Cheating has always been the unspoken elephant in schools. Teachers don’t want to experience it, and students don’t want to get caught doing it.
Just like schools have evolved over the years, so has cheating. What started as writing answers on your hand changed to taping a sheet on the inside of your shirt. Now, some students are using technology to get ahead on tests.
“I’ve heard of students in the first row texting the answers to the students in the back row, but I can’t see how that would work,” said UNA professor Dr. Jim Martin.
Many teachers are taking action on cheating from the very start by banning cell phones and Internet surfing in class altogether.
An article from takepart.com stated that cheating is at an all-time high with even the teachers getting involved by giving out answers prior to the test or even changing wrong ones while grading. However, with more effort to elude detection comes even more effort to detect it. Caveon is a company dedicated to detecting cheaters and educating teachers on how to catch them in class.
Even with more preventative actions taking place in schools across the nation, cheaters still get through.
“In my advanced reporting class, I had one student whose beat was fraternities and sororities,” Martin said. “He wrote an acceptable article with two different sources about the activity. However, for whatever reason, The Flor-Ala did not publish it. Two years later, unbeknownst to me, one of the young ladies in the class turned in a fraternity-sorority story. I didn’t recognize it and The Flor-Ala ran the story. They assumed that since The Flor-Ala didn’t run it once they wouldn’t run it again.”
Instances like this are not completely uncommon at UNA, but Martin believes that just as easy as it is to cheat with technology, it is even easier to detect it.
“If I suspect a phrase or quote of being suspicious, I’ll usually google it,” he said.
While the university is tight-lipped on previous plagiarism cases that have gone to trial, their policies are more than clear. In fact, all professors are required to include the university’s plagiarism policies on the syllabus at the start of the year.
While cheating cases are not nonexistent at UNA, Martin feels they are significantly less common than at other universities.
“I honestly believe that most students [at UNA] are honest and hardworking. Other universities may have more of a problem [with cheating],” said Martin.
While cheating will never really be eliminated from educational settings, it is clear that teachers and faculty will not sit back and let it happen. Steps will continually be made to further educate on how to prevent cheating.
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