Cheating in Academic Institutions

Cheating in Academic Institutions

The most infamous incident to happen at Harvard University in 2012 was the “Harvard Cheating Scandal,” in which 125 Harvard University students were suspected of cheating on a take-home final exam, that shocked the public. Jay Harris, the Dean of undergraduate education, described the case as “unprecedented in its scope and magnitude” (qtd. in Perez-Pena, par. 6). People do not seem surprised that the below average students are sometimes caught cheating in academic institutions; however, cheating is not a rarity in top universities such as Harvard either. It appears that all the college students have the opportunity to cheat. Professor Donald L. McCabe reports in his university study that roughly 50 percent college students across the country confessed to plagiarism; furthermore, 21 percent have confessed to “more severe” form of cheating, such as theft of test answers. (Tilman, par. 3). Why do college students cheat? Sociologists and psychologists have studied academic dishonesty issues for years; the fear of failure, the desire to get good grades without studying hard, and the false belief that peers do the same are the three reasons most people agree on the rationales for cheating.

One fundamental cause of cheating is the fear of failure. If a student didn’t study enough for an exam and didn’t want to fail it, he or she might consider cheating to get a better score than what he or she actually deserves. To many college students, the motivation of cheating in an exam is not the hope of success, but the fear of failure. It’s a choice of either failure or being caught for cheating, and if the chance of failure is greater than the chance of being caught cheating, it is worth a shot. Among the 125 students involved in the Harvard Cheating Scandal, most of the students chose to “collaborate” on their exams because they were scared of not getting an A for that class. Alexandra Petri, a weekly columnist for The Washington Post, discusses the anxiety students feel of the over the prospect of failure, stating that “If we fail, even once, we’ll become failures” (par. 9). Some students are very devoted to daily study and review before exams, but they are weak in psychological quality. A typical problem with these students is that their minds go blank during the exam. The competition fright results in test anxiety and the fear of failing an exam among the students.

Another significant cause of why college students cheat on exams is they can easily get a good score. Why bother to study if you can get a good score just by cheating? Some classes, such as history, require the students to memorize many things for the exam. Some students might think it is easier to copy things down from a cheat sheet than spend the time to actually study for the exam. Deborah Eerkes, director of the student judicial affairs office at the University of Alberta, says