Academic dishonesty has become a rampant problem in high schools across the country. Statistics show that cheating among high school students has risen dramatically during the past 50 years, and now, it is at an all-time high. Many different types of cheating exist, but our teachers most commonly define it as outright plagiarism, representing someone else’s work as our own, or sharing answers to tests or homework between peers.

Personally, I think that I have seen a hundred different kinds of academic dishonesty. One would expect that cheating increases proportionally with the amount of work you get in school, so by that reasoning, high school students would be the ones who cheat most.

In a previous article, I wrote that increased pressure to succeed academically in the face of a highly difficult workload in classes such as honors or Advanced Placement was the reason that most students cheat. But since then, after thinking about some of my own personal experiences from earlier scholastic life, I’ve somewhat re-evaluated my point of view about the issue.

In kindergarten and first grade, I was the best speller in my class. I consistently got perfect grades on the spelling tests that my classmates struggled with, and because I was young and naïve back then, I didn’t understand why every Friday, so many kids wanted to sit next to me.

I’m not going to overgeneralize; a lot of my classmates decided that it simply didn’t matter to them, while some of them decided that they were going to work to increase their grades in an honest fashion. However, the rest chose to take the easy way out and attempted to cheat off me.

I don’t know those kids anymore –– they’re probably still in New Jersey, and now I’m in Arizona –– but I could bet that the ones who found it more acceptable to cheat off a spelling test then are probably more susceptible to cheating on larger and more serious assignments now, as seniors in high school.

Habits formed at a younger age are harder to shake as you get older, and I imagine that cheating is no different. Once they learned that they could get away with cheating on a spelling test, they could push the limits a little bit more. In my honors world history class, students would write the names of countries on the inside of their arm so that they could pass their weekly geography tests on different region of the world.

As I’ve moved up through the grades, cheating has become a lot more innovative. Hardly anybody does the whole ‘sit-next-to-someone-and-then-look-off-their-paper’ method anymore, unless it’s some kind of math class.

In AP literature, where we had weekly quizzes in which we had to write definitions and examples of five randomly chosen literary terms, several students sat in the corner or back of the classroom so that they could put their iPhones in their lap and use the dictionary application to look each of the answers up.

One girl in third period asked the kids in first period what the literary terms would be, and then, during second period, she wrote the answers on the inside of her flip-flops with a pen. During the test, she would cross her legs and glance at her flip-flops underneath the desk.

When I took chemistry my sophomore year, and we had a a giant test over the periodic table of elements, one guy went into the library, used his cell phone to take a picture of the periodic table, and then texted the image to everybody in class. Our teacher never figured out why the class average for that supposedly extremely difficult test was so high.

I actually only found out about the kids who cheated on the lit terms quizzes in AP literature after junior year was over. Sometimes, during the previous class period, I used to be guilty of noting down a few examples of each term on the back of the notebook paper I was going to use for the quiz because I had such a hard time remembering examples while under a time constraint. That made me feel kind of bad on occasion.

I was so surprised by the amount of innovative, creative ways that some of the other students found to cheat. The kids who used their iPhones were so subtle that I never noticed, even when I was sitting next to or behind them. The girl who copied definitions onto her flip-flops was definitely the most original of all.

There is no way to really get rid of cheating, save for increasing the efforts to teach moral values from a very early age. If those values are instilled when kids are in kindergarten –– the age when some of those habits are formed –– it is highly likely that more students will decide to make honest choices through their academic careers.
 

Anushka Mohideen
Senior
Empire High School