This is the time of year when students get a bit desperate. Third quarter grades will soon be closing. The fourth quarter - the last of the year - is on the horizon. Those students who slacked off during the first half of the year are trying to catch up and improve their GPA. Parents are irate. Teachers are nagging. Students are stressed.
And, when students get stressed, they make poor choices. One of these poor choices is to cheat their way through classes. Now, cheating is not a new thing. In fact, cheating has been a part of teachers' lives for as long as teaching has been a profession (or calling, depending on how you view it). As such, one would think that teachers are experts at recognizing cheating when it occurs. Let me set the record straight here - teachers are NOT experts at recognizing cheating. In fact, many teachers have no understanding of modern forms of cheating. For example, few teachers realize that students share homework information via Facebook chats. Even less teachers are aware that students download full essays from the Internet and turn them in as their own examples of writing. As long as teachers are unaware of the ways students cheat today, the education that they are trying to pass along is degraded.
The question of whether to cheat or not is essentially a moral or ethical question. Many believe that cheating is really sharing or simply taking advantage of resources and opportunities. Others feel that finding, analyzing, and retaining information on your own is the best way to go. As we progress into a future where information is readily available, literally at your fingertips, using this readily available information - for any purpose - is becoming more acceptable. The possible effects stemming from NOT having this information at our fingertips is ignored.
For this week's posting I would like you to read the following articles related to student cheating. Reflect upon the contents and create a posting that showcases your opinions on cheating and also includes references (with parenthetical citations) from the articles.
Professors Use Technology to Fight Student Cheating
University of Central Floria Cheating Scandal
12 comments:
I can't say I haven't cheated before, because that would be a lie. Everyone cheats at some point. Maybe out of desperation when they're at a breaking point and cheating is the only way to go, or maybe just because they're recumbent lazy teenagers and all they can see in their near future is eating crisps and playing video games.
Whatever the case may be, cheating is wrong and I think that every trust worthy student out there tries to avoid the call of Cheating and most of them succeed. Cheating makes you feel dirty, like a criminal, and one would think a student feels proud and determined after they've cheated, but it's the other way around. A cheating student feels regret and anguish over the fact that they had to sink so low to receive a good score when they could've just studied. They almost feel stupid.
You may hear many of your peers saying that "sharing is caring" and it is, in a level, but it also is like giving bread to a waif. Too sunken in self-pity and fearing failure, homeless tend to just sulk around and wait for others to take care of them, and the same goes with cheaters.
Cheating nowadays must be one of the easiest ways to complete work. I'm sure almost every student has cheated atleast once. In the article it stated that professors are planning on making cheating proof tests and webcams to see and hear if students are cheating or not. This may avoid an abundant amount of cheating but at the same time I feel as if that's just going to make students make up new ways and methods of cheating. That's where creativity peaks in. There will always be those students that will make up a short cut to their education so that they could take the easy way out of things. Other than that, I think that the ideas professors plan on making will reduce the number of students that cheat and at the same time it was force them to become more responisle and actually be able to soak some information in and make them more educated.
Nicole Ramlal
From personal experience, i know how well cheating can boost your grades. Although it is wrong, many students feel it is the only way to pass a course. Most students overwork themselves by taking multiple AP classes and having numerous extracurricular activities which don't allow them to have enough time to enjoy the simple things like sleeping, hanging out with friends, or unwinding from a long day by watching t.v. To compensate, these students make cheat sheets to eliminate study time which will allow them to do other things. The new methods to prevent cheating seem effective but there are still ways to get around it. For example, the incident that happened in UCF could have been prevented. The fact that after the teacher said that if the students who cheated didn't confess would risk expulsion made only half the students confess was wrong. Teachers are now learning innovative ways to bring cheating to a halt. I think this would make learning more intense in that students would actually have to take notes and review them so that they don't have to cheat. Even though i have cheated in the past, i know that it doesn't benefit you as a person because you just cheated yourself out of knowledge that you could possibly use later on.
- Cheating is more than a simple act of sharing information; its a habit students learn. Although pressure is on our shoulders to pass and succeed all the time, students shouldn't cheat because it is harming their own integrity and self-believe. One bad grade isn't going to stop a person from achieving their life goals. Plus, the whole point of school is to expand one's knowledge not to cheat one's way through it.
- Having said that, cheating inevitable; there will always be students who will take the risk for a higher grade. The technology today makes new methods of cheating easy to come up with as stated by an Ohio State University graduate, "Cheating is super easy now. College classes are way too big, and you can pull out anything on your desk." Cheating can't be stopped. It will most likely live on for generations. Hopefully more students will make a better use of their potentials.
Cheating is something that every student does, no matter who it is. Teachers hate it when their students cheat, but sadly, they cheated too when they were in school. Cheating is a way of getting information quicker and more easily than doing the work from scratch. As a student, I think cheating can be very beneficial in some ways, while at the same time, it can cause hurt the person who is doing it. When a student copies homework or something else that is due a long time from the point he/she copied it, then I don't consider it cheating, but a way of taking advantage of resources. But when a student copies a work the night before it is due, just because he or she was not responsible enough to finish it in their own, then that is cheating and it is not moral. On tests, I consider copying to be cheating because the point of testing is to see if the students have learned the material well. When students copy on tests, it not only ruins the statistics that determine their ability, but they are receiving higher grades than they deserve, and they should be punished. I think Richard Quinn from UCF did the right thing in making the students choose between coming clean or taking the risk of getting caught. They would either feel bad about what they did or they would get caught and get in a lot of trouble. I have to agree with teachers like Richard Quinn that cheating is like "a knife through the heart" because teachers dont dedicate their job to teach kids something for them to take the information and use it in wrong and inmoral ways.
ALLAN NUDELMAN P3
Cheating is a method people use when their lazy. In most cases I think cheating is definitely not the way to go since it's better to do everything by using your own knowledge than someone else's. If someone tries to get the easy way out by cheating they're really not helping themselves at all.
The many different methods there are to prevent cheating are really interesting. In the article Professors Use Technology to Fight Student Cheating, I thought it was an interesting way on how many teachers are able to catch students cheating. Barbara Christe's idea on making her own fake website to catch students plagiarizing is a very smart thing to do.
I also think that many students go out of their way to plan ways on being able to cheat when they are just wasting their time. The time many people spend watching videos on Youtube to get ideas on ways to cheat, is the time their wasting when they could be studying.
I think cheating in some ways has is wrong and right, it depends on the situation. For example lets say a teacher says you can't use calculators, why would they do that in the real world almost every job that requires math has a computer helping you. why shouldn't you be able to use it in school? It makes no sense, also say looking up say a definition to a word, if I would look it up i will always remember it but if you put the wrong answer and then get the question wrong and never see your test you will never find out what that word means. In alot of cases cheating I think is acceptable.
James Sidebottom
Cheating is probably the touchiest subject between students and teachers. My opinion is that knowing how to cheat is something everyone should have a clue how to do. Sure cheating is bad, but cheating is the only way of fighting back those kinds of teachers that give out unfair amount of homework, rude, bi- polar, and cranky, and giving test on thing not taught yet, or not even teaching at all. Everyone has had, at one time, had a teacher like this and wanted to get back at him/ her. As well as, cheating should be the last resort, and only be done when the courses grade depends on it.
I am pretty sure no student or teacher can truthful admit that they haven’t cheated on anything. Even though most people will deny ever cheating, we all have done it, in some way, shape or form. Which includes: taxes, games, tests, diets, relationships, plans … ect. It might be even human nature. Human nature is doing something with less effort but with a better result and isn’t that cheating? Cheating on a test for an example, requires less hours of studying and a few minutes of preparation. The and when the results come out, you would have a better grade than if you studied for hours and forgot some information before the test.
So my basic thought about cheating is that it should be accepted but only on rare occasions.
Cheating is obviously bad and morally wrong, yet it is also over-rated. Many teachers and adults believe it is the worst thing in the world, and students should be brutally punished for it. However, there is a silver lining between copying homework or classwork, and cheating on a exam and plagiarism. Especially if the cheating is done at a college or university.
Technology nowadays, also plays a major role in why students are more tempted to cheat. Technology makes it a lot easier too.
The idea that professors and teachers are catching up with modern day technology, doesn'y bother me because i think it's going to help students to study, not cheat, and actually learn what they are paying for.
Sadly, throughout life, everyone cheats on something, whether it is a miniscule event, or a life-changing opportunity. However, people's ideas on what is considered cheating vary significantly. Many methods of cheating aren't thought of as immoral by some. This can be seen when student Konstantin Ravvin states "Everyone cheats, everyone cheats in life in general..." However, I disagree with this student. This is because if you are studying to work in a particular profession, you shouldn't chose one that you aren't passionate about enough that you resort to cheating. I'm sure nobody would like to hear that their doctor cheated their way through medical school. I believe cheating includes any form of decieving someone into thinking you did something you didn't do. After all, the definition of cheating is "to decieve, influence by fraud," or "to elude."
Although I believe everyone cheats on something throughout life, many people feel guilt after and confess so as not to hold the burden in their concience. However, others cheat on a daily basis, and virtually cheat their way through life. This is immoral and wrong. People who hold themselves up to higher standards and decide against cheating have higher self value. This idea is depicted by Professor Quinn when he commanded the cheaters of his mid-term exam to take a four-hour ethics course. As Quinn states in the article, students are at school to learn, and "...they're going to learn dignity and honor and the value of ethics and honesty."
Melissa Magalhaes Pd. 3
Cheating, of course, is considered a bad habit, but I believe that, modern time, things have taken a turn. As students, we are expected to memorize a ton of information that I believe its too complicated for our memory to withstand. We are so terrified of failing and disappointing our parents, that sometimes its almost crucial to take a sneak peek. One student in the Professors' article stated,"I don't really consider what I did cheating...because in the real world I would be using that device...I see that as just being more efficient." I 100% agree with this statement. Why should we have to remember every piece of knowledge we intake when our future careers allow us to use such tools and notes? School is there for us to prepare for what our future holds for us, so we should able to have access to the notes in order to accomplish our task.
I also find it a waste of time and money for these cameres and "honey pots" used to capture the guilty. It depicts that teachers have no trust that their students can truly achieve something on their own, and that we cheat on every single test we take. I'll admit that I have cheated on numerous occasions, but there have also been assignments where the only tool I've used is my memory on the knowledge I've learned.
As for these ludacris YouTube videos, these peers have taken the whole cheating to an extreme level. If you have a techniques on cheating, its a wiser decision to keep them to yourself and not plaster them for the world, including teachers, to view. Its almost like they're begging to get caught. On the other hand, I believe teachers or authorities should threaten the students with speeches like,"If you want to take a high-risk gamble, take it. I challenge you to take it.Because we know who you are, we know where you are and when academic affairs is done, you'll know the outcome." We, as students, understand the consequences, if caught cheating. We only do it to succeed and make our supporters proud. It also displays that some, not all, teachers are being total hypocrites. Cheating has exists since the creation of education, and I bet money they have had their fair share of peeks. If they want to stop cheating, the teachers must do whatever it takes to help us accomplish and pass our classes.
Despite what we all believe against, many of us resort to cheating. Cheating may help you in the moment boost your grade, but in the long run, the only person you are cheating is yourself. I agree with the first article saying that cheating these days has gotten a lot easier especially in college when the classroom is so big.
However, cheating is very easy to get away with at times which is why it continues on and on and most likely always will. I try not to cheat on a regular basis but when I am so crammed with school and other activities, I sometimes have no other choice (not that I am proud of it.) Although one class i vow to never cheat in is English. I think that cheating might be wrong, but there are worse things that have been done in school.
Perhaps one day through technology, it will be virtually impossible to cheat. I believe cheating devaluates your character. No one wants to be known as a cheater. But sometimes how we conduct ourselves, and how we stick to our morals are what truly defines us as humans.
cory leschel p3
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