AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER CARY GRANT

What stands behind academic dishonesty?

The irrefutable fact is that the scale of academic dishonesty increases with each year to come. Undoubtedly, there are a slew of ulterior reasons that force students to trick their instructors. Why even the best students feel compelled to cheat. We will try to figure out the most common causes, which stand behind academic dishonesty.

• Many students blame their high workload. In fact, students are always up to the elbows in work. Their life is so hectic that at times they can’t manage to juggle life, work, studies, and friends. So, they are compelled to look for the way out of the situation, asking for help other people and excessively resorting to the help of the Internet.

• Good students plagiarize because they feel pressure from family and peers. They want to maintain established reputation and don’t want to do modestly well, because they got used to be at the top of the class. Good students don’t want to undermine their authority. The new research has shown that in the past it was the struggling student who was more likely to cheat just to get by. Today it is above – average college bound students who are cheating.

• • No wonder that in the intense competition, students do everything to go ahead. According to the 1998 poll of Who’s Who Among American High School Students, 80% of the country’s best students cheated to get to the top of their class.
• • There are demands from society for people to be knowledgeable. Having overloaded schedule and stressful life, students can’t cover all the facets of knowledge. Naturally students are eager to meet the demands of society, getting good job, earning much money, and they vigorously try to elbow the way through the crowd to the top.
• • “The grading system fosters competitive, zero-sum game spirit in which if one wins, the others lose.” Grades have been made the major focus of many students, and there is a great pressure for high grades. In the contemporary educational system grades measure not only the abilities of students, but also talents, potential, and even the individual prestige and authority of the students among their peers.

• Students cheat because they see others cheating, they don’t want to be unfairly disadvantaged. Freshmen see that cheating and plagiarism are a campus norm and they go with the stream. What is more, they see cheating in every facet of life: politics, business, home, and school.

• What can be done to diminish the scale of academic dishonesty?

Reading Donald Norman’s article “In Defense of Cheating”, I excerpted one passage, which offers a very sensible solution to the cheating problem.