According to a University of Nebraska at Lincoln study, the vast majority of high school students cheat on both tests and homework assignments. The results of their study indicate that 87 percent of high school kids admitted they had looked at someone else's answers during a test, and 74 percent admitted to sharing their answers with someone else. An additional 70 percent admitted that they had provided test questions to other students who had not yet taken the test, 91 percent had done their homework with a partner, and 53 percent had based a report on a movie instead of reading the book.
New Types of School Cheating
However, the examples of school cheating mentioned above may be just the tip of the iceberg. This author sometimes answers questions on a site called WebAnswers.com. This site allows people to ask all the questions they want, any time of day, and other people will do the research and provide the questioners with answers. Often these questions deal with subjects such as relationship advice, product recommendations or travel information. However, frequently the questions sound like test questions or homework questions. While this author prefers not to answer those questions, other researchers on the site do answer them. Smart phones make it possible for students to log onto sites like WebAnswers while they are in a classroom taking a test. Home computers make it easy for them to enter questions into the website when they are home doing their homework. Either way, they avoid doing any research themselves. They sit back and let someone else do the work.
Computer technology has also made it easier for students to get other types of unauthorized help with their grades. They can find pre-written reports online, which they quickly are able to modify and reuse. Some students are even more direct in their attempts to improve their grades. A few years ago a student in Newport Beach, California stole the password belonging to one of his teachers. He logged into the computer system for the school district and changed his own semester grades, as well as the semester grades for several of his friends. The local newpaper reported that he might have gotten away with changing his own grades, but got caught because so many grades were changed at one time.
Even when grades are not involved, high school students are cheating in order to pass state standardized tests. Last spring, while some students were still taking the California state exams, photos of many pages of the test booklet were spreading around Facebook like wildfire. Undoubtedly, a few students had taken the photos with their cell phones. The same pattern of cheating was discovered in June, 2012 at pretigious Stuyvesant High School in New York City when seventy students were implicated in a scandal that involved using their cell phones to photograph the New York State Regents exams while they were taking them.
High School students were also involved in an SAT cheating scandal on Long Island. Some students were hiring other students to take the SAT exams for them. The test takers used fake ID's to sit for the exam, and earned a significant amount of money by taking the exam repeatedly.
How to Prevent School Cheating
Many teachers still use the traditional methods to stop students from cheating. They spread children apart in the classroom and often use more than one version of the test. These methods do stop some common ways of cheating, such as looking at someone else's answers on a test.
However, high school students are becoming more creative, and these methods are not adequate. Schools need to have students check their cell phones at the classroom door if they really want to prevent cheating. Any cell phone in a classroom is an opportunity to cheat.
In addition, when students are taking exams that are proctored by people who may not know them, the students need to present photo I.D.'s, and may even need to be fingerprinted in order to take major exams such as the SAT. This may seem excessive, but it could be the only way to prevent some types of academic dishonesty.
Teachers may also want to put more weight on work that is completed entirely in the classroom. For example, essays, journals, quizes, papers, lab reports and math calculations performed in front of the teacher may need to carry more weight than assignments and projects that are completed outside the classroom.
Teachers also need to discuss with students exactly what it means to cheat. Students need to understand that it is cheating if they give answers to another student; it is cheating if they share their homework with others; it is cheating if they photograph a test; it is cheating if they use a website to get an answer during a test or while they are doing homework.
Many educators refer to high school cheating as an epidemic. Allowing students to cheat without penalty is not fair to those students who work hard and choose not to cheat. Schools need to take a much more proactive approach to preventing cheaters from succeeding in the classroom.
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You are reading from the blog: http://lies-and-liars.blogspot.com
Photo of teenager courtesy of www.morguefile.com
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