Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
The impact of technology on education
The impact of technology on education
Classroom ethics
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Cheating and Technology: How Modern Technology Has Affected Education Isn’t technology a wonderful thing? Ask 100 people this question and you will probably get 100 different opinions. Most would agree that it is. However, as wonderful as it may be, it doesn’t always mean it is a good thing. There is no doubt technology has made our lives easier, more manageable, and most things can be done faster and in many cases simpler. Has technology also made it simpler for people to cheat? 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. A few years back there was a movie which was set on a Ivey League campus in the late 1990’s and the plot revolved around one student who managed to steal a copy of his professor’s final exam and proceed to copy it and give out copies to all his classmates. Cheating? Yes. Technology? Yes and no. The copy machine is considered technology but in light of innovations in technology over the past decade the copy machine is archaic. The part of his plan that did not require technology but did make his scheme rather difficult as well as dangerous was the actual stealing. The advent of the cell phone and internet has offered ways of cheating that as little as ten years would have been unimaginable. Technology is on the rise, and most people don’t know the real capabilities of the new technological advances. The younger generation has been brought up around the new technology and is finding newer and better ways to use the technology to their advantages. The internet offers a plethora of information and with a cut and paste, a few word re-arrangements, the average student can be made to appear as a very bright prospect. There are many websites out there that offer cheating tools. Free papers and mock test all are very useful tools that kids are using.
So, to help students across the country cheat better, saving themselves both from easy detection and from incurring the wrath of insulted faculty, and leading to a much more harmonious school environment, I offer the following tips, based on recent experience:
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
Pressures from society to obtain a successful career require achieving an education in most cases. In today's economy having a thriving career could depend on our educational background as part of the ingredient to fuel our lifestyles. Students attending high school or college can relate to the pressures of sustaining adequate grades. Students who are overwhelmed with trying to maintain higher GPA standards push the academic barriers using technology to cheat. Our society is more advanced with technology such as computers, cell phones, text message systems, as well as various other electronic devices that could provide the avenue for a desperate student seeking a way to cheat in order to receive a higher GPA score. According to Ad Council (1999),"Grades, rather than education, have become the major focus of many students" (Ad Council, 1999). For those students in high school maintaining high GPA's could equal college scholarship programs needed to attend college. Students with peer pressures as well as pressures from parents to achieve higher grades could thrust students who are not motivated to study, to resort to cheating as an easy solution to an unethical problem. This research paper will discuss ways in which students are using technology to cheat. Other aspects of this paper will include statistics on academic cheating as well as ways instructors are catching students cheating. The pros and cons after using cheating detection programs as well as statistics that show significant changes after using the detection programs will also be discussed.
How bad has cheating become over the years, the numbers in some cases are mind-boggling. In today’s day and age the amount of college students cheating is numbered to have maintain a steady figure of about 75 percent. (Lang, 2013) Cheating has been around since the beginning of time, some of the reasons behind most of the prolific cheaters are centered on what seems to be three main issues plaguing our society. Cheaters be it young or old, all seem to have what I call the “Big Three” in common. In my research on cheating, there were three things that continued to stick out, such as; procrastinating, the pressure to make the grade and it is easier to cheat rather then to do your own work. To the answer the question why college students cheat, we must first understand why, in order to find a solution on how to help avoid this continuing going forward. After reading this paper you will see that cheating has become prevalent in college, caused by a need to get better grades with less original work being done eventually the ends don't justify the means.
Slobogin, K. (2002, April 5). Survey: Many students say cheating’s ok. Retrieved June 12, 2009,
Cheating is a big issue that has reached the most competitive campuses around the United States. It is increasing more and more with the new technology that we have in the 21st century because students have easy access to many sources of information. Cheating is something all students have done at some point in their lives, but as they reach a higher academic level, they are faced with more rigorous consequences that can affect their futures in many different ways. Cheating might be seen as an easy way to obtain a good grade, get into a good college, or maintain scholarships or financial aid, but the consequences could affect the life and the future of the student.
Modern students face many pressures for academic success. They are often unwilling to disappoint their parents or spouses. Some fear that not cheating will weaken a student’s ability to compete with their peers. They rationalize their unethical behavior, unwilling to accept a poor grade, consequently justifying cheating as the only means to that end.
Technology has become and is a daily part of our life. Having technology makes our way of doing things a lot easier. On our everyday life we have technology supporting our basic needs from home, at work, and at school. For the most part technology is used in a positive way in our daily life. However and unfortunately some technologies are used the wrong way. Using technology to cheat in today’s society has become a lot more accessible and easier to do especially in an academic environment.
Academic knowledge is the basis on which future prosperity, and financial security has been determined. As a consequence, students feel inclined to perform above average in school. Now, as students perform less and less, they sink to obtain good grades by cheating. This method to acquire the desired grades will only harm the student, instead of the imagined result. Prompted by a child’s inability to perform basic tasks throughout his education , academic cheating spawns numerous negative consequences.
Over the past decade or so, we have seen a huge increase in cheating in our schools. The introduction of the Internet into most homes and schools and other technological advances are some of the main causes. Students are misusing the new technologies to find new and more high tech ways to cheat. During testing students are receiving answers via text messaging devices, they are downloading notes to iPods and graphing calculators, they are picture messaging exams with their mobile phones, and they are even hiring look-alike experts to take the exams for them. They can use the internet to easily plagiarize a paper; they can pay a company to write the paper for them, they can even pay to use a prewritten paper from a database. The internet and technology are making it easier and easier for students to cheat, and as technology continues to advance, we will continue to see a rapid rise in cheating.
...Almost every student nowadays can admit to cheating at some point in their educational career, but motives as to why they cheat vary and can’t be narrowed down to one reason. There are many excuses as to why all levels of students chose to cheat no matter how wrong or unexpected it is. Cheating is a large problem, but members of universities and schools can discourage it and try to prevent it as much as possible. Not only should it be frowned upon, but it also should be a priority to make it next to impossible to do. Advisers can reduce the temptation of cheating by significantly decreasing the amount of true and false and multiple choice questions on exams and quizzes. Also by understanding the students social and parental pressures in a person at that age’s life is important and contributes to decreasing the amount of students cheating in schools and universities.
In many ways the internet is one of the easiest ways for children to cheat through school. With the click of a mouse students can access websites where they can easily purchase term papers and essays on hundreds of topics. “Search engines such as Google can find over a million resources for students trying to buy term papers, some of which sell for more than ten dollars a page.” (Toosi, 2004, p1) There are three main types of websites students use to cheat; lecture note sites, term paper and essay sites and editorial services sites. The first two types of websites offer some free services and others can charge anywhere from five to five hundred dollars. Websites such as Academictermpapers.com and Cheaters.com offer a variety of papers including book reports, file p...
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...
Technology is progressing very rapidly, and is hurting today’s society. People are abusing the uses of technology. The Internet, which first begun in the mid-1970s, has made huge impact on our generation today. It has its benefits such as brain cell research and the cure for Cancer. People are abusing its uses. Online shopping, playing games, and social media are just some of the ways people abuse technology. Although technology has done great things for society such as medical research, it also gives society a way to isolate themselves by having access to virtually anything, with the touch of a mouse.
The major reason which leads to popularity of cheating is that students always desire to have good marks. Today’s academic system is generally based on grade point average or some other alphabetical or numerical representation of academic skill. If students notice that many classmates have high marks, they also want the fame of having good grades. Therefore, this pressure unintentionally causes students to value their goods marks much more than their knowledge. Eventually, students do anything to achieve good marks, even cheating in exams.