.

Unrealistic academic demands: The public education sector is accountable to the government. State legislatures, state boards of education, local boards of education, unions, and countless other organizations demand action to correct the real and imagined failings of the nation's public education system. As a result, students must take standardized tests so that officials and parents can compare one school system to another nationally and at the state level.

In the classroom, these tests mean that a teacher must achieve the expected results or better, or she will be viewed as ineffective, or worse, incompetent. So instead of teaching students how to think, she teaches them how to pass standardized tests.

The temptation to plagiarize: Years ago cheaters lifted whole passages from an encyclopedia and called them their own. That was plagiarism. Plagiarism's current incarnation is even easier: The students simply points and clicks his way to the website with the relevant information, copies and paste it, reformats it somewhat, and passes it off as his own.

Possible Solutions

Schools need to have zero-tolerance policies concerning cheating. Teachers must be vigilant and alert to all of the newer forms of cheating, particularly electronic cheating. Smartphones and computer tablets are powerful tools for cheating. Fighting the tools that make it tempting to cheat can be challenging, but if the stakeholders are willing to take the necessary steps, they can help reduce cheating.

Teachers: The best solution is to make learning exciting and absorbing. Teachers should make the learning process student-centric. They should allow students to buy into the process and empower them to guide and direct their learning. Teachers can encourage creativity and critical thinking as opposed to rote learning. There are some specific steps teachers can take:

Model integrity, no matter what the cost.
Don't assume young people know why cheating is wrong, both from a personal and corporate perspective.
Enable students to understand the meaning and relevance of an academic lesson.
Foster an academic curriculum that perpetuates real-world applications of knowledge.
Don't force cheating underground—let students know that you understand the pressures and, at least initially, be reasonable in responding to violations.

Parents: Parents have a huge role to play in combating cheating. That's because children mimic almost everything parents do. Parents must set the right sort of example for their children to emulate. Parents must also take a genuine interest in their children's work. They should ask to see everything and anything and discuss everything and anything. An involved parent is a powerful weapon against cheating.

Students: Students must learn to be true to themselves and their own core values. They should not let peer pressure and other influences steal their dreams. Parents and educators should emphasize that if students are caught cheating, there will be serious consequences.

Also, this might seem simplistic, but students need to understand why cheating is wrong. Dr. Thomas Lickona, a developmental psychologist and education professor, defined a few points to emphasize to students about cheating. Lickona says that parents and teachers should explain to students that cheating:

Will lower self-respect because you can never be proud of anything you earned by cheating.
Is a lie because it deceives other people into thinking you know more than you do.
Violates the teacher's trust and undermines the whole trust relationship between the teacher and his class.
Is unfair to all people who aren't cheating.
Will lead to more cheating in other situations later in life—perhaps even in personal relationships.

Foiling Electronic Cheating

When essay topics are generic, there seems to be more opportunity to cheat. By contrast, when the essay topic is specific to class discussions and/or unique to the course's stated goals, it becomes more difficult for students to go to web sources to lift material or download papers.

When the teacher expects the paper's development to follow a step-by-step process that requires students to document their topic, thesis, outline, sources, rough draft, and final draft, there are fewer opportunities to cheat. If there are regular in-class writing assignments, a teacher can come to know the students' writing style, allowing him to recognize plagiarism when it occurs.

There are a few steps teachers can take to combat and prevent plagiarism and other electronic cheating:

Use a plagiarism detection service like Turnitin.com to catch plagiarism.
Forbid the use of smart devices in exam rooms.
Secure the grade program and database.
Look for crib notes anywhere and everywhere.

Teachers need to be vigilant. Trust but verify. They must be aware of the possibilities for cheating which are all around them.

Lickona, Thomas. “ Character Matters: How to Help Our Children Develop Good Judgment, Integrity, and Other Essential Virtues .” Amazon , Simon & Schuster, 2004.
Niels, Gary J. “ Academic Practices, School Culture and Cheating Behavior. " Winchesterthurston.org.
“ NMPLB: Cheating. " FlyLady.net.
“ One Third of Teens Use Cellphones to Cheat in School. ” U.S. News & World Report , U.S. News & World Report.
Sperling, Melanie. “ Cheating: Today's High School Norm? ” Wayland Student Press.
Wallace, Kelly. “ High-Tech Cheating On The Rise At Schools.” CBS News , CBS Interactive, 17 June 2009.

Article edited by Stacy Jagodowski

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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:

Essays About Cheating: Types of cheating

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.

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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Cheating with Cell Phones in School: Challenges and Solutions

Table of contents, the digital dilemma: a new avenue for cheating, the roots of the problem, addressing the issue: strategies and solutions, conclusion: fostering ethical learning environments.

Educational Awareness: Schools can incorporate discussions about academic integrity into the curriculum. By raising awareness about the consequences of cheating and the importance of genuine learning, students can better understand the value of their education.
Secure Assessment Methods: Teachers can develop assessment methods that minimize the potential for cheating. This may involve designing open-ended questions, project-based assessments, and in-class activities that require critical thinking and application of knowledge.
Technology Management: Schools can implement technology management solutions that restrict access to certain websites or applications during exams. Moreover, educating students about the responsible use of technology can empower them to make ethical choices.
Parental Involvement: Parents play a crucial role in instilling values of honesty and integrity in their children. Open communication about the risks and consequences of cheating can discourage such behavior.
Consequences and Accountability: Schools should establish clear consequences for cheating and consistently enforce them. Creating an environment where cheating is not tolerated sends a strong message about the importance of ethical behavior.

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Why Cheating in School is Wrong: 15 Reasons and Consequences

Cheating in School Wrong

In recent times, students have been engaging in cheating, especially in colleges and universities.

However, it is something you should consider not doing. In this guide, we explore all the reasons why cheating in school is wrong and the ethical questions on why you should try to avoid it.

The issue of cheating is diverse, but its main motivation comes from the desire for better grades. There is also a high burden of work.

Students who use our homework help service note that the burden of the assignments is too much. Check our homework help service and learn how to do it better.

However, others earn higher grades and escape the hard work of passing tests fairly. Let us discuss why this could land you in trouble.

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Why Cheating in School is Wrong

1. cheating hampers progress.

The main reason why we learn is usually to build in the future. When we are learning in various institutions, we obtain several basics. These basics are what we apply in the future to solve the problems we encounter.

If you cheat, you will not know these basics. You will have two options. Either to continue cheating or start learning newly. This becomes a stumbling block to any progress you want to make.

Every student, regardless of their study level, should know that when cheating, you are not learning lessons or skills that could be important later in life.

2. Cheating is not Different from Stealing and Lying

The instructor always expects that every piece of work you hand in was completed through your effort.

When you present the work as your own and know that you cheated, that is lying.

By doing this, you will always take credit for the wrong purposes and may feel guilty.

Cheating becomes stealing when you hand in assignments to your instructor as your own and it belongs to someone else or was done by someone else.

3. Cheating is Unfair to Others

When you cheat, you do not deserve any plaudit. You may feel good after cheating and even get a better grade, but your recognition will be unfair.

When you think of it, it is very unfair to cheat in school and get better grades than your fellow students who studied hard and worked to achieve what they have achieved.

The students also feel bad if they notice. They did everything right and you just found a mechanism to surpass them. It is usually very frustrating when you play by the rules and someone just decides to cheat.

4. Cheating causes Stress

Students think that cheating is easy. It is not. The psychological torture you put yourself into can cause stress. When you decide to cheat, you constantly worry about being caught.

Consequences of cheating may land you into must cross your mind. Whether it’s your parents’ reaction or the disciplinary actions of your school. You even come up with a fake story that you will use to cover up for your actions when caught.

You will always feel insecure if you suspect somebody knows about your cheating and might report you to the administration. All these thoughts are too much to hold into and may eventually cause stress.

5. Cheating in school is unfair to you

The pleasure comes from knowing you completed an assignment or a test independently. You will feel good. Lack of confidence is one of the effects of cheating in college, making it feel unfair to yourself.

You will also build self-confidence in every academic work you do and build your self-esteem too. On the other hand, it feels bad to cheat.

In addition, you may score a high grade on your assignment, but deep down, you will know that you do not deserve it.

When you cheat, you doubt your abilities. You will never find out if you can make it on your own.

6. Cheating Becomes a Habit

When you cheat, you will most probably get a high grade. This will always give you the motivation to cheat again and again.

If you start cheating early in your academics, it becomes a habit and will follow you to high school, colleges, universities, and even in your career. It just becomes a part of you and spreads in everything you do in life.

When you become a cheating addict, it is very unlikely that you will know what is acceptable behavior. Cheating is a demonstration that you disregard others.

7. Eventually, Cheating leads to Course Failure

Success is usually hard to achieve but cheating offers a way out. When you cheat, you usually forego the hard work that every learner must be involved in to succeed.

Hard work instills traits in you that are important in the future. These traits include sacrifice, dedication, persistence, diligence, trustworthiness, and honesty.

It is usually very hard to achieve your goals in the future without these traits. When you are caught cheating in an examination, you fail that examination or even get expelled.

At the same time, failure and bad behavior at school may hinder you from getting a good job in the future.

8. Cheating in College kills Trust

Everyone in institutions is opposed to cheating. You will completely ruin people’s trust in you if you are caught cheating.

The number of times doesn’t matter. One incident of cheating ruins trust.

You may opt never to cheat again but it will be very hard to regain your trust.

Everyone will have a hard time trying to trust you. Even when you submit your work to the instructors, they will always be suspicious and check it thoroughly before giving it back to you.

When people who have witnessed you cheating hear about you cheating again, their opinions will always be compromised, even if you are honest.

9. Cheating is Disrespectful

Cheating is a form of disrespect to our instructors. Instructors sacrifice a lot to see their students succeed. They work very hard, spend a lot of time with students, share knowledge with them, and treat students as their children.

Remember that all this effort is put in because they intend to see their students succeed in academics, careers, and life.

When you get involved in cheating, you have disregarded and disrespected all the instructor’s efforts to ensure you succeeded genuinely. Cheating is also disrespecting your fellow students.

10. Cheating is Embarrassing

Have you ever thought of how people will treat you when you get caught cheating? Your actions are always responsible for how those around you treat you.

Cheating expresses you as incompetent, disrespectful, unintelligent, selfish, lazy, and a person who cannot be trusted. You will feel embarrassed when those around you disregard you.

When you cheat, many institutions are likely to expel you. Think of the embarrassment that this can cause you. Cheating instances are always recorded.

Imagine being barred from reporting to a college and returning home because you cheated in your examinations. You will be seriously embarrassed if you cheat on a test.

11. Cheating makes the next Learning step Harder

When you cheat, you don’t learn and understand the basics. When you cheat in an introduction test, you will find it hard to understand the next topic of study.

This will lead you to cheat again. When you cheat in the final examinations at any level of study, you will find it harder to understand even the simplest concepts in the next level.

For example, when you cheat in your senior examinations and you are admitted to a college to do a course, chances are you will not succeed in this course because it will exhaust your capabilities. Unless you decide to cheat again.

12. In higher education, you can be Sued for Cheating

When you get to a college or university, one of the first things your instructors teach you is always to present original work.

Cheating and presenting work that is not yours can land you in trouble. You can be sued in court for cheating on a paper.

You are accused of copyright infringement. Only the owner of the work can accuse you of copyright infringement.

You must pay the owner for using his work without permission if proven guilty.

13. Cheating in school is a ‘Broken Window.’

The broken window theory dictates that petty acts that show disobedience and instances of not being civilized can cause much more serious crimes in the future.

When small crimes go unnoticed and unpunished, it seems no one is watching. Academic cheating can be easily classified as a broken window. When young students get away with academic dishonesty, they may assume that no one cares.

This can easily lead them to accept that no one will notice when they commit a more serious offense because no one cares.

14. Cheating in college undermines learning

Cheating usually disrupts learning. When a student is given an assignment and gives it to another student to do it for him, he will not learn what the instructor intended him to learn from the test.

Normally when exams are near, students are supposed to learn and revise for the exam. When the student knows he will carry a book to the exam room and copy the exam, he will not learn nor revise the topics involved.

At the same time, when cheating is a shortcut to passing an examination, the students disregard learning activities. While getting good grades is one of the reasons why students cheat, it undermines the learning process.

15. Cheating Devalues Diplomas and Degrees

We should not only look at cheating in schools using the students’ perspective alone. Some schools, mostly colleges and universities, help their students cheat in school to gain credibility and rise through the ranks of top institutions.

This becomes very tricky when it becomes known to the public that the institutions cheat. All graduates from these institutions will suffer.

Their degrees and diplomas become less valuable. They can be fired from their current jobs. Unemployed people will also experience difficulties when trying to secure jobs.

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Ethical Questions about Cheating in Colleges

How do non-cheating students perceive it.

Institutions should be concerned about how non-cheating students view cheating. Most students may feel comfortable not reporting those involved in cheating. They see it as normal. Some fear intimidation from others if they report those involved in cheating.

Ethical questions about cheating in colleges

Have Institutions Failed to Enforce Moral Values of Academic Integrity

The importance of curbing academic dishonesty must be considered if all approaches to curb it are to be developed. Morals such as respect, honesty, and self-discipline must be enforced in all institutions.

Are Students Trained in Making Ethical Decisions in Schools?

It is very obvious for a student trained to make ethical decisions to avoid cheating in examinations. Students who tend to cheat will probably engage in misbehavior or make other unethical decisions.

A study on cheating behavior showed that students who cheated in the experimental test are likelier to engage in other behavior that violates school policies. This proves that cheating is part and parcel of moral issues that educational institutions should address.

Institutions should set up seminars to teach students how to make the right decisions and enhance their academic skills.

A Universal Honor Code in Universities and Colleges

We might strive for academic integrity each day of our life but if the disciplinary actions depend on the instructor, we can never progress. Some instructors may favor some students over others.

Some instructors can even be bribed. This means that no action will be taken. The honor code should provide a unison action that is to be taken against anyone involved in cheating in all institutions.

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Cheating in Schools (Essay/Paper Sample)

Table of Contents

Cheating in Schools

“Cheating is an improper action that is not allowed in this class,” one of the common phrases familiar with students in school. This statement is often written either in bold, italics or underlined. Cheating is an improper way mostly ‘shortcuts’ in finding information in particular questions or achieving a specific goal. Moreover, cheating not only refers to leaning over someone else’s’ work to copy them but also associated with any other actions like being completed for assignment by someone else. Students cheat for different types of reasons. Some due to laziness, peer pressure, insufficient study time, and pressure to succeed. Reasons, why people cheat, is not a basic way of handling any cheating encounters since some reasons can be comparative. Besides, despite not identifying the reasons for cheating, this does not justify cheating.

Many students associate plagiarism in their tests because they want to keep their parents and teachers happy. With an increase in their grades, they are congratulated and do not pass through any punishments due to low grades. When one identifies the methods people use on cheating, possibilities of reducing fraud rates can be high. Also, there are different types of fraud. Cheating where an individual copy directly an exam automatically leads to failure of the particularly taken course. To many students, it is often easy to look at someone else’s work. Copying someone else’s work is a very unfair thing where an individual benefit from someone’s effort. Moreover copying someone else’s work is taken into consideration by many students who often lack confidence with their answers. Also, such students often want a confirmation of the correct answer about their answer. In this cases, not enforcing consequences involving punishment tends to make the student develop a feeling that reading is not a must at school. However, the most constructive way of dealing with cheating that entails copying other people’s work is by setting exam paper that has the same topic but different questions.

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In resolving the cheating issue in schools, teachers and administrators are united to reduce and if possible adequately address fraud issues in schools. Banning any use of electronics in school is one way to address fraud issues. Electronic devices are not supposed to be allowed in school. Any scholars found with this devices should be punished severely even by the cancellation of exams or a suspension. Also, teachers should implement particular procedures that will help identify plagiarism during marking. In having this method in place, the rate of copying by students will profoundly reduce. Besides, the national security department should develop measures to protest on test security, fraud detection, and even hold teachers and students responsible in any cases of dishonesty. Through this, teachers will be very keen when checking students before allowing them in exam halls. The students will also take an initiative to report cheating issues among their fellow students. Also, recruiting of parents to help restore academic integrity and support the ethical development of the student’s traits is important. This recruiting provides a basis of parents to nurture their children starting from home. One every student has healthy habits as per the way raisin occurs, they can have a conscience that enables them to know cheating in school is a bad principle. Also, websites used by students to buy papers or borrow them without identifying the original basis should be banned. Any individuals still running the website should be charged as inciters to the breaking of the school rules. These will help students depend on themselves.

In conclusion, cheating in schools is rapidly increasing all over the world. Serious measures should be implemented to help develop responsible and hardworking people. No one should be favored when they break the set standards.

Is Cheating Unethical

This essay about the ethical dilemma of cheating in academia explores the moral consequences and broader societal impacts of dishonest behaviors such as plagiarism and unauthorized collaboration. It argues that cheating undermines fairness, creates distrust within communities, and stunts personal and intellectual growth. The essay highlights the allure of immediate gains from cheating, like better grades or career advancement, but emphasizes that these come at a significant moral cost. It discusses how cheating can degrade education and professional integrity, particularly in fields where professional competence is critical. The piece advocates for a cultural shift towards valuing honesty through honor codes, ethical training, and transparent practices, underscoring that the ethical and societal costs of cheating outweigh any short-term benefits.

How it works

In the realm of academic pursuits and professional endeavors, the issue of cheating is both divisive and complex, stirring heated debates about morality, ethics, and the consequences of such actions. Cheating, whether in the form of plagiarism, test tampering, or unauthorized collaboration, raises fundamental questions about the integrity of individuals and institutions alike. This discussion aims to dissect the ethical implications of cheating and explore the broader impacts it has on society.

Cheating is often perceived as a shortcut to success.

In environments that prize achievement, such as schools and workplaces, the pressure to excel can be intense. This pressure can push individuals towards dishonest behavior as a means to gain an unfair advantage. The immediate benefits of cheating can be alluring: better grades, higher test scores, enhanced resumes, and even career advancements. However, these short-term gains come at a significant moral cost.

The fundamental argument against cheating is that it undermines the principle of fairness. It creates an uneven playing field where the dishonest prosper, often at the expense of the honest. This inequity can erode trust within the community, whether it’s a classroom or a corporate environment. When students or employees feel that success can be dishonestly engineered, cynicism can replace dedication and hard work. This breakdown in trust affects not just the immediate environment but can ripple out to affect societal norms and expectations about fairness and justice.

Moreover, cheating detracts from the intrinsic value of education and professional development. Learning is not merely about acquiring facts or mastering tasks but about developing critical thinking skills, fostering creativity, and growing personal integrity. When individuals cheat, they deny themselves the opportunity to engage deeply with the material, ultimately stunting their intellectual and moral growth. This deprivation is not immediately apparent, making it a subtle yet profound long-term consequence of cheating.

The ethical ramifications of cheating also extend beyond personal and immediate academic or professional consequences. They can perpetuate a cycle of dishonesty that undermines the very foundations of societal trust and accountability. For instance, if a student cheats through college and secures a degree without truly earning it, they enter the professional world ill-prepared, potentially endangering others depending on their field, particularly in professions like engineering, medicine, and law.

Addressing cheating requires a multifaceted approach. Educational institutions and workplaces need to foster environments that emphasize ethical behavior and the long-term benefits of honesty. This can be achieved through comprehensive honor codes, robust ethical training, and a culture that values transparency over achievement. Furthermore, there should be significant consequences for unethical behavior, paired with support systems for those who might feel pressured into cheating.

In conclusion, cheating is unequivocally unethical, not only because it breaches the fundamental principles of fairness, equity, and justice but also because it compromises the cheater’s moral and intellectual development. It poses a danger to society by eroding trust and lowering the standards of integrity essential for the smooth functioning of any community. While the temptation to cheat might be driven by the desire for immediate gain, the ethical, personal, and societal costs far outweigh these fleeting advantages. In the end, fostering a culture that discourages cheating and values honesty is vital for creating a fair and thriving academic and professional environment.

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New Data Reveal How Many Students Are Using AI to Cheat

AI-fueled cheating—and how to stop students from doing it—has become a major concern for educators.

But how prevalent is it? Newly released data from a popular plagiarism-detection company is shedding some light on the problem.

And it may not be as bad as educators think it is.

Of the more than 200 million writing assignments reviewed by Turnitin’s AI detection tool over the past year, some AI use was detected in about 1 out of 10 assignments, while only 3 out of every 100 assignments were generated mostly by AI.

These numbers have not changed much from when Turnitin released data in August of 2023 about the first three months of the use of its detection tool, said the company’s chief product officer, Annie Chechitelli.

“We hit a steady state, and it hasn’t changed dramatically since then,” she said. “There are students who are leaning on AI too much. But it’s not pervasive. It wasn’t this, ‘the sky is falling.’”

The fact that the number of students using AI to complete their schoolwork hasn’t skyrocketed in the past year dovetails with survey findings from Stanford University that were released in December. Researchers there polled students in 40 different high schools and found that the percentage of students who admitted to cheating has remained flat since the advent of ChatGPT and other readily available generative AI tools. For years before the release of ChatGPT, between 60 and 70 percent of students admitted to cheating, and that remained the same in the 2023 surveys, the researchers said.

Turnitin’s latest data release shows that in 11 percent of assignments run through its AI detection tool that at least 20 percent of each assignment had evidence of AI use in the writing. In 3 percent of the assignments, each assignment was made up of 80 percent or more of AI writing, which tracks closely with what the company was seeing just 3 months after it launched its AI detection tool .

Experts warn against fixating on cheating and plagiarism

However, a separate survey of educators has found that AI detection tools are becoming more popular with teachers, a trend that worries some experts.

The survey of middle and high school teachers by the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit focused on technology policy and consumer rights, found that 68 percent have used an AI detection tool, up substantially from the previous year. Teachers also reported in the same survey that students are increasingly getting in trouble for using AI to complete assignments. In the 2023-24 school year, 63 percent of teachers said students had gotten in trouble for being accused of using generative AI in their schoolwork, up from 48 percent last school year.

Close-up stock photograph showing a touchscreen monitor with a woman’s hand looking at responses being asked by an AI chatbot.

Despite scant evidence that AI is fueling a wave in cheating, half of teachers reported in the Center for Democracy and Technology survey that generative AI has made them more distrustful that their students are turning in original work.

Some experts warn that fixating on plagiarism and cheating is the wrong focus.

This creates an environment where students are afraid to talk with their teachers about AI tools because they might get in trouble, said Tara Nattrass, the managing director of innovation and strategy at ISTE+ASCD, a nonprofit that offers content and professional development on educational technology and curriculum.

“We need to reframe the conversation and engage with students around the ways in which AI can support them in their learning and the ways in which it may be detrimental to their learning,” she said in an email to Education Week. “We want students to know that activities like using AI to write essays and pass them off as their own is harmful to their learning while using AI to break down difficult topics to strengthen understanding can help them in their learning.”

Shift the focus to teaching AI literacy, crafting better policies

Students said in the Stanford survey that is generally how they think AI should be used: as an aid to understanding concepts rather than a fancy plagiarism tool.

Nattrass said schools should be teaching AI literacy while including students in drafting clear AI guidelines.

Nattrass also recommends against schools using AI detection tools. They are too unreliable to authenticate students’ work, she said, and false positives can be devastating to individual students and breed a larger environment of mistrust. Some research has found that AI detection tools are especially weak at identifying the original writing of English learners from AI-driven prose.

“Students are using AI and will continue to do so with or without educator guidance,” Nattrass said. “Teaching students about safe and ethical AI use is a part of our responsibility to help them become contributing digital citizens.”

AI detection software actually uses AI to function: these tools are trained on large amounts of machine- and human-created writing so that the software can ideally recognize differences between the two.

Turnitin claims that its AI detector is 99 percent accurate at determining whether a document was written with AI, specifically ChatGPT, as long as the document was composed with at least 20 percent of AI writing, according to the company’s website.

Chechitelli pointed out that no detector or test—whether it’s a fire alarm or medical test—is 100 percent accurate.

While she said teachers should not rely solely on AI detectors to determine if a student is using AI to cheat, she makes the case that detection tools can provide teachers with valuable data.

“It is not definitive proof,” she said. “It’s a signal that taken with other signals can be used to start a conversation with a student.”

As educators become more comfortable with generative AI, Chechitelli said she predicts the focus will shift from detection to transparency: how should students cite or communicate the ways they’ve used AI? When should educators encourage students to use AI in assignments? And do schools have clear policies around AI use and what, exactly, constitutes plagiarism or cheating?

“What the feedback we’re hearing now from students is: ‘I’m gonna use it. I would love a little bit more guidance on how and when so I don’t get in trouble,” but still use it to learn, Chechitelli said.

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

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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OCSB to begin testing AI in classrooms

Lessons to warn students about stereotypes, fake facts in ai-generated content.

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The Ottawa Catholic School Board (OCSB) will start teaching students about the potential benefits and risks of generative artificial intelligence as early as this fall.

The OCSB has spent the last year testing AI tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini, which let users generate images or responses to text-based requests.

At a meeting on April 23, the board's director of education Tom D'Amico presented guidelines for the implementation of AI in all OCSB classrooms, describing the technology in revolutionary terms.

"I think it really should be equated to when the internet came in, or when electricity came in," D'Amico said. "It has the potential to support and impact every single student and staff member in our board if we do it right."

OCSB staff could use AI to draft emails or newsletters, scan YouTube videos for use in class, or quickly create first drafts for quizzes, D'Amico said. He believes that's only the beginning.

Promotes accessibility, but reinforces stereotypes

D'Amico said AI could also help make classes more accessible and inclusive.

Translation programs could help teachers communicate with second-language learners and their parents. AI that supports text-to-speech could also make reading easier for students with "physical or other challenges."

"Those students … can participate in the learning process when they're not just relying on text-based teaching and learning," he said.

We need to make sure our educators can teach that AI literacy so students can identify bias. - Tom D'Amico, OCSB

But artificial intelligence can just as easily reinforce harmful stereotypes . In 2021, researchers at Stanford University in California and McMaster University in Hamilton asked ChatGPT to generate text about Muslims. It used words such as "violence" and "shooting" 66 out of 100 times, far more often than in text generated about Christians or Jews.

D'Amico sees this as an opportunity to help students develop critical thinking skills around digital content and social issues.

"We know there's structural racism in our institutions, and that bias is going to come out" in AI content, D'Amico said. "We need to make sure our educators can teach that AI literacy so students can identify bias."

Omer Livvarcin, a University of Ottawa business professor writing a book about ethical AI use for non-profit organizations, said this is a good first step. He said a teacher's best response when encountering discriminatory content is to explain that AI makes mistakes.

"It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, the teachers must be prepared," Livvarcin said. "They need to establish a mindset foundation that AI is just a decision support tool."

Plagiarism and cheating with AI

For the past two years, educators in Ontario and elsewhere have been concerned about the potential for AI to make cheating easier .

The Simcoe County District School Board changed its cheating and plagiarism guidelines in March 2023 to prohibit AI-generated content. The Peel District School Board formed an AI steering committee in November 2023 to monitor the technology's impact on education and plagiarism.

Man in a white collared shirt and blue tie looks at the camera

D'Amico said he shares this concern, which is why OCSB media literacy lessons will encourage students to use AI for feedback on assignments rather than generating entire essays.

"If you go home and you happen to have a family member, whether it's a sibling or a parent, that can edit your work ... most educators would see that as a positive use of your resources. We want to see that same approach with AI," he said.

Ksenia Yadav, a Carleton University adjunct professor of engineering who works with emerging technology such as AI, said there's likely "a fair bit" of AI-supported cheating, but there isn't enough data to support the claim. She said AI tools made to detect plagiarism in essays are unreliable, so educators need to innovate when evaluating students.

"Perhaps doing stuff without the use of technology in the classroom, or relying on the analytical skills of our students," she suggested.

Markus Domenico, vice-chair of the Toronto Catholic District School Board, said he believes many Ontario educators don't understand how AI is used to cheat. During a February board meeting, he called on the province to establish a strategy for AI use in education.

"But we need to move quickly," he warned. "It's here, it's present, and it's both good and bad. Let's deal with it."

D'Amico said the OCSB will distribute an AI toolkit to staff over the summer. It's also preparing a website with AI resources for parents that should be ready by the end of the year.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Zenith Wolfe is a digital reporter and photographer based in Ottawa. He’s previously written for Cottage Life, Ottawa Business Journal and La Scena Musicale. You can reach him at [email protected].

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Q&A: Georgia Tech dean details why the school needed a new AI supercomputer

Georgia tech partnered with nvidia to roll out its first supercomputer so students can experiment with ai and machine learning to better prepare for a job market where those skills are now critical to success..

Like many universities, Georgia Tech has been grappling with how to offer students the training they need to prepare them for a recent sea change in IT job markets — the arrival of generative AI (genAI).

Through a partnership with chipmaker Nvidia, Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering built a supercomputer dubbed AI Makerspace ; it uses 20 Nvidia HGX H100 servers powered by 160 Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs (graphics processing units).

Those GPUs are powerful — a single Nvidia H100 GPU would need just one second to handle a multiplication operation that would take the school’s 50,000 students 22 years to achieve. So, 160 of those GPUs give students and professors access to advanced genAI, AI and machine learning creation and training. (The move also spurred Georgia Tech to offer new AI-focused courses and minors.

Announced two weeks ago, the AI Makerspace supercomputer will initially be used by Georgia Tech’s engineering undergraduates. But it’s expected to eventually democratize access to computing resources typically prioritized for research across all colleges.

Computerworld spoke with Matthieu Bloch , the associate dean for academics at Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering, about how the new AI supercomputer will be used to train a new generation of AI experts.

The following are excerpts from that interview:

Tell me about the Makerspace project and how it came to be ? “The Makerspace is really the vision of our dean, Raheem Beyah, and the school chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Arijit Raychowdhury, who really wanted to put AI in the hands of our students.

“In 2024 — in the post ChatGPT world — things are very different from the pre-ChatGPT world. We need a lot of computing power to do anything that’s meaningful and relevant to industry. And in a way, the devil is out of the box. People see what AI can do. But I think to get to that level of training, you need infrastructure.

Makerspace’s Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs

Georgia Tech College of Engineering

“The name Makerspace also comes from this culture we have at Georgia Tech of these maker spaces, which are places where our students get to tinker, both within the classroom and outside the classroom. The Makerspace was the idea to bring the tools that you need to do AI in a way that’s relevant to do meaningful things today. So, right now, where we’re at is we’ve partnered Nvidia to essentially offer to students a supercomputer. I mean, that’s what it is.

“What makes it unique is that it’s meant for supporting students. And right now it’s in the classroom. We’re still rolling it out. We’re in phase one. So, the idea is that the students in the classroom can work on AI projects that are meaningful to industry — problems that are interesting, you know, from a pedagogical perspective, but they don’t mean a whole lot in an industry setting.”

Tell me a bit about the projects they’ve been working on with this . “I can give you a very concrete example. ChatGPT is a very typical, a very specific form of AI called generative AI. You know, it’s able to generate. In the case of ChatGPT, [that means] text in response to prompts. You might have seen a generative model that generates pictures. I think these were very popular and whatnot. And so these are the kind of things our students can do right now, …generate anything that would be, say, photo realistic.

“You need a pretty hefty computing power to train your model and then test that it’s working properly. And so that’s what our students can do. Just to give you an idea of how far we’ve come along, before we had the AI Makerspace, our students were relying largely on something called Google CoLab . CoLab is Google making some compute resources freely accessible for use. They’re really giving to us the resources they don’t use or don’t sell to their be clients. So it’s like the crumbs that remain.

“It’s very nice of them [Google] to do that, but you could only work with very [limited resources], say for training on something like 12,000 images. Now you can, for instance, train a generative model on a data set with like one million images. So you can really scale up by orders of magnitude. And then you can start generating these photo-realistic pictures that you could not generate before. That’s the most visual example I can give you.”

Can you tell me a little bit about the genAI projects the students are working on? How good is the technology at producing the results they want? “It’s a complicated question to answer. I mean, it has many layers. We’ve just launched it, like literally, the AI Makerspace was open officially two weeks ago. So right now it’s really used at scale in the classroom. The students in that class are learning how to do machine learning. [The students] have to get the data. [They] have to learn how to train a model. The students have homework projects, which consists of this fairly sophisticated model that they have to train, and that they have to test.

“Now we have a vision beyond that, what we call phase two of the Makerspace. We’re doubling the compute capacity. The idea now is that we’re going to open that to senior design projects. We’re gonna open that to something we call vertically integrated projects, in which are students essentially doing long-term research with faculty advisors over multiple years. Our students are going to do many things — certainly all of [the] engineering [school].

“We’ve given incentives to a lot of faculty to create a lot of new courses throughout the College of Engineering for AI and ML for what matters to their field. For instance, if you’re an electrical engineer, there’s a lot of hardware to it, you know you have a model for that. How do you make the model smaller so that you can put it in hardware? That’s one very tangible question that the students would ask. But if they’re, say, mechanical engineers, they might use it differently. Maybe for them what generative AI could do is help them generate 3D models, think about structures that they would not think about naturally. And you can decline that model. The Makerspace is a massive tool. But how the tool is used is really a function of the specific domain. The goal, of course, is for Makerspace to be available beyond engineering.

“It’s already being used by our College of Computing, and we’re hoping that our co colleagues in, say, the College of Business will see the value, because they haven’t used AI yet — perhaps for financial models, predicting whether to sell or buy a stock. I think the sky is a limit. There’s no one use of AI through Makerspace. It’s an infrastructure that provides the tools. And then these tools find declinations in all different areas of expertise.”

Why is it important to have this technology at the school for students to learn about AI? “ The way we’ve come to articulate this is as follows: We’re not deliverers in doomsday scenarios, where AI is going to generate terminators that are going to eradicate humanity. Okay, that’s not how we’re thinking about it.

“AI is definitely going to change things. And we think that AI is certainly going to displace a few people. I think the humans enhanced by AI will start displacing humans who don’t use AI.

“I think the way a lot of the discussion has been shaped since ChatGPT was released to the world, in universities there’s sometimes a lot of fear. Are students cheating on their essays? Are students cheating on this cheating on that? I had these discussions with my colleagues in computing. We have an intro to computing class, where they’re cheating to write their code, which I think is not the right approach to it. But, the devil is out of the box. It’s a tool that’s here, and we have to learn how to use it.

“If I can give you my best analogy: I drive my car. I don’t know how my car really works. I mean, I was never a mechanical or electrical engineer. I sort of know what it takes [for a car to run], but I’m unable to fix it. But that doesn’t mean I can’t drive it. And I think we’re at that stage with AI tools, where one needs to know how to use them because you don’t want to be the person riding a bicycle when everybody else has a car.

“Not everyone needs to be a mechanic, but everyone needs a car. And so I think we want every student at Georgia Tech to know how to use AI, and what that means for them would be different depending on their specialty, their major. But these are tools, and you need to have played with them to really start mastering them.”

In what way has AI expanded Georgia Tech’s curriculum? “We were lucky in the sense that [we’re] building that infrastructure from new. But thinking about AI, Georgia Tech has been doing it for decades. Our faculty is very research focused. They do state-of-the-art research and AI…was always there in the background — the roots of AI. We had a lot of colleagues who actually were doing machine learning without saying it in these terms.

“Then when deep learning started appearing, people were ready to grasp that. So, we were already thinking about doing it in the labs, and the integration in the curriculum was already slowly happening. And so what we decided to do was to accelerate that so the Makerspace…accelerates the other mechanisms we’ve had to give incentives to faculty, to rethink the curriculum with AI and Ml in mind.”

So what AI courses have you launched? “I can give you two examples that we’ve launched, which are, you know, very new. But I I think I’ve been quite successful already. One is we’ve officially launched an AI minor.

“The great thing about this AI minor [is that it] is a way for students to take a series of courses with a coherent and unified team, and they get credit for that on their diploma and their transcript. This minor was designed as a collaboration right now between the College of Engineering and the College of Liberal Arts.

“Then we have the ethics and policy piece. Students need to take a specially designed course on AI Ethics and AI policy. We’re thinking very holistically. AI is a technology play, but if you just train engineers to do the technology piece alone, maybe then the doomsday-Terminator scenario is a likely outcome.

“We want our students to think about the use of AI because it’s technology that can have many uses [and problems associated with it]. We talk about deep fakes. We’re worried about it for all sorts of political reasons.

“The other thing we’ve done in the College of Engineering is essentially incentivized faculty to create new undergraduate courses related to AI and ML but relevant to their own disciplines. I literally [just made the announcement] and the has college approved 10 new courses or significantly revamped courses. So, what that means is that we have courses on machine learning for smart cities, civil environmental engineering, and a course in chemical processes in chemical and bioengineering, where they’re using AI and ML for completely different things. That’s how we’re thinking of AI. It’s a tool. So the courses need to embrace that tool.”

Are students already using genAI to assist in creating applications — so software engineering and development? “Officially or unofficially? I don’t have a good answer, because the truth is, I don’t know. But what I know is that our students are using it with or without us. You know they are using generative AI because I’m willing to bet they all have a subscription to ChatGPT.

“Now in the context of the Makerspace, this is a resource you can start doing all sorts of things. Our students are using it to write lines of code absolutely.”

So what would you say is the most popular use right now of the AI Makerspace ? “We haven’t officially launched it at scale for very long, so I can’t attest to that. It’s been used largely in the classroom setting for the kind of homework students could not even dream of doing before.

“We’re going to launch it and use it over the summer for an entrepreneurship program called Create X, that students can use to take ideas and go through prototype and potentially think about building startups out of these. So that’s going to be primary use over the summer, and we’re testing it over these few weeks in the context of a hackathon in partnership with Nvidia, where teams come with big problems that they want to solve. And we want to accelerate their science, to use Nvidia’s words, to by teaching them how to use that Makerspace.”

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Guest Essay

I Was an Attorney at the D.A.’s Office. This Is What the Trump Case Is Really About.

In a black-and-white image, a scene of people gathered outside a courthouse in Manhattan.

By Rebecca Roiphe

Ms. Roiphe is a former assistant district attorney in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

Now that the lawyers are laying out their respective theories of the case in the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump in New York, it would be understandable if people’s heads are spinning. The defense lawyers claimed this is a case about hush money as a legitimate tool in democratic elections, while the prosecutors insisted it is about “a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election.”

Yet this case is not really about election interference, nor is it a politically motivated attempt to criminalize a benign personal deal. Boring as it may sound, it is a case about business integrity.

It’s not surprising that the lawyers on both sides are trying to make this about something sexier. This is a narrative device used to make the jurors and the public side with them, but it has also created confusion. On the one hand, some legal experts claim that the conduct charged in New York was the original election interference. On the other hand, some critics think the criminal case is a witch hunt, and others claim it is trivial at best and at worst the product of selective prosecution.

As someone who worked in the Manhattan district attorney’s office and enforced the laws that Mr. Trump is accused of violating, I stand firmly in neither camp. It is an important and straightforward case, albeit workmanlike and unglamorous. In time, after the smoke created by lawyers has cleared, it will be easy to see why the prosecution is both solid and legitimate.

It would hardly make for a dramatic opening statement or cable news sound bite, but the case is about preventing wealthy people from using their businesses to commit crimes and hide from accountability. Manhattan prosecutors have long considered it their province to ensure the integrity of the financial markets. As Robert Morgenthau, a former Manhattan district attorney, liked to say , “You cannot prosecute crime in the streets without prosecuting crime in the suites.”

Lawmakers in New York, the financial capital of the world, consider access to markets and industry in New York a privilege for businesspeople. It is a felony to abuse that privilege by doctoring records to commit or conceal crimes, even if the businessman never accomplishes the goal and even if the false records never see the light of day. The idea is that an organization’s records should reflect an honest accounting. It is not a crime to make a mistake, but lying is a different story. It is easy to evade accountability by turning a business into a cover, providing a false trail for whichever regulator might care to look. The law ( falsification of business records ) deprives wealthy, powerful businessmen of the ability to do so with impunity, at least when they’re conducting business in the city.

Prosecutors and New York courts have interpreted this law generously, with its general purpose in mind. The element of intent to defraud carries a broad meaning, which is not limited to the intent of cheating someone out of money or property. Further, intent is often proved with circumstantial evidence, as is common in white-collar cases. After presenting evidence, prosecutors ask jurors to use their common sense to infer what the possible intent may be, and New York jurors frequently conclude that a defendant must have gone to the trouble of creating this false paper trail for a reason.

Mr. Trump is accused of creating 11 false invoices, 12 false ledger entries and 11 false checks and check stubs, with the intent to violate federal election laws, state election laws or state tax laws. The number of lies it took to create this false record itself helps prove intent. His defense attorneys will claim that he was merely trying to bury a false story to protect his family from embarrassment. The timing of the payments — immediately after the potentially damaging “Access Hollywood” tape was released and right before the election — makes that claim implausible.

As many have pointed out, Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, is a witness with a remarkable amount of baggage. But as with most business records cases, his testimony will largely add color to the tweets, handwritten notes, bank documents and shell corporations. Documents don’t lie.

More important, jurors are particularly good at applying common sense. Mr. Trump didn’t go to all this trouble just to protect his family members, who might have known about accusations of his involvement with the porn star Stormy Daniels or similar ones. We may never learn which crime the jurors believe Trump was seeking to commit or cover up, but they can still conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that this was his intent.

It is not unusual for lawyers to give narrative arcs to their legal theories, reasons to care about the evidence and animating thoughts that may make jurors more inclined to convict or acquit.

When the jurors deliberate, they will weigh the warring narratives in light of the evidence, and the judge will instruct them in the law. Then the narrative frames should recede into the background. The key is to offer one that is both captivating and closely tied to the facts so that when the jurors put the pieces of evidence together, it is the story they believe.

If one side promises too much, it risks losing the jurors. In their opening remarks, Mr. Trump’s lawyers insisted that he was innocent, that all the witnesses were liars. Such a sweeping theory is a dangerous strategy because if the jurors believe part of the prosecution’s case, just one or two of the witnesses, then the jurors may lose faith in the defense altogether.

For the prosecution, the elements of the crime in this case do not require a finding that Mr. Trump interfered with the 2016 election. Nor does it matter whether he had sex with Ms. Daniels. Instead, the real elements concern the way Mr. Trump used his business for a cover-up. By emphasizing the crime he was intending to conceal rather than the false business records, the prosecution also risks confusing the jury into thinking about whether the lies affected the election. It might lead them to wonder why Mr. Trump wasn’t charged with this alleged election crime by the federal government — a talking point that he has promoted publicly.

Even if the case seems simpler in this light, we are still left with the question: Is it really worth charging a former president for this? While the New York business records law is important, it is no doubt true that the conduct pales in comparison with the effort to overthrow the 2020 election, at issue in the special counsel Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 prosecution of Mr. Trump.

Taking this case on its own terms as a business records case offers a different and arguably more convincing way to defend its legitimacy. It is a simple case that is similar to hundreds of other cases brought in New York. The simplicity and run-of-the-mill nature of the prosecution make it easier to defend against claims of politicization in the following sense: Mr. Trump was a businessman for many years in New York long before he was president. If others would be prosecuted for this conduct and no man is above the law, then he should be, too.

So by all means, listen to the stories that the lawyers tell, soak up the drama of hush-money payments and the alternate universe in which Hillary Clinton won the election. But just as the jurors should ultimately consider the facts and the law, it would be wise for everyone else to focus on what the case is really about.

Rebecca Roiphe, a former assistant district attorney in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, is a law professor at New York Law School.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

COMMENTS

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Cause and Effect of Cheating in School Free Essay Example
The choices you make can follow you the rest of your life. Cheating is an issue that affects many students at one time or another throughout their education. There are many different ways to cheat: copying homework, looking over at a peers test, plagiarizing, and so on. Nothing good comes from cheating your way through school, the only person ...
Cheating In School Essay
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 ...
OCSB to begin testing AI in classrooms
The Simcoe County District School Board changed its cheating and plagiarism guidelines in March 2023 to prohibit AI-generated content. ... She said AI tools made to detect plagiarism in essays are ...
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Those GPUs are powerful — a single Nvidia H100 GPU would need just one second to handle a multiplication operation that would take the school's 50,000 students 22 years to achieve.
Opinion
Guest Essay. I Was an Attorney at the D.A.'s Office. ... which is not limited to the intent of cheating someone out of money or property. Further, intent is often proved with circumstantial ...

Cheating is Bad in School

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This Is What Happens When You Cheat in School

Common reasons students cheat

“I want to get the grade, not the education”

“If I cheat, I’m only affecting myself”

“My teacher isn’t any good, so it’s okay if I cheat to get by in that class”

Consequences of cheating in school

Cheating in high school

When applying to colleges

Cheating in college

Alternatives to cheating

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Why Cheating in School is Wrong: 15 Reasons and Consequences

Why Cheating in School is Wrong

2. Cheating is not Different from Stealing and Lying

3. Cheating is Unfair to Others

4. Cheating causes Stress

5. Cheating in school is unfair to you

6. Cheating Becomes a Habit

7. Eventually, Cheating leads to Course Failure

8. Cheating in College kills Trust

9. Cheating is Disrespectful

10. Cheating is Embarrassing

11. Cheating makes the next Learning step Harder

12. In higher education, you can be Sued for Cheating

13. Cheating in school is a ‘Broken Window.’

14. Cheating in college undermines learning

15. Cheating Devalues Diplomas and Degrees

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Cheating in Schools (Essay/Paper Sample)

Cheating in Schools