When you were in school, cheating included looking at a neighbor’s paper or copying a friend’s homework. The most scandalous attempts to cheat most likely involved a student who wrote the answers to a test on the cover of his or her notebook.
Cheating in today’s world has evolved. Technology makes cheating all too common and too easy.
A whopping 35 percent of teens admit to using their smartphones to cheat on homework or tests, according to a Pew Research Center study. Sixty-five percent of the same surveyed students also stated they have seen others use their phones to cheat in school.
Remember how people used to cheat by stealing peeks at their neighbor’s tests? Kids today are way more high-tech — such as Trevor Graves, a college student whose digital-age grade-rigging spree not only got him kicked out of school, it also landed him in hot water with the FBI.
According to Vice, the former University of Iowa student inserted keylogging devices — hardware that captures every keystroke entered into a computer — on his professors’ Macs and PCs. This move, Vice reports, allowed him to retrieve “everything professors typed, including their passwords” — giving him advance access to exams and even allowing him to change his grades.
It’s a criminal mastermind move — but unfortunately FBI agents, who got called in to investigate, do not give out coolness points. According to the Daily Iowan, Graves ran the school $68,000 in security updates. He now also faces federal hacking charges and up to 20 years in prison.
Graves isn’t alone, either: Nearly two-thirds of students in the United States know kids who cheat via high-tech devices, according to a study conducted by computer-security firm McAfee.
There’s the kid from Golden High School, in Golden, Colo., who loaded an entire examonto his calculator and sold it to his friends.
Then, there’s the New York City high-school cheat who jockeyed for an edge on the Gotham-wide Regents exam in math by getting answers via text. “He did the entire multiple-choice section in pencil, most likely took his cellphone to the bathroom, wrote the answers on the back of his hand, went back to his desk, changed all 30 answers and got 30 out of 30 right,” high-school teacher Steve Goffner told education Web site Edutopia. Over in Thailand, aspiring medical-school students cheated on their entrance exams using glasses that contained hidden cameras, CNN reported.
For all the high-tech wizardry, kids’ motivations for cheating are pretty old-fashioned. Don McCabe, a Rutgers Business School professor who researched test scammers, spoke to the Denver Post about students’ justifications for their high-tech deceptions. “They feel a test is unfair . . . Maybe they had something to do the night before and didn’t study.”
Sadly, cheating often becomes normalized among teens. Many of them don’t even recognize that sharing answers or using a homework app could constitute cheating.
For those who are well aware that their behavior constitutes cheating, the academic pressure to succeed may outweigh the risk of getting caught. They want to get into top colleges and they want to earn scholarships for their grades. They feel the best way to gain a competitive edge is by cheating.
Other students are just looking for shortcuts. It seems easier to cheat rather than look up the answers. Or, rather than studying for a test, using a smartphone to cheat seems like an easier option.
Teens with busy schedules may be especially tempted to cheat. The demands of sports, a part-time job, or other after-school responsibilities can make cheating seem like a time-saving option.
There’s also a fairly low risk of getting caught. Technology has evolved faster than school policies. Many teachers lack the resources to detect academic dishonesty in the classroom.
Finally, some teens get confused about their parents’ values. They assume their parent(s) would rather they cheat than get a bad grade.
It’s important to educate yourself about the various ways that today’s teens are cheating so you can be aware of the temptations your teen likely faces. Let's look at how teens are using phones and technology to cheat.
Since students use tools and techniques that have not been used before, they might not always know what really constitutes cheating. For your information, the following activities constitute cheating. They can get you kicked out of college.
If you’ve been transmitting answers to homework or test questions, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve been cheating—even though it might have been unintentional.
Unfortunately, there’s an old saying that states “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” and when it comes to cheating, that old saying holds up. If you cheat, even by accident, you’re risking your academic career.
Texting is one of the fastest ways for students to get answers to test questions from other students in the room—it's become the modern equivalent of note passing. Teens hide their smartphones on their seats and text one another, looking down to view responses while the teacher isn't paying attention.
Teens admit the practice is easy to get away with even when phones aren't allowed (provided the teacher isn't walking around the room to check for cellphones).
You’ve also had Bluetooth devices, and they’re using some super high-frequency ring tones on their phones that only young people could hear. In fact, if you’re much over the age of 30, or 35, you can’t hear it. So they are able to answer their phone where nobody knows they are answering a phone. And they’re not talking, they are just getting the answers in their ear.”
Other high-tech devices that facilitate cheating include a watch that appears to display nothing, but when you wear special glasses sold with the watch, the screen becomes visible and you can see any uploaded content.
Some teens store notes for test time on their cell phones and access these notes during class. As with texting, this is done on the sly, hiding the phone from view. The internet offers other unusual tips for cheating with notes, too.
For example, several sites guide teens to print their notes out in the nutrition information portion of a water bottle label, providing a downloadable template to do so. Teens replace the water or beverage bottle labels with their own for a nearly undetectable setup, especially in a large class. This, of course, only works if the teacher allows beverages during class.
Rather than conduct research to find sources, some students are copying and pasting material. They may plagiarize a report by trying to pass off a Wikipedia article as their own paper, for example.
Teachers may get wise to this type of plagiarism by doing a simple internet search of their own. Pasting a few sentences of a paper into a search engine can help teachers identify if the content was taken from a website.
A few websites even offer complete research papers for free based on popular subjects or common books. Others allow students to purchase a paper. Then, a professional writer, or perhaps even another student, can complete the report.
Teachers may be able to detect this type of cheating when a student’s paper seems to be written in a different voice. A perfectly polished paper may indicate a ninth-grade student’s work isn’t their own.
Crowdsourced sites such as Homework Helper also provide their share of homework answers. Students simply ask a question and others chime in to give them the answers.
Know how young people are using technology to cheat. In a poll by Common Sense Media, 35% of the students surveyed admitted to using a cell phone to cheat; however, only 3% of the parents surveyed believed their child had been involved in a cheating incident 1.
Common cheating methods include:
Teenagers use social media to help one another on tests, too. It only takes a second to capture a picture of an exam when the teacher isn’t looking.
That picture may then be shared with friends who want a sneak peak of the test before they take it. The photo may be uploaded to a special Facebook group or simply shared via text message. Then, other teens can look up the answers to the exam once they know the questions ahead of time.
While many tech-savvy cheating methods aren’t all that surprising, some methods require very little effort on the student’s part.
Two-thirds of parents have never had a serious talk with their child about cheating. Many of them don’t think it’s necessary because they assume their child would never cheat.
Don’t assume your child wouldn’t cheat. Often, ‘good kids’ and ‘honest kids’ make bad decisions. Make it clear to your teen that you value hard work and honesty.
Talk to your teen regularly about the dangers of cheating. Make it clear that cheaters tend not to get ahead in life.
Discuss the academic and social consequences of cheating. For example, your teen might get a zero or get kicked out of a class for cheating. And even worse, other people may not believe her when she tells the truth if she becomes a known cheater. It could also go on her transcripts, which could impair his or her academic future.
It’s important for your teen to understand that cheating can take a toll on his or her mental health as well. A 2016 study found that cheaters actually cheat themselves out of happiness. Although they may think the advantage they gain by cheating will make them happier, studies show cheating causes people to feel worse.
Deciphering what constitutes cheating in today's world can be a little tricky. If your teen uses a homework app to get help, is that cheating? What if he uses a website that translates Spanish into English for them?
You may need to take it on a case-by-case basis to determine whether your teen's use of technology enhances or hinders his learning. When in doubt, you can always ask the teacher directly if using technology for homework is acceptable.
It’s better for your teen to learn lessons about cheating now, rather than later in life. Cheating in college could get your teen expelled and cheating at a future job could get them fired or it could even lead to legal action. Cheating on a future partner could lead to the end of the relationship.
https://nypost.com/2017/11/08/students-are-turning-to-high-tech-cheating/
https://www.verywellfamily.com/how-teens-use-technology-to-cheat-at-school-4065364
http://www.nea.org/home/33984.htm
https://www.voanews.com/a/technology-gives-students-innovative-tools-for-cheating/3556643.html
https://www.thetechedvocate.org/cheating-and-technology-unethical-indifference/
https://www.iste.org/explore/In-the-classroom/8-ways-to-prevent-cheating-in-the-digital-age