By Mark Ramos | Observer Contributor
Cheating. Whether you do it yourself or know somebody who does, it’s something we all know happens. So instead of going over preventative measures or the morality of it, let’s take a look into how and why some students cheat.
While some confessed to old school methods of sitting next to friends who would let them copy or writing answers on their arms, others had taken things a little further in the classroom. One student told me a tale of how her professor had left out examples of past student’s lab reports, so the current class had an idea of how they should be done. When the professor wasn’t looking, she took one with a good grade home and copied the entire lab report.
“Since he only had hard copies, he wouldn’t even know it was missing or even have something to compare what I turned in to” was what she had to say when asked about her rather bold decision.
Another student, who had an art project due, had her boyfriend do the entire thing for her. “It was just a class that I was forced to take, it’s not like it was crucial to my major, so I didn’t care about it,” she explained. Her boyfriend did such a good job that it was put on display here on campus for awhile.
One student when writing papers said “I would look for extremely rare sources on the web and just copy and paste different parts of it into my paper,” going on to further state, “There are some websites that the schools system just won’t pick up or recognize.”
This bring us to the heavy hitter: Online classes. While online classes provide students with convenient access to classes from anywhere with a web connection, it is also the place where cheating is the most egregious and prevalent.
A former student summed up what most of the online cheaters had to say with this, “I had to do an online statistics course and I’m bad at math so I just paid my buddy’s girlfriend $300 to do it for me and I got an A.” With the exception of paying, most students who cheated while taking online courses gave a similar response. When asked about the risk of getting caught while cheating online, another student said, “How are they going to catch you? They have no way of proving that you didn’t do the work, so how?,” a statement that was reiterated by all of the online cheaters.
When asking these students why they cheat, they all gave similar answers. For most, it has to do with financial aid benefits or transferring. “If I fall below a certain GPA I’ll lose my financial aid, my scholarship money will go away and then that all effects what schools I’ll be able to transfer to. It’s just a lot of pressure,” explained another student with heavy disappointment in his voice. This disappointing tone was echoed with the overwhelming majority of the students interviewed.
Some of the students, while not proud of cheating, had a lighthearted tone and would laugh it off while going over the how and why they had cheated. A hand full of others had little to no remorse, with one stating, “We have a college system that is designed to screw you over as much as possible, at every chance they get. So if I have a chance to make things a little easier for myself then I’m going to take it and if it screws them in the process, then good.”
Another student added, “Look, at the end of the day, when you’re all done here, all other schools and jobs are going to see is your GPA and your degree. Do you really think they care how you got those two things? Because they don’t and those are the only two things they care about, did you do good in college and did you finish. Nothing else matters.” That’s a very condemning statement, one that most students agreed with on varying levels.
So, now that we have taken a peek into one of the well know taboos of college education, does it change your perception on cheating? Or does it reinforce the feelings you have already had? One thing is for sure, though, not all students cheat because they are slackers. For many, it was a survival instinct that kicked in out of a fear of failure, not just failure in the classroom but a failure that could have a long lasting ripple effect on the rest of their lives. Not that it makes cheating ok, because it doesn’t. It just makes it a little easier to understand what brings most students to their individual breaking point.
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