When I was in high school, a stranger shot a BB gun through the screen door of my family’s home. No one was seriously hurt, thank goodness (a ricochet just grazed my sister’s ankle), but it was a scary experience that clearly could have been much worse. For weeks after the incident, I kept trying to understand why anyone would do such a thing. What would possess someone to do something so reckless and stupid?
One doesn’t have to look far these days to find examples of human behavior that are hard to understand. And, in the age of social media, it’s also easy to find all sorts of people speculating on the motives of others. An incident occurs, and people rush to Facebook to theorize about other people’s motives, what triggered them to act, etc. etc.
All of which leads me to the topic of this blog, which is cheating in school. I don’t know if cheating and plagiarism are on the rise, but I do know that faculty everywhere are worried about this issue. A large survey by Tyton Partners found that preventing cheating was the #1 instructional concern among faculty in 2023 – up 10 places from the previous year. Generative AI like ChatGPT has made it easier for students to cheat, although cheating is clearly not a new problem. (Students have probably been cheating since the dawn of compulsory education, and students of means have long had the option to buy test answers or pay someone to write their term papers.)
Obviously, we can’t solve the problem of cheating simply by worrying about it. But we also can’t solve it solely by punishing and policing it. Many of us have strong plagiarism polices on our syllabi, we rigorously scan our Turnitin reports – and still, sometimes, students cheat. To address not just cheating but the larger issue of academic integrity, we need to explore the reasons why students cheat. And it turns out there are quite a few.
To be sure, there are certain students who simply don’t want to do the work, look for short cuts, and feel like they are “getting one over” when they cheat. But we shouldn’t assume that is every student’s rationale. The University of Buffalo’s Office of Academic Integrity provides a helpful list of reasons why students cheat on its website. Among them are poor time management, stress, and overload. The authors also note that fear of failure or an inability to understand the assignment also sometimes lead students to cheat. And if they observe their peers cheating and not getting caught, students may feel like there is no reason for them not to cheat as well.
In an article for the AAC&U’s magazine Liberal Education, Brian McCoy highlights the role that pressure to succeed and fear of failure play in cheating. When the stakes are high, so is the temptation to cheat. Fear of failure can affect any student, but I imagine it is particularly acute for some of our populations like first-generation college students, who sometimes carry their weight of their family’s expectations to class. Dealing with pressure is, of course, part of college (and of life!). But this is a case where understanding reasons for cheating might help us make small adjustments that can reduce the likelihood of cheating while still holding students to high academic standards. Can we provide several practice quizzes before a big exam, so the test doesn’t feel as intimidating? Can we scaffold an essay assignment or project and break it into parts so that students don’t feel so much of their grade is riding on one document?
Torrey Trust, who teaches in the College of Education at UMass Amherst, provides additional insight in this excellent one-pager (which contains great links, too). Dr. Trust explains that students are more likely to cheat when courses focus more on grades than on learning, and when they don’t see their assignments as relevant or valuable. I find that last reason particularly intriguing, and another case where understanding why students cheat might lead us to make changes in our curriculum or methods. All of us have to learn things or complete work we don’t find particularly interesting. But our students are here of their own free will. If they don’t find the assignments we’re giving worth doing, why not? And how can we make more of our assignments feel relevant, purposeful and engaging – and therefore, worth doing without cheating – to our students?
To be crystal clear: NONE of the reasons above makes cheating OK. Students are responsible for knowing what constitutes cheating and plagiarism, and they should face the consequences of their decisions. But clearly there’s some difference between a student who cheats because they just don’t care and a student who cheats because they are overwhelmed. Knowing why a student cheats doesn’t change the consequences, but it may change how we work with that student in the future. (For example, a student who cheats because they are drowning in stress or doesn’t understand the assignment probably needs additional support from an advisor or tutor.) That’s why it’s so important to talk with our students about plagiarism, cheating and academic integrity, both as a group when going over our policies, and individually when cases of cheating arise. Those conversations can be frank and even stern, but we also need to listen to students about why they decide to cheat. If we better understand the causes behind their actions, we have more information about how to guide them back onto the path.
These conversations are even more important with the advent of AI tools like ChatGPT. In some ways, cheating is easier than it has ever been, and there is some legitimate ambiguity about the appropriate use of technology in academic work. For several years, I’ve used this simple anonymous survey to spark class discussion about using technology on assignments. Talking about the survey results has opened up great conversations about what constitutes cheating, when technology is helpful and when it is not, and why academic integrity is important in the first place. My students have also asked great questions about the grey area that exists in this area. They all know they shouldn’t copy and paste from ChatGPT. But if they ask ChatGPT to give them synonyms for a word, is that cheating? (If so, how is that different from using a thesaurus?) Can they use ChatGPT as a brainstorming partner? (And if not, how is that different from brainstorming with a friend or tutor?)
My students have also expressed frustration that their professors have different policies about the use of technology, different statements about cheating in their syllabi, and different consequences for plagiarism. Perhaps this is one area where we need to rethink our academic freedom as we define that term here at Massasoit. It’s certainly convenient for each of us to have our own policies about technology and plagiarism, but it’s hard to see how that helps students, especially when they have so many other differences to juggle among the classes they’re taking.
One other note about cheating: I think many teachers take it personally when they catch a student cheating. (I know I do!) We feel a flash of frustration, maybe even anger, and we may feel like students are trying to put one over on us, laughing behind our backs. In reality, of course, cheating isn’t personal; the student is trying to avoid doing their work for reasons that have nothing to do with us. I also know colleagues who devote countless extra hours checking for student plagiarism, running multiple AI detectors and scouring the Internet for copy-and-pasted text. We should definitely do our due diligence to catch and prevent cheating (and rely on useful tools like Turnitin), but we shouldn’t drive ourselves crazy about this issue. All that extra time we spend checking for plagiarism takes time away from designing engaging lessons, creating rich assignments – the kinds of things that will benefit the students who do want to learn – and I don’t know many teachers who went into the profession because they wanted to be the “plagiarism police.” Cheating is a big, institutional problem for colleges, and the responsibility for addressing it should not and cannot fall to faculty alone. If colleges are concerned that students are getting credits they haven’t earned, they need to develop institutional solutions to that problem.
We will probably never eradicate cheating, but we can do things to reduce the number of cases in which students decide to cheat. Understanding why students cheat is an essential part of the solution. Again, having a conversation with a student who has cheated isn’t being “soft” or excusing the behavior. It’s a way to gain a better understanding of the student’s motivations and situation, an understanding that we can build on to help the student not make the same bad decision twice. Ultimately, we don’t just want students to do their own work, we want them to have meaningful, purposeful learning experiences that they are eager to engage in. And we want them to understand the essential value of openness, honesty and integrity, qualities we could surely use more of in our world today.
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