Academic Dishonesty: Movie Analysis

When my father was a kid, he was considered an exceptional student that didn’t speak out of turn and didn’t cheat on tests. Nowadays, the perception about someone being a “good student,” no longer matters. People cheat, and some more often than others. When asked about why people cheat, the most common answer is, “It’s easy and the class is hard.” It seems that academic dishonesty is more common among the Millennials due to various ways of cheating, like through technology. An article called, Addressing Academic Dishonesty in the Age of Ubiquitous Technology by Berlin Fang, they spoke about an Oklahoma Christian University where all the students have an electronic device provided to them by the school. It says, “With our infrastructure, technology …show more content…
Does it make them bad people? In the film, (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies, directed by Yael Melamede, it talks about, “The Fudge Factor.” In simple terms, “The Fudge Factor” can be explained as the ability to misbehave, but still be good people. It’s practically a person’s deciding line on what is okay and what is not okay. But how does someone get drawn into that theory? Just recently, my class of three had finished an essay test for a Government class. However, one of the students was not present because they were gone on a trip. When they came back, they asked me about the test. I simply answered, “It was so easy that I could tell you what was on the …show more content…
In this situation, it’s more of a curse. More people tend to cheat because of their peers. In a study called, Attitudes and Behaviors Related to Academic Honesty: A Survey of Taiwanese Graduate Students, written by Shu Ching Yang, they stated, “Students who reported engaging in misconduct reported significantly higher estimates in peer involvement in misconduct than did students who did not report involvement in misconduct” (Yang, 219). Now, wondering if they students in this study weren’t lying, then this would be a giant estimate of students.
In my experience, I’ve seen peer involvement being a huge factor of cheating. There was a cheating incident in one of my classes where the students were relentless. They would take pictures of the exams and share them through a chat on a social media app. I wasn’t aware of what was going on at the time, but a close friend of mine had fallen into the trenches of peer pressure. They were included in the chat but had no interest to use the answers to get a good mark. They explained how the answers wouldn’t get out of their head and it just came