Methods Of Preventing Academic Dishonesty

Teachers should encourage students to be academically honest through positive reinforcement, support, trust, and a combined effort. Cheating is a global phenomenon that happens too often, and all over the world, schools strive for academic integrity. We all want to be successful, and some of us go about it differently than others. Some of us are innately honest and others are dishonest. Those of us who are honest will work tirelessly for their success while the dishonest ones will find a way to cheat to get the results they desire. Teachers have tried many techniques to make sure students are academically honest, but even with the teachers’ tireless efforts, students still cheat. Is it because these cheating prevention methods aren’t effective or is it because the students are unethical?

Detentions, suspensions, and expulsions: these are methods teachers and schools use consistently to tackle cheating. How often does this work? A student will cheat on their test, and as a result, they get a zero and a detention. How does this stop them from cheating again? It simply doesn’t, therefore, that student will cheat again, and again. Punishments like these are given to students all the time, yet cheating still occurs. This is because a punishment doesn’t teach them how to make themselves better. It only tells them that they did something wrong.

Well, how exactly does one teach a cheater not to cheat? The answer is giving them positive reinforcement, offering support, and showing them a certain amount of trust.

This is why honor codes like Stanford’s work. Stanford’s honor code not only puts responsibility on the students to be academically honest, but the faculty are mentioned as well. “The faculty on its part manifests its confidence in the honor of its students by refraining from proctoring exams,” is a small part of a larger statement from Stanford’s honor code which shows not only shared responsibility between students and faculty, but a sense of trust. By not proctoring exams, it sends a message to the students that the faculty trusts them enough that they don’t feel the need to watch them constantly. Of course there are still punishments for cheaters, but when students are shown trust like they are in Stanford’s honor code, it makes ground for a more academically honest environment.

Breeding an environment of trust and integrity is crucial for an honor code to work. For instance, in schools such as the University of Virginia, students take immense pride in the tradition of their honor code and expect it from their peers to be academically honest. When such honor codes are “closely identified with the institution itself,” a sense of pride from being known as a school that is academically honest is created and thus, a culture of academic honesty is born. With most people having a “follow the herd” mentality, when the majority of students are academically honest, others are encouraged to be academically honest as well, a phenomenon which is known as the feedback loop.

This method doesn’t always work and when it does, it usually tends to work better at schools with a more sophisticated reputation. For other schools, academic dishonesty is still prevalent, and one way to tackle it is through positive reinforcement. It is in our nature to want encouragement and rewards. Positive reinforcement is a tactic that many parents use to teach their kids lessons. We can translate this technique over into the school setting and use it to tackle academic dishonesty. For instance, in a situation where someone is caught being academically dishonest, instead of making them out to be a villain and discrediting their nature, a better way would be to offer them extra help if they need on the next assignment, because the most common reason that students cheat is because of their lack of confidence in their knowledge. If teachers took the time to help the student, it would allow the students to build up confidence which will give them a reason to no longer cheat. Of course this doesn’t mean cheating doesn’t go unpunished, rather it means that instead of just pointing out the problem, teachers should help be a part of the solution.

Since everyone is human and everyone has their own standards of integrity, the positive reinforcement method will not work on everyone. There is always the occasional “bad nut,” who seems relentless in their efforts to keep cheating. These kinds of people are the most frustrating to deal with because they only seek the easy way out regardless of the help being offered to them. Even with these students, teachers should not publicly shame them, because there are times when teachers publically address a cheater. This only discourages the student and it maybe even encourages them to cheat more. For students like this, they should be dealt with privately and given a stern talk which could involve other faculty and their parents, an intervention of sorts.

One of the biggest reasons that many honor codes don’t work is because there is no joint effort between the faculty and the students. Many honor codes rely solely on students to be academically honest but mention nothing about the faculty’s role in academic honesty. Yes, it is true that the students are the ones learning, but the expectations for academic honesty should go both ways, and teachers need to be incorporated into honor codes. This is something that Harvard students have pointed out and they said that “the norms for professors are more ambiguous,” compared to students. Teachers are not required to take the same steps that students are to prove that they are being academically honest. For instance, teachers don’t have to cite sources for lectures while students are punished severely for even forgetting to cite one source. When honesty is only expected of one group of people in a joint-effort community, it seems not only unfair, but implies that the issue is not serious.

Students face a lot of pressure from parents, especially in Asian cultures where anything less than perfect is unacceptable. This is an incentive for many students to cheat since they feel that this is the only way to satisfy their parents. Through positive reinforcement, support and trust, teachers cannot help unload some of the pressure from the students, but create a more academically honest culture. A joint effort from both parties is required, and when a student is transformed from a cheater to an academically honest person, they set an example for others to be academically honest as well, creating an environment of integrity and honesty.