Bethany Plutowski
Ms. Lechelt
College Freshman English
9-23-18
“Is Cheating Wrong?”
Is cheating wrong? A question that seems uncontroversial, may not be when we look at the many arguments that are pro-cheating and point out the inconsistencies in arguments against it. When they are looked at as not connected, most problems are easily solved. Cheating is looked at as separate from the purpose of tests, separate from grading etc., but when we take many questions together ( instead of answering one without taking the others under consideration) what you thought was indisputable, is no longer.
Some say cheating is wrong simply because it's against the rules, but breaking a rule is only wrong if that rule is justifiable. Cheating should not be wrong because it's prohibited, it should be prohibited because it's wrong. Another point of view is that cheating is morally wrong because cheating it’s treating your teaches as just a means instead of ends in themselves, but one would not punish a student for treating an instructor as a means, and aren't teachers essentially a means to education? Also, Many teachers dislike cheating simply because they take it as an insult to themselves, but this proves nothing. Cheating may be frustrating to teachers but that doesn't make a valid argument against it.
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In many cases, it may be the lack of cheating that cripples education. Many times teamwork can increase knowledge and understanding, therefor making the absence of cheating worse than cheating. Also some of the best students don't need homework especially when it's meaningless, Failing a student that's too good to need the homework makes no sense at
Strom, P., & Strom, R. (2007). Cheating in middle school and high school. Educational …..Forum,71(2), 104-116. doi:10.1080/00131720708984924
When Professor John Doe assigned this reading assignment, I had really no idea what academic book would appeal to me. I definitely wanted to choose a book that would impact me in the long run and that I would benefit from. When I told my brother about the book, he said that he was just finishing a book called “The Cheating Culture, Why More Americans Are Doing More To Get Ahead” by, David Callahan. When he quickly explained what the book was about I knew that was the book I was going to read. I figured that this would be a good choice, because everywhere you look these days you see cheating. This book was published back in 2004 so even though it is a decade old, I do believe that many of the examples in the book are still problems, if not, even worse today than they were a decade ago. Weather it is kids in school, athletes, or the average business man. Everyone is cheating and trying to cut corners to get ahead. Nearly everyone has cheated in their life rather you would want to admit it or not. Reading this book, I was hoping to learn exactly why so many people try to cheat, and what alternatives people could take to prevent from cheating.
If a teacher is unfamiliar with current advancements in the digital world, it is possible that they will miss the most obvious of cheaters. Because the student is never punished or caught, they assume the teacher does not consider it cheating. In some cases, schools are responsible for the rise in cheating because of the way curriculum is presented. In an article written by the Atlantic, a teacher received an anonymous letter from a successful college student stating that he had cheated all throughout high school. He told the author he cheated “because the grade [he]would have otherwise been given was not reflective of [his] true learning” (Lahey). In other words, he felt the teachers were giving him exams that were not accurate representations of the material he had learned. If students are giving themselves excuses for their cheating, that feeling of guilt will subside, and they will not view the action as wrong. Many think they are not at fault if they do not get caught or because they are just trying to keep up with their classmates who are cheating as well. These are the students that contribute to the statistics, the ones who are adding to
Cheating can be a common routine in a classroom—from copying work on homework to copying answers on a test. “Cheating by teachers and administrators on standardized tests is rare, and not a reason to stop testing America's children” (Standardized Tests). This statement is proved false by the fact that thirty-seven states have been caught cheating by “encouraging teachers to view upcoming test forms before they are administered” (“FairTest Press Release: Standardized Exam Cheating in 37 States And D.C., New Report Shows Widespread Test Score Corruption”). If teachers can view a test before it is administered, they can teach to the test so that their students’ scores are higher. Teachers who have viewed the test can then “drill students on actual upcoming test items” (“FairTest Press Release: Standardized Exam Cheating in 37 States And D.C., New Report Shows Widespread Test Score Corruption”). This is morally wrong since teachers who do not have the access to an actual test or those who refuse to view it do not know what would be on the test and cover a broad domain of material, not just specifics.
Situations of cheating have seemed to become more and more commonplace when the student is bored by the subject material, poor teaching and or feels they have no use for the knowledge. Kohn even states in his article, “cheating is more common when students experience the academic tasks they’ve been given as boring, irrelevant, or overwhelming.” This infers that if a student were attending a school interested in learning about art, the student maybe more inclined to cheat in a business accounting class due to the fact the student would find the subject material irrelevant to them and their future. Students seem to be less inclined to cheat and it “is relatively rare in classrooms where the learning is genuinely engaging and meaningful to students and where a commitment to exploring significant ideas hasn’t been eclipsed by a single-minded emphasis on “rigor”” (Kohn). To simplify everything mentioned above; students are inclined to cheat in school when they are disinterested in the subject material and or are overwhelmed by in assignment or finally the result in a poor teacher. Everyone who has attended school can relate to this in some way or another, most people do not want to retain knowledge they have no interest in or use for in their
Cheating and plagiarism have their own history. Many people believe it’s a way to get around certain challenges that we feel unable to defeat. When friends see their peers cheating, they think about their friendship, and therefore, they decide to remain silent. Not allowing teachers to know about cheating can affect your friend, people around you, and even you. Students should alert teachers about cheating, because it’s an act to save your friends, others and yourself.
“For every clever person who goes to the trouble of creating an incentive scheme, there is an army of people, clever and otherwise, who will inevitably spend even more time trying to beat it. Cheating may or may not be human nature, but it is certainly a prominent feature in just about every human endeavor. Cheating is a primordial economic act: getting more or less” (21). This quote is important because it proves how everyone has cheated once. In many cases it is true, people often cheat on tests or even on their diet. Not everyone can live up to their expectations. Some may justify it, others proudly proclaim it, and others will try denying their cheating vigorously. Most people consider cheating as a bad and unwise action. In this novel, it gave two examples of cheaters, school teachers and sumo wrestlers. It shows how both authors can take two different people and still find something similar with both of them, like cheating.
...kay and when cheating was acceptable. One person said, “Excuse me, but there are worse things to do than cheat on homework.” (Nathan, 125) She noticed that over half of the students who responded thought that cheating depends on the situation or circumstance.
Cheating is wrong, under no circumstances even with good intention, would this be acceptable. If we challenge that could cheating only certain circumstances be wrong? Applying principles of prima facie, defined as not being absolute (Rowan). The potential consequences of the teacher losing his job, the student getting expelled, other students relationships being impacted, how each would deal with the moral consequences in the future are all to be considered.
Why do people cheat? To justify the practice, some students claim that school is boring and that they prefer to spend their time on things that really interest them instead of studying. Others say that they are virtually forced to cheat.
The first cause as to why students cheat is because they are lazy. It happens all the time, where students go home from school, have a snack, watch television, take a nap, play some video games, and just keep saying that they will do their homework later. The next thing they know it eleven o’clock at night and time to go to bed, but no homework was accomplished. The student keeps pushing back the assignment until the last minute and the last minute is not enough time. This is also known as procrastination. The student does not want to fail, but they were too lazy to do their own work, so they ask to copy the work from a friend that did the work. I once said something to a guy about how this was cheating and he told me that he was, “using his resources wisely”. Another time I asked a student next to me to stop copying my answers in class and he told, “Then you shouldn’t let me see your answers”, he blamed his cheating on me. One time when I was in seventh grade in my ecology class we had to put together a presentation with a partner. My partner was a close friend at the time, and our topic was solar power. I ended up doing all of the research and put together the presentation a...
From a young age we are taught the differences between right and wrong, but as we get older the line between moral and immoral is often blurred. Things that were once thought of as unacceptable are now perfectly fine in our minds. Have you ever seen anyone cheat on an assignment or exam? Do you know anyone that’s been expelled from school for cheating? What if it was discovered that a U.S. senator plagiarized his college thesis paper? Imagine if it got out that one of the most respected universities in the U.S. was involved in a huge fraud scandal that involved thousands of students. Academic cheating is a terrible offense because it is unethical, self-degrading, and can be detrimental to the learning environment.
We might want to first follow that question with another question. What is cheating and why do so many people do it? Most people would agree that cheating is deceitful and one who obtains answers by cheating is not practicing good integrity. We could further add that cheating also prevents the student from having to put in long hours of studying and preparation. Recent technology has made this “time saving method” even more efficient.
Cheating is the result of today’s open resources on the web easily access and use by anyone in today’s society (Walker, 2017). Because the internet provides easy information fast, the temptation to click "copy/paste" and pull in quotes from a website without attribution is great. So the question is, is it because students aren't learning the material? (Walker, 2017). If students believe that what and how they are learning does not seem relevant or useful, cheating is more likely to occur.
The above discussion shows that there are many effects of cheating in exam. Therefore, schools should come up with strategies on how to reduce cheating in schools. The teachers can inform the students about the effects of cheating in exam. They should also come up with harass punishment if a student is caught cheating. This will reduce the cases of cheating, and students will be fully equipped for the job market. Therefore, students should know cheating in exams is bad.