Academic Cheating Essay, Research Paper

Academic cheating is a major problem on all levels and has negative results on everyone involved. The person cheating is learning nothing by taking the easy way out and the people being cheated off of from are being cheated themselves. There are no solutions that are both total and cheap, one or the other must be sacrificed to some extent. Although academic cheating is a problem that reaches almost all schools in the nation and most classrooms, there are solutions that may be used that are reasonably effective.

There are several contributory causes of academic cheating. Lack of respect for oneself could lead to cheating. If someone does not care about their education and their gaining of knowledge then cheating, to them, would be the best alternative to actually doing some work and studying. Another contributory cause is laziness. A lazy student would rather cheat off of their neighbor than do the work themselves and study. Usually procrastination is involved in this situation. The students puts off studying until it is to late and then cheating, in their minds, is the easiest and quickest way out of the situation. This has a negative result on everyone. The person cheating learns nothing and chances are that this pattern of behavior will follow them throughout their life. The person who is being cheated off of put in all the time required to study and the person who cheated did nothing but glance over at someone else s work. This results in ruining class averages, class ranks, and the class standings of those who actually work hard to make their grades.

The major cause of cheating in the school system is pressure. There is tremendous pressure on students to make good grades. Many different factors can lead to the placing of pressure on a student. Pressure from parents, peers, and personal expectations are all forces that put incredible weight on the shoulders of students. These pressures can easily drive a student to cheat because, to them it is the only way to be completely sure of making a good grade and satisfying the expectations of everyone who expects a certain result from someone.

Cheating has no real and complete solution. Many different schools have many different ways of dealing with this problem but none of them are absolute. On solution that school have been using for some time is the honor system . It uses a student s own guilty conscience to keep them from cheating. Most of the time the students are required to sign an agreement, which states their pledge to uphold this system. However, the effectiveness of this system depends on the type of students that attend the school. If the students are untrustworthy and selfish then, of course, the chances of this system actually working are slim. If the students are concerned about their education and have worked hard to get where they have then the system will be quite effective.

Another possible solution to academic cheating might be to install cameras in the classrooms. This method would be able to monitor the student far better than just a single teachers who peak over the tops of the books they are reading as their students are taking a test. Installing video cameras in the classrooms would be very costly but the results would be great. There would be very little cheating, if any, during classroom activities. However, since cheating is not confined to in class assignment the cameras would have their limits as well.

Academic cheating is a problem that deserves considerable attention. Those who cheat are robbing themselves and the people from whom they cheated. There is no real easy solution to resolve academic cheating, but there is not to any large problem. However, there are methods of lowering the amount of cheating done in academics substantially. If academic cheating is handled for no other reason, then it should be done for the good of the future. What is to happen to this nation if a workforce of cheaters are sent out into the world?