Teacher's Involvement in Student's Cheating Behavior
Plagiarism has been an increasing problem worldwide and has only gotten worse since the start of the digital era. Students now have much more tools to cheat and cut corners when it comes to testing and assignments. Teaching has not undergone any major changes to combat this, it has even worsened due to new teachers cheating to get where they are now (Deshpande Rajeshwari, 2011). The influence the teaching community has on why students cheat is very big, only behind parents’ influence (Sangma, Zeetha M., et al., 2018). Here I will discuss how teachers affect students and what should they do to prevent cheating.
Affecting a Student
Dr. Zeetha M Sangma et al., 2018, found out that ⅘ students felt pressure to succeed, which then made them cheat. The second most common external factor was pressure by teachers with 40.6% of students choosing this option. Almost half of the students felt the need to cheat due to the pressure imposed by teachers, which makes this look like teachers boycotting themselves. This study then continues talking about other outcomes that come from the pressure students have, such as less sleep time or depression.
If students that are pressured to succeed don’t end up doing good it may hurt their thought of themselves. In Cross et al., 2019, it was found that how students think of themselves helps determine how likely they are to cheat or plagiarize. Students with higher self-esteem are less likely to cheat than those with lower self-esteem. Teachers that bring down their students with excessive pressure and maybe even shame them for their low grades may provoke the student's self-esteem to drop. This makes him think he is not good enough to succeed on his own and may resort to cheating to pass the class, again showing that a teacher's actions might go back to haunt them.
Another great factor that was found out by Finn et al., 2004, was that what the student thinks of the teacher helps determine how likely he is to cheat. If a student likes the teacher more he is less likely to cheat. I can back this claim since I always try to give my 100% in the classes where I like the teacher, and I’m lazier to succeed in a class where I don’t actually feel a connection with the teacher. The study also ties their finding to self-esteem by talking about how if a teacher makes the student feel capable, he will feel it and succeed on his own without cheating.
To try and find out how teacher involvement affects students in my own community, my team and I did an experiment and surveyed 101 high school students of MAST Academy to ask them the reasons behind why they cheat, and how they cheat. We found out that 83.2% of students cheat and that one of the main reasons for this in MAST Academy is due to teachers, with 55.4% of students choosing this option. Even if it doesn’t seem important and not related, the way teachers act and teach relates directly to how many people cheat or plagiarize.
Solutions
Teachers have many options at hand to try and combat plagiarism and cheating within their classrooms. Through my research, I found out that there are 2 main approaches to try and do this correctly. The first one is more strict and focuses on changing things that mostly affect students. The other approach is more focused on both students and teachers making changes, to try and both do better.
The first approach which can be considered more strict may work very well at the start but its effectiveness may fall down as time passes. The first approach, which is proposed by Professor Matthew C. Woessner in Beating the House: How Inadequate Penalties for Cheating Make Plagiarism an Excellent Gamble (2004), is to increase penalties for people found cheating. Mr. Woessner in his article compares gambling with cheating and suggests that if the payout (not getting caught and having a good grade without trying) is much better than the punishment for losing (punishment for getting caught cheating) people are going to keep trying to cheat, even if the odds of succeeding get smaller by teachers implementing things to prevent cheating. Mr. Woessner concludes his article by saying that the correct punishment to prevent cheating is: telling school authorities, an F on the assignment, F on the following assignment. Mr. Woessner states that the two F’s will prevent students from cheating greatly due to them not being able to lift the first F with the following assignment as this is what most student plan for if they get caught. As I stated before this approach is more strict and focuses more on changing what happens to the student. It will also become less effective as time passes because students will eventually find a way to cheat.
The second option for teachers to try and prevent cheating is to try and build a meaningful relationship with each student and try to lift them up while doing that. This option is backed by two studies already mentioned here. The first study is by Finn et al., 2004, and the second one being Cross et al., 2019. Both studies talk about a student's self-esteem and how it affects them regarding cheating. While Cross et al., 2019, focus more on the student alone, the study done by Finn et al., 2004, focuses on how a student's self-esteem is affected by a school environment (especially by teachers), and how that affects their chance of cheating. Both studies agree that as a student's self-esteem is higher the less likely they are to cheat, grabbing this while also adding that teachers will try to make good and meaningful relationships with each student, which was found to help prevent cheating (Finn et al., 2004,), will be the other solution. This may not work perfectly at first since students will take advantage at the beginning but as their relationship with the teacher grows the cheating will stop and this will last for a long time since the relationship is already formed and will become harder to break.
Teachers play a very important role in how often and why students cheat so it can be said that they are, in some way, responsible for the cheating that is happening in their classroom. We should all work together to try and stop cheating. Teachers have options to try and prevent it, as the ones I mentioned. As a student myself I think both options proposed are good solutions. The best one though would be a mixture of both. We should increase the punishment to a certain level so that students actually feel punished if they get caught, while also trying to increase the relationship between students and teachers since I think this is the core of the solution. Once a strong relationship is built between the student and the teacher, that student is likely to never cheat again in that class (Finn et al., 2004,).