Students Using Technology to Cheat Show There is a Problem With the System

Date: June 22, 2009; Discussion: 0 Comments

Education Week published an article on the 18th of June, Students Often Use Technology to Cheat, Poll Finds, which discusses a recent Common Sense Media polling [PDF] of over 2,000 students in grades 7-12, as well as parents who have children in those grades. The overall results were that over a third of kids cheat, and many are using mobile phones to do so.

To those of us who all but live and breathe all that which is geeky, this surely comes as no surprise. What? Children are using the tools that were essentially put in their hands from birth? You don’t say! I would be more concerned if these students weren’t taking advantage of these tools. It would be on par with rejecting the use of fire and the wheel, and I’m pretty sure that those who did that back in the day weren’t too successful in the long run.

Unfortunately, many parents and teachers don’t see it this way at all, which would explain why so many teachers and schools ban technological devices in the classroom. This does not, however, solve the problem. It only relieves a symptom of the problem. Arguably, those banning the devices don’t even have a firm grasp on what the problem is, much less how to deal with it.

So, firstly, why do students cheat?

People obviously cheat for a variety of reasons, but I think the majority of school cheating falls into one or more of the following categories.

Students cheat because they don’t think the subject matter is important.
Students cheat because they aren’t interested in the subject matter, as individuals.
Students cheat because the systems of incentive and/or punishment are ill-balanced.

To me, this isn’t rocket science, and I’m not quite sure why teachers and parents expect extraordinary things from young people that they themselves do not do. Young people are human, and I believe many are quite likely to cheat if one or more of the above issues exists. If the importance of a subject’s matter is not explained, they will tune out and possibly cheat to cover that up. If the subject matter is made to be boring and tedious, or is a requirement that they are particularly uninterested in, they will not try hard and may cheat to get by. If non-cheating students don’t see benefits from not cheating, few will see the point in remaining honest. If cheating students aren’t punished enough for cheating, they won’t see a reason to stop.

These are not alien concepts. They are concepts that adults have and act on every day. People cut corners, don’t listen in meetings and they even stalk people during work hours. Some do the same in their personal lives, even. To varying degrees, these are all dishonest and harmful to individuals and society as a whole. We can’t blame technology, a tool, for this, nor I think a change in morals. We can only blame human nature, which of course isn’t likely to change anytime soon, and strict control rarely works against it.

Is cheating okay? No, of course not. We want honesty in people’s actions, because honesty creates peaceful reliability and stability within society. But just because cheating is wrong, doesn’t mean we should stick to outdated systems and force young people to live and learn as if they’re in a world without technological devices. Information, both good and bad, is abundant. We should not act as if it’s otherwise. Doing so only promotes ignorance and, I think, corner-cutting and cheating.

Is it really appropriate to act like these technologies don’t exist?

At 22, I’m no longer fresh out of high school, but if things are in any way similar to how they were several years ago, I know technology is condemned by a majority of teachers. I think there are a combination of reasons for this.

The first possible reason is ignorance on the part of the teacher. Few teachers have attempted to keep up with the technologies that their students use. (I even frequently encountered this in my multimedia degree.) This is not a student’s fault, and computer and Internet challenged teachers should not feel ashamed for being out of the loop; instead, they should be open to learning.

Another possible reason, and the most likely of them all, is that it is sometimes easier to stick to old ways than to adopt and adapt to the new. However, just like cheating is wrong, being stubborn and unrealistic is as well.

So what’s the solution?

I think a possible solution is to train young people, particularly those in secondary school, in how to identify good and reliable sources online, as well as how to correctly use them (i.e., not to unwittingly plagiarize). (To teachers reading this: The answer isn’t as simple as “don’t use Wikipedia or blogs,” so please can that broken record response.) What this will mean is a redefinition of cheating. To me, a student using a dictionary in the classroom, when writing an essay, is not cheating, as this is something anyone with a career in writing will do. Likewise, using the technology that is readily available to you, to hopefully find an answer to a question, as well as the way the answer was arrived at, is not cheating; it’s good researching.

An over-quoted Chinese proverb comes to mind with all this. “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” When teachers and schools ban digital devices from the classroom, we are only left teaching children in the day that we have; we’re feeding them on that day, in that semester. They may or, more likely, may not remember all the information taught in that day or semester. They have an outdated, tedious way to record the information—pen and paper—and their ability to branch out and research subtopics of the topics taught are destroyed. These things make it exponentially harder to retain the information and put it into a useful context for the individuals participating.

However, if we teach these children how to find reliable information and use it well, they will never be without it; they will always be able to learn and apply that learning—easily. They will be able to record and organize and have everything at their fingertips. When we teach children to use dictionaries and thesauri, the language used in their essays tends to improve. Imagine, then, teaching children how to properly use the tools of the Internet.

What is it that makes us think remembering everything means that someone knows much at all?

Are grades and cheating really what we should worry about?

The concern about cheating is that it breaks the system that so many of us so foolishly believe in 100%, but maybe the system should be torn apart. Maybe it was broken from the very beginning. Technology and all its devices, if used correctly, give us a chance, more than ever before, to have a truly personalized learning experience that is based on the concept of learning and education, rather than hazy goal setting and supposed achievements.

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