Succeed
at All Costs
Success. A word we are all very familiar with but most find challenging to define.
Success can be an accomplishment. Some find success as a measurement of
material goods. Success can even simply be not failing. For generations, Americans have been striving for success, but at what cost? Many students have it ingrained in them to succeed at all costs.
Is this fair? Can we really expect this out of every living human being? Apparently some students feel that it is, and if they are not able to succeed at the
standards they, their parents, teachers, or even society have set, they are failures.
It is in this mindset that many children go to the extreme to “succeed” by cheating.
Cheating within a classroom
setting can be defined as a behavior that creates an unfair advantage for a particular student [1]. Initially students feel that they are helping themselves out by cheating on a test; however, there are
certain standards that must be met before a student can continue with his or her education or concepts he or she must be able
to employ before taking on certain careers. Cheating on a test may help the student
get a good grade or pass the class initially. In the long run, though, it does
neither the teacher, future employers, nor the student any good at determining whether or not the student completely understands
the material, and therefore, perform future tasks.
Many different forms of academic
cheating currently exist. There are the traditional forms of talking during the
test, passing notes, looking off someone else’s paper, and writing answers on a piece of paper, an arm, a leg, or the
brim of a hat. Recently, technology has been providing more of a challenge by
allowing students to use camera phones to take pictures of tests. Two-way pagers
can be used to get answers from students outside of the classroom. Tiny computers
that look like PDAs can be used to access wireless internet to find answers on the internet at any time. Other forms of cheating include turning in other people’s essays or term papers. This has also been made a lot easier with the increasing use of the internet. Students can simply surf the net for the perfect term paper or pay to have someone write a completely new
paper for them.
All of these forms of cheating
allow a student to pass on answers or ideas that they were unable to produce in order to pass the classroom standards. The use of many of these technological advances allow children that can afford the
fancy tools to succeed while others are not able to use these kinds of resources on tests or term papers. Returning to the definition of cheating, this then gives those students that have the “resources”
an unfair advantage to succeed. They will in turn receive the scholarships, college
admission, and possibly the higher paying job in the long run. Therefore, cheating
at all levels of education needs to be halted so that all children have a fair advantage of receiving a proper education and
decent job.
Cheating
on the Rise
Cheating on all educational
levels has been increasing over the last decade with much more controversy yet to come.
Professor Donald McCabe, of Rutgers University,
performed a report for The Center for Academic Integrity in 2005. Of the 60 colleges
that he surveyed, 70% of the students admitted to some form of cheating within the past year.
At the high school level, McCabe found that 70% of 18,000 students said they had performed a serious act of cheating
on a test [2]. Both of these statistics suggest that cheating is high, but we
can also imply that cheating is not going to stop anytime soon. Unfortunately,
these same high school students will probably graduate from high school without ever being caught, at which time they will
go off to college and continue to cheat. According to another poll performed
by Who’s Who Among High School Students in 1998, 80% of high school students had cheated at one time or another. What is more surprising is the fact that 53% of them did not feel as though cheating
was ethically wrong [3].
Preparing
for the Future
ABC news posted one of their
news reports in which Primetime’s Charles Gibson interviewed many different students across the country. A highly recognized student at Northeast
College says, “The world is terrible. People will take other people’s materials and pass it on as theirs.
I’m numb to it already. I’ll cheat to get by.”[4] This
student isn’t just talking about getting by at school; he also refers to “getting by” in life. Students are willing to take shortcuts in school because they feel that they aren’t really learning
what future career men and women are supposed to do in the job setting. Instead,
they are learning how to work the system for the rest of their life.
Unfortunately, there is some
truth to that. If you look back over the course of the last ten years or so,
you may be able to come up with a variety of instances that involved somebody stealing or lying in order to get ahead in their
career or personal life, for example, Enron or Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Students
that cheat in high school or college are simply preparing for life. But does
that make cheating any less wrong?
Schools
are in the Wrong
One particular website, called
nobleCheater.tk, says, “Just because you cheat in school doesn’t mean you can’t still be a noble or good
person. Cheating is just one way of getting by without spending lots of time
on things that are pretty unnecessary for the most part.”[5] This website
is full of hints on how to cheat the school system. The author gives suggestions
for how to make and hide notes when taking tests. He has also provided a web
search for essays. Many students spend hours slowly searching the vast number
of websites that write term papers for a fee or even give you pre-written papers for free, such as www.cheathouse.com, www.termpapergenie.com, or www.freeonlineresearchpapers.com. Instead, this author has an engine devised to
search them all at one time; this saves a cheater a lot of valuable time. The
author even makes a bold suggestion to be nice to the professor (almost suck up to them) so that they will “give you
good grades, without you having to work for them.”
Sometimes there are those
teachers that you can’t be nice to and just get a good grade. Sometimes
you get a teacher that no matter what you do, how hard you study, or what kind of ideas you come up with, you will never get
a “good” grade. What if that teacher was notorious for never giving
A’s or putting questions on the test that had to do with what was being tested?
Is it acceptable to cheat on their test? “In instances like this,
cheating is almost necessary,” says www.phonydiploma.com. The website, like the one above, says that teachers
are in the wrong for challenging students so much and offers many different cheating techniques. However, if you look at the name of the website, it is hard to think that they have any morals toward an
honest education!
Are Teachers
in the Wrong?
Are teachers really wrong for challenging students and “driving them to cheat?” There are some teachers out there that require ridiculous amounts of time spent on memorization and time
consuming projects. However, I feel that the main goal of an education system
should be to challenge students to an extent that they can comprehend the material that is being presented. Education should also offer an opportunity for students to learn with one another. Without socialization within the classroom students would not know how to act out in “the real world.”
The government has tried to find ways to measure both of these concepts through the development of state and national standards. Teachers must prove that students are capable of passing certain standards before
they are given certain grades. It is not the teacher’s fault for covering
some of the material or giving some of the tests. They are required. Therefore, students must learn to comply with these standards just like they will have to comply with certain
rules with any given career field.
Teachers have the opportunity
to help students honestly achieve mastery of these standards. I have personally
experienced the teachers that give you homework for the sake of giving you something to do.
As students we question if the teacher realizes we have a full course load, jobs, extra-curricular activities, etc.
on top of their class. It is with these teachers that cheaters don’t feel
so bad about being dishonest on projects and tests.
There are also teachers out there that strive to make sure students do only the necessary work to make sure they comprehend
the material. These teachers go to great lengths to make sure students experience
hands on activities that provide the student with more than enough time and opportunities to learn the material being taught. In this situation, students may have a harder time cheating.
Unfortunately, there are still a large number of students that believe cheating is acceptable because it is all around
them. Other students cheat to get scholarships, college admission, or the perfect
job. These students got their success through dishonesty. Their success truly isn’t success. They did not earn
their happiness or acknowledgement. It is for this reason that cheating must
be stopped.
Is it
Possible to Stop Cheating?
Teachers are trying their hardest to stop cheating within the school. They
use all the standard methods of rearranging test questions, separating students, not allowing talking during tests, etc.,
but this is not enough. Technological advances provide a new challenge for teachers. There are so many different methods of cheating, it seems impossible to tackle this
never ending problem.
Many schools are installing stricter punishments for getting caught cheating, but what happens when the student never
gets caught? They go through life thinking that it is morally acceptable to cheat
as long as they are never caught. Others schools are taking a much different
approach. Instead, they are trying to teach students some form of moral conduct. In fact, many universities, such as Harvard, are trying to introduce Honor Codes. These Honor Codes will hopefully teach students to be more responsible about submitting
their own work.
I think honor codes are a great idea, but they need to be introduced to students at a much younger level. If students realize they can cheat early and get away with it, it will be much harder to stop them at the
college level. Instead, elementary and junior high students need to be taught
about dishonesty, plagiarism, stealing of tests and ideas, and, overall, their responsibility as a student. Then, by the time they get to high school and college where high stake grades and tests are found, students
will act responsibly and with the utmost honesty.
Another simple solution lays in the teachers’ hands. Teachers have
the ability to transform their classroom from a boring, “why do we have to do this” type of classroom into one
that students dread leaving because they want to find out what happens at the end of the book or how long it would take to
travel to next galaxy. Teachers have the ability to motivate children to learn;
this ability needs to be taken advantage of. Then, maybe students will take pride
in the grades they honestly earned and stray away from the possibility of cheating to succeed.
Conclusion
Cheating is not something
new; it has always been a problem no matter what part of life you are talking about.
However, with new technology available, cheating has reached an all time high with little or no regrets by those who
cheat. Unfortunately, cheaters do not see the impact that dishonesty can have
on performing future tasks. It is for this reason that we must instill honesty
and integrity in our students so that everyone is rewarded properly for the knowledge and tasks they are able to perform. By doing this, we can ensure that all students have the opportunity to achieve academic
success. Success that can be clearly defined by accomplishments attained through
honesty.
World
Wide Web Evaluated Websites
The following are websites that I used to attain many of the different resources and opinions for this paper. Following the evaluations are also citations of articles used for statistics and quotes
found within the paper.
http://www.phonydiploma.com/articles/index.html is a link to a variety of articles surrounding education as it has changed throughout the years.
If I were doing a full research paper, I would not use this site as it is not really credible. It does have some very interesting
opinions surrounding the importance of education particularly implying that cheating, especially getting a fake diploma or
learning how to work the system through cheating techniques, is a part of life.
http://www.noblecheater.tk/ is another link to a not so credible source. There were no names or dates available. However,
I found it very a pretty good site that helped students to come up with new ways of cheating on tests, providing essay searches,
and even an explanation as to why students cheat. The site is fairly easy to navigate, but I found that since it has recently
moved, not all of the links are working correctly. Once again, this is purely an opinion page that holds little to no credibility.
http://www.gradebook.org/Cheating.htm is part of a website called The Classroom. It is a well recognized website that provides a variety of links for teachers. Teachers can go here for information and lesson plans within their content area, free grade books, bulletin
boards, etc. It also provides links for students and parents within certain educational
areas. This website provided a variety of resources that I used to get a great
deal of information and opinions from, including a lot of the statistics on cheating.
This website also had some of its own techniques for stopping cheating. All
of the links I went to were up to date and did not require any additional programs or software to view. Overall, I found it to be a very user friendly and informative website.
http://www.cheatingculture.com/education.htm is a link providing various links to articles and websites about cheating. This site was written by and about David Callahan, author of The
Cheating Culture: Why More Americans are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead. Most of the links and his conversations lead to a strong opinion against cheating. However, his focuses on why students are cheating to get ahead.
David also has multiple links to colleges that have found cheating a major threat along with people of authority, including
teachers, cheating. Unfortunately, many of these sites were no longer working. This site has great potential but at the current time, it is lacking in efficiency.
[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cheating
[2] Jervey, G. (2006, March). Cheating: But everybody’s doing it. Retrieved April 7, 2007 from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cheating.
[3] Wright, R. (2004). Cheating in school and life: What to do? Retrieved April 7, 2007 from http://www.iamnext.com/academics/cheating.html.
[4] ABC News Primetime (2006). A cheating crisis in America’s
schools. Retrieved April 7, 2007 from http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=132376&page=1.
[5] www.noblecheater.tk
