Shelbie Harris
News Editor
Maybe you started the last game of Monopoly with an extra $500 bill hidden under your side of the board, or decided raspberry-filled powdered donuts were a better idea for breakfast than the usual two slices of whole grain toast, or maybe not, but chances are you’ve cheated at one thing or another in your lifetime.
There’s a higher chance if you’re one of the 20 million Americans attending universities today, the term academic dishonesty is familiar. From Google to hand scribblings to stolen exams, cheating has been around for as long as students have, and today between 75 and 98 percent of college students surveyed each year report having cheated at some time in their academic careers.
“With regular in-class assignments I never cheated,” said a former ISU graduate from the communication, media and persuasion department and graphic designer for Bench Craft Company, who asked to remain anonymous. “I wasn’t the type of person who was going to try and cheat; I didn’t go out of my way to cheat, the only instance I was academically dishonest was in online classes where I’m taking a quiz and I have Google right there. If I came across a question I wasn’t 100 percent sure about I would just Google it.”
Academic dishonesty, or cheating, is representing someone else’s work as your own, and can take on many forms including fabrication, plagiarism and misrepresentation. Cheating in collegiate settings is reaching epidemic levels with reports of scandals at colleges ranging from elite schools such as Harvard to public universities like Florida State University.
Idaho State University is not immune to these scandals, and could potentially follow suit.
“Almost everyone is cheating,” said Anas Alghamdi, a third-year ISU civil engineering student. “Everyone is cheating in his or her own way. For example, classes with labs, some of the students in the College of Technology, the GIS Department and others taking courses in the Physical Science building leave their homework saved on the computers for others to access.”
According to the Academic Cheating Fact Sheet authored by the Educational Testing Service and the Ad Council’s Campaign to Discourage Academic Cheating, only about 20 percent of college students admitted to cheating in high school in 1940. That means 70 years ago one in five students had cheated compared with two out of three today.
Cheating isn’t married to a particular group of students and can be seen in student athletes, fraternity or sorority members, those involved in extracurricular activities and even international students. Additionally, cheating doesn’t only occur in those who are struggling or have lower GPA’s, but above-average students are also cheating to get to the top of the class.
“During my freshman year I took an online class for medical terminology and students weren’t supposed to use their books or notes during exams,” said Richard Garcia, an ISU graduate from the economics department. “And so for the first two exams I didn’t, yet most of the students were getting high scores and I was getting low scores so I realized they were cheating. I came to the conclusion if I want to be at the top of class I better have my notes and my book ready.”
When it comes to cheating, perhaps most central is the question of how university and its faculty motivate students to learn.
According to an article published in the Boston Globe online edition, “Educational researchers typically distinguish between two broad types of learning motivation: extrinsic and intrinsic.”
Students who are extrinsically driven seek external rewards and praise, good grades and honor awards. By contrast, students driven by intrinsic motivation seek to understand and learn the course material for its own sake; they find learning new information fascinating, useful and meaningful to their lives, thus are less likely to cheat.
Consider the introductory general education courses each student is required to complete before he or she can begin taking upper-division courses related to his or her majors. Most consist of a large number of students, with fast-paced weekly lectures, in which the professor covers key events and terminology, usually with the help of some type of visual aid. Grades will be determined by three difficult exams and only the truly dedicated students will earn the coveted A’s.
When a professor teaches a class in such a way, it’s difficult for students to find intrinsic value, thus increasing the chances a student who normally wouldn’t consider cheating to do so in order to continue into classes they feel are more important to their career choice.
“For upper-division such as my marketing and advertising courses it was generally harder, or more work to cheat or to try and get around something than it was actually doing the work,” said Troy Lujan, a communication, media and persuasion graduate from ISU. “The big exception is online classes.”
As pressures to make classes bigger and more economically efficient grow stronger, University officials should continue to monitor cheating, students should instill higher moral values and continue to report instances of cheating, but perhaps the ball is left in the professor’s court to challenge students with unique exam methods and questions, or facilitating a more interesting lecture.
Nonetheless, students who cheat in higher education deserve appropriate punishment, and institutions cannot expect to solve the cheating epidemic by shifting the blame and letting students off the hook.
“I’m at a loss really to see how you could do it without restructuring the entire way exams are administered in the academic setting,” said Garcia. “People in all sorts of various positions use Google to look up information in their day-to-day lives, so it’s interesting to see what university’s will do in the future regarding the use of outside resources.”
