Why Do Students Cheat?

By Kamryn Casebeer

Have you ever cheated on a test? Ever written the answers on your hand? Used AI in an essay? I’m sure even if you haven’t, the thought has crossed your mind, just to get a good grade. According to Why Students Cheat and What to Do About it, “more than half of high school students admitted to cheating on a test, while 74 percent reported copying their friends’ homework.”

Cheating on your work in high school has become easier and easier as technology advances, because we have things like AI and Google that can give you the answer within seconds, but the question is, how are you supposed to learn if you just look up the answers? Crystal Onago, our Marine Biology and Biology teacher, reported that she typically uses Securely to watch students’ computers during tests and quizzes, and that she has found that more of her students who are in honors classes cheat than the students in her regular classes do. Evidently, honors classes have harder coursework than regular classes do, which means that the tests are harder too, which could be the reason why she noticed that. There is also the possibility that students in honors classes have higher expectations, and may be worried about getting good grades, which may be why they are more inclined to cheat.

Using the internet to do your work is all fun and games until you have to take a test on that subject and you have no clue what you’re doing and ultimately get a bad grade. This also raises red flags for teachers because as students are finding different ways to cheat, teachers are learning how they are doing it.

“High-achieving students who feel pressured to attain perfection may turn to cheating as a way to find an edge on the competition or to keep a single bad test score from sabotaging months of hard work,” said Andrew Simmons on “Why Students Cheat and What to Do About It.” This can prove that when students are pressured to get borderline perfect grades, and feel like they can’t achieve it, they might feel like cheating is going to help them.

Using AI or the internet to cheat means finding ways to be sneaky about it, such as different websites that paraphrase it to make it sound more like a human, and AI checkers to see how much AI was used. Those AI checkers aren’t always accurate, which can affect students because if they didn’t cheat, but their teachers may think that they did. The University of Kansas Center for Teaching Excellence says that the TurnItIn.com AI detection tool is 98% accurate but has a margin of error of around 15%. So how accurate are these AI detection tools?

As seen previously, students may feel the need to cheat if they are under a lot of pressure, but it has also been noticed that when students are assigned “busy work,” the easiest way to get through it is to use the internet. Having significantly long assignments can also play a factor in cheating because students could also feel as though they have better ways they could be spending their time when they have been assigned really long assignments. It can be shown that some students learn better when they are hearing and seeing what they are learning, like a lesson. Being given an assignment that is just filling in the blanks and technically easy to cheat on isn’t the most beneficial way to learn.

When students feel like they are under pressure to get good grades, whether this is from themselves, parents, or even teachers, turning to cheating might feel like a good solution, but that is not the case. Cheating in school can come with major repercussions and is not worth the trouble. This can look like failing a class, suspension, etc. Teachers are there for a reason, and it is better to reach out for help instead of risking trouble.