Academic Cheating Essay: The Causes Of Academic Bullying

“If you can’t beat them, join them.” Some individuals make this statement to justify events in life. Academic cheating is a widespread issue and also very difficult to combat. Cheating undermines the student’s assessments because at the end of the school year the student is on ground zero. Academic cheating has no social status, age range or race. The causes include competition for grades, attitudes of students and parents with regard to cheating, technology, policies on cheating, and situational and dispositional factors. Competition for grades and difficulty of materials is one of the causes of cheating. Academically, students need very good grades in order to get honors and recognitions, but not every student wants to earn …show more content…
Nowadays, students are always looking for loopholes and shortcuts in everyday life. The ease, access and abundance of materials via the internet make it more difficult to resist cheating. Students are encouraged to use this medium for good, but alas, some students are just not ready to learn the right way. For example, when students are given some mathematical exercises, they post them online for answers without trying to find the solutions. According to McCabe, the internet makes it easier to cut and paste assignments, and plagiarize individuals’ thesis with ease (682).Technology also introduced another type of cheating known as contract cheating. Contract cheating is basically hiring an individual to do the coursework. Research showed that contract cheating is very difficult to detect because it is more fraudulent and is connected to a range of systematic problems within higher education (Walker 27). This era of technology is both a curse and a blessing to students in general and the community at …show more content…
These factors affect the students’ views and decisions. Some students blame the teachers’ inability to finish the course work in class, thus leaving the student to do most of the learning. In some cases, lack of morals and ethics by both the student and teacher may lead to cheating. McCabe suggested that in some schools, the teacher will leave the class during the test; to the students this is the time for cheating (685). These situations may influence student to think that cheating is good because the teacher allowed it to happen. Sadly, the honest students are made to “help” the dishonest students during the test. The size of a class can also affect the students’ decisions to cheat. It is easier to cheat in a large class because it is more difficult to supervise the