how many students cheat on tests using phones

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How Teens Use Technology to Cheat in School

Why teens cheat, text messaging during tests, storing notes, copying and pasting, social media, homework apps and websites, talk to your teen.

• Expectations and Consequences

When you were in school, teens who were cheating were likely looking at a neighbor’s paper or copying a friend’s homework. The most high-tech attempts to cheat may have involved a student who wrote the answers to a test on the cover of their notebook.

Cheating in today’s world has evolved, and unfortunately, become pervasive. Technology makes cheating all too tempting, common, and easy to pull off. Not only can kids use their phones to covertly communicate with each other, but they can also easily look up answers or get their work done on the Internet.

In one study, a whopping 35% of teens admit to using their smartphones to cheat on homework or tests. 65% of the same surveyed students also stated they have seen others use their phones to cheat in school. Other research has also pointed to widespread academic indiscretions among teens.

Sadly, academic dishonesty often is easily normalized among teens. Many of them may not even recognize that sharing answers, looking up facts online, consulting a friend, or using a homework app could constitute cheating. It may be a slippery slope as well, with kids fudging the honesty line a tiny bit here or there before beginning full-fledged cheating.

For those who are well aware that their behavior constitutes cheating, the academic pressure to succeed may outweigh the risk of getting caught. They may want to get into top colleges or earn scholarships for their grades. Some teens may feel that the best way to gain a competitive edge is by cheating.

Other students may just be looking for shortcuts. It may seem easier to cheat rather than look up the answers, figure things out in their heads, or study for a test. Plus, it can be rationalized that they are "studying" on their phone rather than actually cheating.

Teens with busy schedules may be especially tempted to cheat. The demands of sports, a part-time job , family commitments, or other after-school responsibilities can make academic dishonesty seem like a time-saving option.

Sometimes, there’s also a fairly low risk of getting caught. Some teachers rely on an honor system, and in some cases, technology has evolved faster than school policies. Many teachers lack the resources to detect academic dishonesty in the classroom. However, increasingly, there are programs and methods that let teachers scan student work for plagiarism.

Finally, some teens get confused about their family's values and may forget that learning is the goal of schooling rather than just the grades they get. They may assume that their parent would rather they cheat than get a bad grade—or they fear disappointing them. Plus, they see so many other kids cheating that it may start to feel expected.

It’s important to educate yourself about the various ways that today’s teens are cheating so you can be aware of the temptations your teen may face. Let's look at how teens are using phones and technology to cheat.

Texting is one of the fastest ways for students to get answers to test questions from other students in the room—it's become the modern equivalent of note passing. Teens hide their smartphones on their seats and text one another, looking down to view responses while the teacher isn't paying attention.

Teens often admit the practice is easy to get away with even when phones aren't allowed (provided the teacher isn't walking around the room to check for cellphones).

Some teens store notes for test time on their cell phones and access these notes during class. As with texting, this is done on the sly, hiding the phone from view.  The internet offers other unusual tips for cheating with notes, too.

For example, several sites guide teens to print their notes out in the nutrition information portion of a water bottle label, providing a downloadable template to do so. Teens replace the water or beverage bottle labels with their own for a nearly undetectable setup, especially in a large class. This, of course, only works if the teacher allows beverages during class.

Rather than conduct research to find sources, some students are copying and pasting material. They may plagiarize a report by trying to pass off a Wikipedia article as their own paper, for example.

Teachers may get wise to this type of plagiarism by doing a simple internet search of their own. Pasting a few sentences of a paper into a search engine can help teachers identify if the content was taken from a website.

A few websites offer complete research papers for free based on popular subjects or common books. Others allow students to purchase a paper. Then, a professional writer, or perhaps even another student, will complete the report for them.

Teachers may be able to detect this type of cheating when a student’s paper seems to be written in a different voice. A perfectly polished paper may indicate a ninth-grade student’s work isn’t their own. Teachers may also just be able to tell that the paper just doesn't sound like the student who turned it in.

Crowdsourced sites such as Homework Helper also provide their share of homework answers. Students simply ask a question and others chime in to give them the answers.

Teenagers use social media to help one another on tests, too. It only takes a second to capture a picture of an exam when the teacher isn’t looking.

That picture may then be shared with friends who want a sneak peek of the test before they take it. The photo may be uploaded to a special Facebook group or simply shared via text message. Then, other teens can look up the answers to the exam once they know the questions ahead of time.

While many tech-savvy cheating methods aren’t all that surprising, some methods require very little effort on the student’s part. Numerous free math apps such as Photomath allow a student to take a picture of the math problem. The app scans the problem and spits out the answers, even for complex algebra problems. That means students can quickly complete the homework without actually understanding the material.

Other apps, such as HWPic , send a picture of the problem to an actual tutor, who offers a step-by-step solution to the problem. While some students may use this to better understand their homework, others just copy down the answers, complete with the steps that justify the answer.

Websites such as Cymayth and Wolfram Alpha solve math problems on the fly—Wolfram can even handle college-level math problems. While the sites and apps state they are designed to help students figure out how to do the math, they are also used by students who would rather have the answers without the effort required to think them through on their own.

Other apps quickly translate foreign languages. Rather than have to decipher what a recording says or translate written words, apps can easily translate the information for the student.

The American Academy of Pediatrics encourages parents to talk to teens about cheating and their expectations for honesty, school, and communication. Many parents may have never had a serious talk with their child about cheating. It may not even come up unless their child gets caught cheating. Some parents may not think it’s necessary to discuss because they assume their child would never cheat. 

However, clearly, the statistics show that many kids do engage in academic discretions. So, don’t assume your child wouldn’t cheat. Often, "good kids" and "honest kids" make bad decisions. Make it clear to your teen that you value hard work and honesty.

Talk to your teen regularly about the dangers of cheating. Make it clear that cheaters tend not to get ahead in life.

Discuss the academic and social consequences of cheating, too. For example, your teen might get a zero or get kicked out of a class for cheating. Even worse, other people may not believe them when they tell the truth if they become known as dishonest or a cheater. It could also go on their transcripts, which could impair their academic future.

It’s important for your teen to understand that cheating—and heavy cell phone use—can take a toll on their mental health , as well. Additionally, studies make clear that poor mental health, particularly relating to self-image, stress levels, and academic engagement, makes kids more likely to indulge in academic dishonestly. So, be sure to consider the whole picture of why your child may be cheating or feel tempted to cheat.

A 2016 study found that cheaters actually cheat themselves out of happiness. Although they may think the advantage they gain by cheating will make them happier, research shows cheating causes people to feel worse.

Establish Clear Expectations and Consequences

Deciphering what constitutes cheating in today's world can be a little tricky. If your teen uses a homework app to get help, is that cheating? What if they use a website that translates Spanish into English? Also, note that different teachers have different expectations and will allow different levels of outside academic support.

Expectations

So, you may need to take it on a case-by-case basis to determine whether your teen's use of technology enhances or hinders their learning and/or is approved by their teacher. When in doubt, you can always ask the teacher directly if using technology for homework or other projects is acceptable.

To help prevent cheating, take a firm, clear stance so that your child understands your values and expectations. Also, make sure they have any needed supports in place so that they aren't tempted to cheat due to academic frustrations or challenges.

Tell your teen, ideally before an incident of academic dishonesty occurs, that you don’t condone cheating of any kind and you’d prefer a bad grade over dishonesty.

Stay involved in your teen’s education. Know what type of homework your teen is doing and be aware of the various ways your teen may be tempted to use their laptop or smartphone to cheat.

To encourage honesty in your child, help them develop a healthy moral compass by being an honest role model. If you cheat on your taxes or lie about your teen’s age to get into the movies for a cheaper price, you may send them the message that cheating is acceptable.

Consequences

If you do catch your teen cheating, take action . Just because your teen insists, “Everyone uses an app to get homework done,” don’t blindly believe it or let that give them a free pass. Instead, reiterate your expectations and provide substantive consequences. These may include removing phone privileges for a specified period of time. Sometimes the loss of privileges —such as your teen’s electronics—for 24 hours is enough to send a clear message.

Allow your teen to face consequences at school as well. If they get a zero on a test for cheating, don’t argue with the teacher. Instead, let your teen know that cheating has serious ramifications—and that they will not get away with this behavior.

However, do find out why your teen is cheating. Consider if they're over-scheduled or afraid they can’t keep up with their peers. Are they struggling to understand the material? Do they feel unhealthy pressure to excel? Ask questions to gain an understanding so you can help prevent cheating in the future and ensure they can succeed on their own.

It’s better for your teen to learn lessons about cheating now, rather than later in life. Dishonesty can have serious consequences. Cheating in college could get your teen expelled and cheating at a future job could get them fired or it could even lead to legal action. Cheating on a future partner could lead to the end of the relationship.

A Word From Verywell

Make sure your teen knows that honesty and focusing on learning rather than only on getting "good grades," at all costs, really is the best policy. Talk about honesty often and validate your teen’s feelings when they're frustrated with schoolwork—and the fact that some students who cheat seem to get ahead without getting caught. Assure them that ultimately, people who cheat truly are cheating themselves.

Common Sense Media. It's ridiculously easy for kids to cheat now .

Common Sense Media. 35% of kids admit to using cell phones to cheat .

Isakov M, Tripathy A. Behavioral correlates of cheating: environmental specificity and reward expectation .  PLoS One . 2017;12(10):e0186054. Published 2017 Oct 26. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0186054

Marksteiner T, Nishen AK, Dickhäuser O. Students' perception of teachers' reference norm orientation and cheating in the classroom .  Front Psychol . 2021;12:614199. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.614199

Khan ZR, Sivasubramaniam S, Anand P, Hysaj A. ‘ e’-thinking teaching and assessment to uphold academic integrity: lessons learned from emergency distance learning .  International Journal for Educational Integrity . 2021;17(1):17. doi:10.1007/s40979-021-00079-5

Farnese ML, Tramontano C, Fida R, Paciello M. Cheating behaviors in academic context: does academic moral disengagement matter?   Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences . 2011;29:356-365. doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2011.11.250

Pew Research Center. How parents and schools regulate teens' mobile phones .

Mohammad Abu Taleb BR, Coughlin C, Romanowski MH, Semmar Y, Hosny KH. Students, mobile devices and classrooms: a comparison of US and Arab undergraduate students in a middle eastern university .  HES . 2017;7(3):181. doi:10.5539/hes.v7n3p181

Gasparyan AY, Nurmashev B, Seksenbayev B, Trukhachev VI, Kostyukova EI, Kitas GD. Plagiarism in the context of education and evolving detection strategies .  J Korean Med Sci . 2017;32(8):1220-1227. doi:10.3346/jkms.2017.32.8.1220

Bretag T. Challenges in addressing plagiarism in education .  PLoS Med . 2013;10(12):e1001574. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001574

American Academy of Pediatrics. Competition and cheating .

Korn L, Davidovitch N. The Profile of academic offenders: features of students who admit to academic dishonesty .  Med Sci Monit . 2016;22:3043-3055. doi:10.12659/msm.898810

Abi-Jaoude E, Naylor KT, Pignatiello A. Smartphones, social media use and youth mental health .  CMAJ . 2020;192(6):E136-E141. doi:10.1503/cmaj.190434

Stets JE, Trettevik R. Happiness and Identities . Soc Sci Res. 2016;58:1-13. doi:10.1016/j.ssresearch.2016.04.011

Lenhart A. Teens, Social Media & Technology Overview 2015 . Pew Research Center.

By Amy Morin, LCSW Amy Morin, LCSW, is the Editor-in-Chief of Verywell Mind. She's also a psychotherapist, an international bestselling author of books on mental strength and host of The Verywell Mind Podcast. She delivered one of the most popular TEDx talks of all time.

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35% of Teens Admit to Using Cell Phones to Cheat

National Poll Reveals Students’ Attitudes Toward Hi-Tech Cheating and Highlights Need for Parents and Educators to Set Guidelines and Address Consequences

Watch The Early Show segment. Read about this study in USA Today , the Los Angeles Times , and the San Francisco Chronicle .

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – Common Sense Media today released the results of a national poll on the use of digital media for cheating in school. The poll, conducted by The Benenson Strategy Group, revealed that more than 35% of teens admit to cheating with cell phones, and more than half admit to using the Internet to cheat. More importantly, many students don't consider their actions to be cheating at all. The results highlight a real need for parents, educators, and leaders to start a national discussion on digital ethics.

"The results of this poll should be a wake-up call for educators and parents," said James Steyer, CEO and founder of Common Sense Media. "Cell phones and the Internet have been a real game-changer for education and have opened up many avenues for collaboration, creation, and communication. But as this poll shows, the unintended consequence of these versatile technologies is that they've made cheating easier. The call to action is clear: Parents and educators have to be aware of how kids are using technology to cheat and then help our kids understand that the consequences for online cheating are just as serious as offline cheating."

Kids have always found ways to cheat, but the tools they have today are more powerful than ever. In this poll, kids reveal that they're texting each other answers during tests, using notes and information stored on their cell phones during tests, and downloading papers from the Internet to turn in as their own work. Because the digital world is distant, hard to track, and mostly anonymous, kids are less likely to see the consequences of their online actions, especially when they feel they won't get caught.

Common Sense Media is asking parents and educators to step in to help kids develop a set of guidelines to follow in the digital world and to understand that the rules of right and wrong in their offline lives also apply in their online lives. For parents, it's important to understand and embrace the media their kids are using and have a frank discussion about cheating and its implications. Educators need to be hyper aware of the amount of hi-tech cheating happening in their schools, talk to students about it, and establish rules and consequences for the classroom that reflect the reality of our kids' 24/7 media world.

Other key findings from the poll include:

• 41% of teens say that storing notes on a cell phone to access during a test is a serious cheating offense, while 23% don't think it's cheating at all.
• 45% of teens say that texting friends about answers during tests is a serious cheating offense, while 20% say it's not cheating at all.
• 76% of parents say that cell phone cheating happens at their teens' schools, but only 3% believe their own teen has ever used a cell phone to cheat.
• Nearly two-thirds of students with cell phones use them during school, regardless of school policies against it.
• Teens with cell phones send 440 text messages a week and 110 a week while in the classroom.

In conjunction with the poll, Common Sense Media is releasing a policy paper, "Digital Literacy and Citizenship in the 21st Century," which lays out its vision for educating, empowering, and protecting today's kids so they can develop the skills, knowledge, and ethics for today's digital world.

For full poll results, the policy paper, parent tips, and more, visit www.commonsensemedia.org/blog/cheating-goes-hi-tech .

To set up an interview with our experts, please use the contact information below.

About Common Sense Media Common Sense Media is the nation's leading nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the impact of media and entertainment on kids and families. Common Sense Media provides trustworthy ratings and reviews of media and entertainment based on child development criteria created by leading national experts. For more information, visit www.commonsensemedia.org .

About Benenson Strategy Group The Benenson Strategy Group is a nationally recognized strategic research and consulting firm with a reputation for being energetic, fast-paced, and analytically aggressive. Founded in 2001, The Benenson Strategy Group's clients include major nonprofit organizations, President Barack Obama, governors, U.S. Senators, members of Congress, international labor unions, and Fortune 100 companies. For more information, visit www.bsgco.com .

Press Contacts: Marlene Saritzky Vice President of Communications, Common Sense Media 415-553-6768 (direct) 415-713-1241 (cell) [email protected]

Marisa Connolly Communications Manager, Common Sense Media 415-553-6703 (direct) 617-699-4235 (cell) [email protected]

Students Cheating with Cell Phones Statistics [Infographic]

The tendency for students to cheat on tests and exams has existed since the beginning of education.

Cell phones and smartphones however, have only been around for a short period of time and have definitely increase the temptation for high school and college students to use modern technology to cheat in school.

See Also: Facebook’s Effect on Student Grades [Study]

As mobile technology continues to improve, we will continue to address the question of where the line is between cheating and being resourceful.

An infographic ( posted below ) was recently published by Online-Education.net that provides us with some insight on how common it is for students to use their mobile devices to cheat on tests and exams.

Students Cheating with Cell Phones Statistics Highlights:

• 35% of teens admit to using a cell phone at least once to cheat at school.
• 65% of teens report that other students use phones to cheat.
• 26% of students report using smartphones to store information to look at during a test.
• 17% of students report taking pictures of test questions to send to other peers.
• 20% of students admit to searching the interent for answers during a test.
• 76% of parents believe that cheating by using cell phones occurs at their child’s school.
• 25% of students do not consider the following acts cheating:
• Checking notes on a cell phone during a test.
• Searching the internet for an answer during a test.
• Texting friends with answers during a test.

Anson Alexander

I am an author, digital educator and content marketer. I record, edit, and publish content for AnsonAlex.com, provide technical and business services to clients and am an avid self-learner. I have also authored several digital marketing and business courses for LinkedIn Learning (previously Lynda.com).

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Another problem with shifting education online: cheating

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When universities went online in response to Covid-19, so did the tests their students took. But one of the people who logged on to take an exam in a pre-med chemistry class at a well-known mid-Atlantic university turned out not to be a student at all.

He was a plant. An imposter. A paid ringer.

Proctors — remote monitors some schools have hired to watch test-takers through their webcams — discovered by reviewing video recordings that this same person had taken tests for at least a dozen different students enrolled at seven universities across the country. The camera caught a spreadsheet tacked to the wall of his workspace with student names, course schedules, remote login information and passwords for websites that could feed him answers.

“We can only imagine what the rate of inappropriate testing activity is when no one is watching.” Scott McFarland, CEO, ProctorU

But he was in Qatar, beyond the reach of any attempts to hold him accountable, according to proctors familiar with the situation. They could not say what happened to the students who allegedly hired him.

It was a dramatic case, but far from unique. Universal online testing has created a documented increase in cheating, often because universities, colleges and testing companies were unprepared for the scale of the transformation or unable or unwilling to pay for safeguards, according to faculty and testing experts.

Even with trained proctors watching test-takers and checking their IDs, cheating is up. Before Covid-19 forced millions of students online, one of the companies that provides that service, ProctorU, caught people cheating on fewer than 1 percent of the 340,000 exams it administered from January through March. During the height of remote testing, the company says, the number of exams it supervised jumped to 1.3 million from April through June, and the cheating rate rose above 8 percent.

“We can only imagine what the rate of inappropriate testing activity is when no one is watching,” said Scott McFarland, CEO of ProctorU.

Related: As students fill summer courses, many ask: Why aren’t all colleges open in the summers?

And for most online test-takers, no one has been watching. One reason is that, as demand for online testing spiked, proctoring capacity was overwhelmed. One company, Examity, suspended its live proctoring services during the demand surge when its 1,000 proctors in India were locked down to curb the spread of the coronavirus there.

Ninety-three percent of instructors think students are more likely to cheat online than in person , according to a survey conducted in May by the publishing and digital education company Wiley. Only a third said they were using some type of proctoring to prevent it. Many colleges and universities moved ahead with online testing without supervision to save money. Others opted instead for less expensive, scaled-down kinds of test security, such as software that can lock a web browser while a student takes a test.

While locking a browser during an exam may help — and about 15 percent of instructors take that step, the Wiley survey found — it can’t stop other forms of cheating.

“You cannot give an exam if it is not proctored,” said Charles M. Krousgrill, a professor of engineering at Purdue, where faculty have been more willing to publicly discuss cheating than their counterparts at many other schools.

When, after the Covid shutdowns, Purdue gave students extra time to take their tests online, said Krousgrill, “there was rampant dishonesty.” He described some students in his department organizing videoconferences and sharing answers. “Once we went to online instruction, we could not watch. [The students] knew it, and knew the game was up for grabs. There were lots of kids who got caught up in that.”  

ProctorU, which provides proctors to be sure online test-takers follow the rules, caught people cheating on fewer than 1 percent of exams it administered before the Covid-19 outbreak. Since then the number has jumped to more than 8 percent.

Online tests have also meant a booming business for companies that sell homework and test answers, including Chegg and Course Hero. Students pay subscription fees to get answers to questions on tests or copies of entire tests with answers already provided. The tests are uploaded by other students who have already taken them, in exchange for credits, or answers are quickly provided by “tutors” who work for the sites.

For $9.95 a month, Chegg is offering a new service that provides fast answers to math problems submitted by smartphone camera, step-by-step solution included. Snap a pic, get the answer.

Related: While focus is on fall, students’ choices about college will have a far longer impact

Though these sites have been around since before the pandemic, their use appears to have exploded as more tests are given online. Students used Chegg to allegedly cheat on online exams and tests in the spring at schools including Georgia Tech, Boston University, North Carolina State and Purdue, according to faculty at those institutions and news reports. Universities prefer not to talk about cheating incidents, and federal privacy law limits how much detail they can provide.

At North Carolina State, more than 200 of the 800 students in a single Statistics 311 class were referred for disciplinary action for getting answers to exam questions from a company that offers online tutoring services.

At North Carolina State, more than 200 of the 800 students in a single Statistics 311 class were referred for disciplinary action for using “tutor-provided solutions” to exam questions from Chegg, said Tyler Johnson, the course coordinator.

After the exam, Johnson said, he asked his university to get Chegg to remove the questions, citing copyright law. Chegg did, and furnished a report of users who had either posted or accessed the exam materials.

“I was initially really naive to the extent to which these services are utilized by students,” he said.

Related: Amid pandemic, graduate student workers are winning long-sought contracts

The North Carolina State students have protested in a petition that they didn’t know using Chegg would be considered cheating, and that Johnson showed “no regard to the personal stresses we are enduring and have endured throughout the semester.”

Krousgrill and his colleagues at Purdue asked Chegg to remove their exam materials, too, and asked for help identifying cheaters. They found “a massive number” of students who had used Chegg to get test answers, he said. In one class, Krousgrill said, as many as 60 students out of 250 had done it, and 100 students in a colleague’s class were identified as having used Chegg in a similar fashion.

“I do feel for the students,” Eric Nauman, a professor of engineering and director of the engineering honors program at Purdue, told a web panel for engineering faculty and majors convened to discuss the use of Chegg and similar services for cheating. “If one person starts using it and gets a better grade and these exams are graded on a curve, then they’re in big trouble.”

The number of students who are cheating is almost certainly higher than the number being caught or reported. Research has shown that instructors believe cheating happens much less often than students do , which means they may not be looking for it. When they do find it, many choose to simply give cheaters an F, without reporting the incidents further.

“I do feel for the students. … If one person starts using [an online service] and gets a better grade and these exams are graded on a curve, then they’re in big trouble.” Eric Nauman, professor of engineering and director of the engineering honors program, Purdue University

“I had a conversation with a group of students several months ago,” said James Pitarresi, vice provost at Binghamton University. “And one of the students said, ‘Look, you know, probably 80 percent of the class is looking at Chegg. What are you going to do, expel all of us?’ ”

For most faculty, their only recourse is to ask the companies to remove their exam materials and identify cheaters. But that can take days or even weeks, and happens after the materials have already been shared and an exam is over. It also puts the burden on professors to go site by site, search for their material and ask that it be taken down. “I go through every couple of months and write to them and say, ‘Please take these 200 or 300 items off your site,’ ” said Krousgrill. “But that takes a lot of time.” Especially, he said, when his students are getting answers in 10 minutes.

The cheaters are often way ahead. Message boards at Reddit are filled with warnings to students not to use their school email addresses or real names when signing up for Chegg or similar services. That makes catching cheaters nearly impossible. Even when professors try to preempt Chegg and other sites ahead of time, as one did by embedding a trackable code in test questions, students figured it out and worked around it, according to faculty familiar with the example, although they wouldn’t identify which institution did this.

Chegg, which offers online tutoring services, declined to comment at length. A spokesman said the company supports academic integrity and hasn’t seen “any relative increase in honor code issues since the Covid-19 crisis began.” In an interview with The New York Times, Chegg chief executive Dan Rosensweig, when  asked whether his company’s services were being used for cheating, said: “Let’s face it: Students have always found a way, whether it’s in fraternities, or whether they go to Google. But Chegg is not built for that.”

The company reported  $153 million in revenue for the second quarter , when the pandemic shutdowns were at their peak — a 63 percent year-over-year increase. 

Related: Could the online, for-profit college industry be “a winner in this crisis”?

Chegg CFO Andy Brown told investors in a video call, “We’ve clearly been seeing tailwinds since the shelter in place and kids were learning off campus.”

Colleges were not the only institutions to rush examinations online. Advanced placement and other tests also went virtual in the spring and the parent College Board said it was prepared to move the SAT online in the fall if necessary but then reversed itself.*  So did law school entrance and placement exams, professional certification tests for financial managers and food handlers and many others.

The College Board , which administers the AP tests, reconfigured these exams to be “open book” when they were moved online, but without proctoring. Students reportedly used private messaging apps to collaborate on answers. Even before the exams began, College Board officials tweeted about “a ring of students who were developing plans to cheat” and canceled their registrations.

The College Board won’t disclose whether any cheating actually happened. A spokesman would say only that “at-home testing presents some different security challenges” and that the organization took steps to prevent it.

There are other reasons besides just having the opportunity that students are cheating online. About a quarter of students “indicated that it should be expected that students will use whatever is available to them in a take-home or online test ,” according to research published in the spring by the Journal of the National College Testing Association. It said “any inaction on the part of the faculty to provide a secure exam administration was seen [by students] as an indication that the faculty did not care about” cheating.

“One student with a pattern of cheating is an ethical problem for that student. Multiple students with a pattern of cheating devalues any grade or degree they might be receiving,” Steve Saladin, a co-author of the study, said. “And when cheating spreads to many students in many programs and schools, degrees and grades cease to provide a measure of an individual’s preparedness for a profession or position. And perhaps even more importantly, it suggests a society that blindly accepts any means to an end as a given.”

*This story has been updated to correct that the SAT was not moved online in the spring.

This story about online testing was produced by  The Hechinger Report , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our  higher education newsletter .

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Accused of Cheating by an Algorithm, and a Professor She Had Never Met

An unsettling glimpse at the digitization of education.

Credit... Ariel Davis

Supported by

By Kashmir Hill

• May 27, 2022

A Florida teenager taking a biology class at a community college got an upsetting note this year. A start-up called Honorlock had flagged her as acting suspiciously during an exam in February. She was, she said in an email to The New York Times, a Black woman who had been “wrongfully accused of academic dishonesty by an algorithm.”

What happened, however, was more complicated than a simple algorithmic mistake. It involved several humans, academic bureaucracy and an automated facial detection tool from Amazon called Rekognition. Despite extensive data collection, including a recording of the girl, 17, and her screen while she took the test, the accusation of cheating was ultimately a human judgment call: Did looking away from the screen mean she was cheating?

The pandemic was a boom time for companies that remotely monitor test takers, as it became a public health hazard to gather a large group in a room. Suddenly, millions of people were forced to take bar exams, tests and quizzes alone at home on their laptops. To prevent the temptation to cheat, and catch those who did, remote proctoring companies offered web browser extensions that detect keystrokes and cursor movements, collect audio from a computer’s microphone, and record the screen and the feed from a computer’s camera, bringing surveillance methods used by law enforcement, employers and domestic abusers into an academic setting.

Honorlock, based in Boca Raton, Fla., was founded by a couple of business school graduates who were frustrated by classmates they believed were gaming tests. The start-up administered nine million exams in 2021, charging about $5 per test or $10 per student to cover all the tests in the course. Honorlock has raised $40 million from investors, the vast majority of it since the pandemic began.

Keeping test takers honest has become a multimillion-dollar industry, but Honorlock and its competitors, including ExamSoft, ProctorU and Proctorio, have faced major blowback along the way: widespread activism , media reports on the technology’s problems and even a Senate inquiry . Some surveilled test takers have been frustrated by the software’s invasiveness , glitches , false allegations of cheating and failure to work equally well for all types of people.

The Florida teenager is a rare example of an accused cheater who received the evidence against her: a 50-second clip from her hourlong Honorlock recording. She asked that her name not be used because of the stigma associated with academic dishonesty.

The teenager was in the final year of a special program to earn both her high school diploma and her associate degree. Nearly 40 other students were in the teenager’s biology class, but they never met. The class, from Broward College, was fully remote and asynchronous.

Asynchronous online education was growing even before the pandemic. It offers students a more flexible schedule, but it has downsides. Last year, an art history student who had a question about a recorded lecture tried to email his professor, and discovered that the man had died nearly two years earlier .

The Florida teenager’s biology professor, Jonelle Orridge, was alive, but distant, her interactions with students taking place by email, as she assigned readings and YouTube videos. The exam this past February was the second the teenager had taken in the class. She set up her laptop in her living room in North Lauderdale making sure to follow a long list of rules set out in the class syllabus and in an Honorlock drop-down menu: Do not eat or drink, use a phone, have others in the room, look offscreen to read notes, and so on.

The student had to pose in front of her laptop camera for a photo, show her student ID, and then pick her laptop up and use its camera to provide a 360-degree scan of the room to prove she didn’t have any contraband material. She didn’t mind any of this, she said, because she hoped the measures would prevent others from cheating.

She thought the test went well, but a few days later, she received an email from Dr. Orridge.

“You were flagged by Honorlock,” Dr. Orridge wrote. “After review of your video, you were observed frequently looking down and away from the screen before answering questions.”

She was receiving a zero on the exam, and the matter was being referred to the dean of student affairs. “If you are found responsible for academic dishonesty the grade of zero will remain,” Dr. Orridge wrote.

“This must be a mistake,” the student replied in an email. “I was not being academically dishonest. Looking down does not indicate academic dishonesty.”

‘The word of God’

The New York Times has reviewed the video. Honorlock recordings of several other students are visible briefly in the screen capture, before the teenager’s video is played.

The student and her screen are visible, as is a partial log of time stamps, including at least one red flag, which is meant to indicate highly suspicious behavior, just a minute into her test. As the student begins the exam, at 8:29 a.m., she scrolls through four questions, appearing to look down after reading each one, once for as long as 10 seconds. She shifts slightly. She does not answer any of the questions during the 50-second clip.

It’s impossible to say with certainty what is happening in the video. What the artificial intelligence technology got right is that she looked down. But to do what? She could be staring at the table, a smartphone or notes. The video is ambiguous.

When the student met with the dean and Dr. Orridge by video, she said, she told them that she looks down to think, and that she fiddles with her hands to jog her memory. They were not swayed. The student was found “responsible” for “noncompliance with directions,” resulting in a zero on the exam and a warning on her record.

“Who stares at a test the entire time they’re taking a test? That’s ridiculous. That’s not how humans work,” said Cooper Quintin, a technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization. “Normal behaviors are punished by this software.”

After examining online proctoring software that medical students at Dartmouth College claimed had wrongly flagged them , Mr. Quintin suggested that schools have outside experts review evidence of cheating. The most serious flaw with these systems may be a human one: educators who overreact when artificially intelligent software raises an alert.

“Schools seem to be treating it as the word of God,” Mr. Quintin said. “If the computer says you’re cheating, you must be cheating.”

Tess Mitchell, a spokeswoman for Honorlock, said it was not the company’s role to advise schools on how to deal with behavior flagged by its product.

“In no case do we definitively identify ‘cheaters’ — the final decision and course of action is up to the instructor and school, just as it would be in a classroom setting,” Ms. Mitchell said. “It can be challenging to interpret a student’s actions. That’s why we don’t.”

Dr. Orridge did not respond to requests for comment for this article. A spokeswoman from Broward College said she could not discuss the case because of student privacy laws. In an email, she said faculty “exercise their best judgment” about what they see in Honorlock reports. She said a first warning for dishonesty would appear on a student’s record but not have more serious consequences, such as preventing the student from graduating or transferring credits to another institution.

Who decides

Honorlock hasn’t previously disclosed exactly how its artificial intelligence works, but a company spokeswoman revealed that the company performs face detection using Rekognition, an image analysis tool that Amazon started selling in 2016. The Rekognition software looks for facial landmarks — nose, eyes, eyebrows, mouth — and returns a confidence score that what is onscreen is a face. It can also infer the emotional state, gender and angle of the face.

Honorlock will flag a test taker as suspicious if it detects multiple faces in the room, or if the test taker’s face disappears, which could happen when people cover their face with their hands in frustration, said Brandon Smith, Honorlock’s president and chief operating officer.

Honorlock does sometimes use human employees to monitor test takers; “live proctors” will pop in by chat if there is a high number of flags on an exam to find out what is going on. Recently, these proctors discovered that Rekognition was mistakenly registering faces in photos or posters as additional people in the room.

When something like that happens, Honorlock tells Amazon’s engineers. “They take our real data and use it to improve their A.I.,” Mr. Smith said.

Rekognition was supposed to be a step up from what Honorlock had been using. A previous face detection tool from Google was worse at detecting the faces of people with a range of skin tones, Mr. Smith said.

But Rekognition has also been accused of bias. In a series of studies, Joy Buolamwini, a computer researcher and executive director of the Algorithmic Justice League, found that gender classification software, including Rekognition , worked least well on darker-skinned females.

Determining a person’s gender is different from detecting or recognizing a face, but Dr. Buolamwini considered her findings a canary in a coal mine. “If you sell one system that has been shown to have bias on human faces, it is doubtful your other face-based products are also completely bias free,” she wrote in 2019.

The Times analyzed images from the student’s Honorlock video with Amazon Rekognition. It was 99.9 percent confident that a face was present and that it was sad, and 59 percent confident that the student was a man.

Dr. Buolamwini said the Florida student’s skin color and gender should be a consideration in her attempts to clear her name, regardless of whether they affected the algorithm’s performance.

“Whether it is technically linked to race or gender, the stigma and presumption placed on students of color can be exacerbated when a machine label feeds into confirmation bias,” Dr. Buolamwini wrote in an email.

The human element

As the pandemic winds down, and test takers can gather in person again, the remote proctoring industry may soon be in lower demand and face far less scrutiny. However, the intense activism around the technology during the pandemic did lead at least one company to make a major change to its product.

ProctorU, an Honorlock competitor, no longer offers an A.I.-only product that flags videos for professors to review.

“The faculty didn’t have the time, training or ability to do it or do it properly,” said Jarrod Morgan, ProctorU’s founder. A review of ProctorU’s internal data found that videos of flagged behavior were opened only 11 percent of the time.

All suspicious behavior is now reviewed by one of the company’s approximately 1,300 proctors, most of whom are based abroad in cheaper labor markets. Mr. Morgan said these contractors went through rigorous training, and would “confirm a breach” only if there was solid evidence that a test taker was receiving help. ProctorU administered four million exams last year; in analyzing three million of those tests, it found that over 200,000, or about 7 percent, involved some kind of academic misconduct, according to the company.

The teenager graduated from Broward College this month. She remains distraught at being labeled a cheater and fears it could happen again.

“I try to become like a mannequin during tests now,” she said.

Kashmir Hill is a tech reporter based in New York. She writes about the unexpected and sometimes ominous ways technology is changing our lives, particularly when it comes to our privacy. More about Kashmir Hill

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Academic Dishonesty Statistics

Definition Of Academic Cheating

• Cheating refers to using various types of materials, information, or devices that are not allowed when completing an academic task. It can include communicating with other test-takers without the consent of the proctor, using a phone to search for information on the Internet, etc.
• Plagiarism implies using the works of other people (their ideas, words, designs, etc.) without their consent. One of the most common forms of plagiarism is copying text written by one or more other authors and pasting it into your paperwork without citation.
• Fabrication involves using data that doesn't exist. For example, having failed to find evidence for their theories, some students opt for counterfeiting the necessary information.

Why Do Students Prefer to Cheat?

• Lack of time or poor time management
• Fear of failure
• Anxiety about grades
• Desire to help classmates
• Academic overload
• Stress, etc.

What’s more, some students not only cheat, but also find it acceptable in particular situations. Eric M. Anderman, a professor from Ohio State University, published a survey in 2017 stating that the majority of the 400 respondents admitted that it’s not a big deal to cheat if you are not interested in a subject. This perspective was also considered in research from Lindale High School (LHS). According to the results, 44.4% of students consider it ethical to behave dishonestly while doing homework, but not during a test.

Could Cheating Hinge on Student Culture?

What’s more, East European countries, such as Bulgaria, Croatia, and former Soviet Union countries tend to be less strict and more accepting of academic cheating than Western European countries and the US. According to a survey carried out by CEDOS together with American Councils for International Education, American and European universities often have different or even opposite opinions about academic misconduct.

Academic Cheating Fact Sheet

The cheating rate among high school and college students is tremendously high, and it isn’t losing momentum. There is an avalanche of cheating incidents happening worldwide. Students who have been lured by cheating once usually tend to continue shortcutting. Unsurprisingly, the statistics are supported by ample evidence. Here are some jaw-dropping facts about cheating in school and college:

60.8% of polled college students admitted to cheating

According to a survey conducted by the CollegeHumor website among 30,000 respondents, 60.8% of college students admitted to committing some form of cheating. Moreover, 16.5% of them didn’t feel guilty about it. This data was supported by the results of Rutgers University research showing that 68% of the polled students acted dishonestly during their studies.

Cheaters have higher GPAs

Many students opt for cheating to get good grades. Although it may be upsetting for their honest counterparts, cheaters manage to achieve their goals. Statistics provided by Fordham University show that dishonest students have a Grade Point Average (GPA) of about 3.41, while non-cheaters can boast of only 2.85. It’s important to understand that these numbers not only indicate the decreasing amount of opportunities for honest students, but also may push more of them to commit the same unethical acts.

95% of cheaters don't get caught

Research carried out by ETS and the Ad Council indicates that the majority of cheaters stay unnoticed and don’t get caught for their misconduct. This is another motive for other students to break the established rules of academic integrity. According to U.S. News and World Report, 90% of polled college students are sure that they will not be caught cheating.

Dishonesty among college students stems from high school

According to ETS and Ad Council research, 75% to 98% of students who admitted to cheating at college confessed to have started doing it in high school. Moreover, academic dishonesty is showing up among even younger students, meaning that it is starting to take place not only in high school, but also in elementary school.

There is no gender difference in cheating

The Ad Council and ETS survey states that there is no significant gender difference in academic misconduct. However, men tend to confess to it slightly more than women. When it comes to subjects, disciplines like math and science are more prone to cheating incidents.

Cheating is getting worse

According to research from the Josephson Institute Center for Youth Ethics, the number of cheating students is not only high, but also shows an uptrend potential. The study provided statistics from two academic years. In the first year, it revealed 59% of cheating high-school students, but in the next year, the number surged to 95%.

Renowned Colleges Turn Out to Be Vulnerable Too

Despite the common belief that renowned educational institutions have managed to eliminate cheating, statistics and news headlines provide a different view. According to McCabe research, reputable colleges and universities have significantly reduced the level of academic misconduct due to stricter honor codes and a more developed academic culture, but they haven’t managed to eradicate it. Even world-famous elite institutions are found to be involved in cheating scandals.

In 2012, Harvard University was involved in one of the biggest cheating scandals in its history. About 125 of its students were suspected of working in collaboration on an exam despite being asked to do it alone. As a result, around 70 students were forced out.

Strategies for Reducing Cheating

• Avoid student overload. When placed under continuous pressure, students often fail to manage their time and start looking for easier ways to get a good grade.
• Be thoughtful about language . It’s important to choose the right words for praising your students. It’s recommended to use phrases that include both praising and stimulus for further progress. For example, “You did a great job but there are still more areas you can develop in.”
• Develop academic culture . Educational institutions are advised to devote more time to discussing ethical matters with their students. Moreover, they could consider including these types of lessons in their curriculum.
• Proctoring . The increasing popularity of e-learning and continuous technological development has fostered a surge in academic misconduct. However, why not turn the tide in your favor? Nowadays, there are many innovative digital proctoring solutions, such as ProctorEdu.com, that help educational institutions increase the effectiveness of online learning and protect their reputation.

What is the percentage of students cheating?

How often do students get caught cheating, is academic cheating getting worse, what percentage of high schoolers have cheated.

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August 19, 2019

Students are still using tech to cheat on exams, but things are getting more advanced

by Dalvin Brown, Usa Today

In many ways, cheating on high school and college exams used to be a lot harder than it is nowadays.

What used to take an elaborate plot to discreetly spread answers across a classroom can now be done with a swipe on a smartwatch. You used to have to steal the answer key or have a cheat sheet hidden around your desk.

Now, smartphones can be disguised as calculators, information can be spread invisibly via the airwaves and tiny earbuds allow students to listen to content transmitted from a smartphone in their backpack across the room.

The self-identified student cheaters we reached out to wouldn't go on the record to discuss these behaviors (for obvious reasons). However, Twitter is a hotbed for discussion on the topic and smartwatches are a fan favorite as a convenient loophole to classroom smartphone bans.

"An Apple Watch is the go-to way to cheat on any exam. Hands down," Tweets @too_Coziey in December 2018. "I bought an Apple Watch just to cheat on exams in ( high school )," writes @Shymyafaith.

"My teacher collects phones during exams so I brought two phones and an Apple Watch. I will cheat on my exam, (i don't care) if it kills me," writes Twitter user @Wontonpx.

There are even online instructional videos and countless digital forums that teach students how to cheat on tests using their gadgets.

Technology enthusiasts often tout the latest innovations as tools to help students feel more engaged in the classroom. They encourage teachers and schools to adapt to the shifting tech landscape and instructors and institutions often follow suit, introducing Echo Dots and smartwatches to campuses in recent years.

While the gadgets have utility in educational environments, they also open pandora's box, allowing students to pay less attention in class and shortcut their education—aka cheat.

"Technology presents new ways for students to do things that they've always been doing which is avoid doing the work themselves," said David Rettinger, president of International Center for Academic Integrity and instructor of psychological sciences at the University of Mary Washington.

"Forever, students would go to a book and copy things for a paper. Copy and paste plagiarism is as old as reading and writing, but now it's so much easier. You don't even have to leave your desk to do that. The bar has gotten much lower."

In other words, cheating is nothing new, and students have been taking notes on their devices, getting notifications during tests, texting their friends for answers and sending photos of exams to their classmates for years.

However, one of the latest, widespread forms of cheating in the classroom involves students using auto-summarize features in programs like Word to pass off computer-generated essays as original work.

Summarizing tools can also be found on the internet. They take the most important information from a large text and generate a shorter version that isn't easily picked up by anti-plagiarism software, according to Teddi Fishman, the former director of the International Center for Academic Integrity.

She works with educators, students and administrators to identify integrity vulnerabilities and taught at the State University of West Georgia and Clemson University.

What makes today's cheating landscape even more dire is that "teachers are so overworked" Fishman said. "A lot of them are not tenured so they may be working at two or three universities to make ends meet. They just don't have time" to double-check if they suspect a student of cheating.

Along with the auto-summarizing tools, technology now enables students to buy "bespoke essays" from third parties overseas. These so-called "essay mills" don't just let students buy one assignment. They're contracting someone to write all their assignments for a semester or even a year.

If it's an online class, "You can pay somebody in another country to take that course for you. If you do an easy online search for 'take my online class," you see sites where someone can log in, take the class and you can get the credit for it," Fishman said.

"That's a danger for all of us. Imagine if your nurse paid someone to take classes for them."

The Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 requires institutions to verify the identities of remote students by using at least one of the following methods: a secure login and password, proctored exams or other technological practices to accurately identify a person.

In many cases, the use of a secure User ID and password that can be easily exchanged with others and proctored exams are effective only if the instructor actually knows what the student looks like. However, tech such as typing-style verification and speed checks may help to curb cheating in e-learning situations.

Rettinger, who is also an associate professor of psychological science, has started giving his classes shorter exams, which cuts down on the time students could spend trying to figure out how to cheat.

"I've changed a lot of my assessment to be much shorter, lower-stake assessment rather than big exams. (So) students feel less pressure to cheat," Rettinger said.

"When you have a test and it's worth a lot of points, a student is going to put a lot of work into either studying or cheating," he said. "If it's a quick test, there isn't as much time to set up those structures. You're not dumbing down the material. I'm just testing more frequently."

The University of Mary Washington and many others use a student-run honor codes to discourage cheating where the student body self-polices to create a social sanction against being dishonest.

Teachers also use tools like the plagiarism-checking software Turnitin to sniff out academic dishonesty. In March 2019, Turnitin released a piece of software called Authorship Investigate, which creates a digital fingerprint of a writer's writing style so teachers can detect changes over the course of the semester to detect "contract cheating."

Alexis Redding, a lecturer in the Higher Education Program at Harvard who studied cheating, warns that if instructors don't go through those types of plagiarism reports with students, they "become confused about what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong."

Some institutions and departments across the country mandate that students submit all essays through plagiarism detection programs. "That feels like a very dangerous direction to go in," Redding said. "It sends a negative message to students that we are expecting them to do something for which we need to catch them."

Still, advances in technology will continue to make information sharing easier and more discreet. With teens and young adults being digital natives and early adopters of innovative communications, experts say teachers will always be slower to catch up.

"By the time you try to figure out how to outsmart the people who want to cheat, you've already lost the battle," said Howard Gardner, a research professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Instead of getting into a technological arm's race with students, Gardner said instructors and parents should help students understand "why one shouldn't cheat and why it's destructive to them. It's easy to say that and be completely ignored, but otherwise, it's a (game of) cops and robbers."

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What do ai chatbots really mean for students and cheating.

The launch of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots has triggered an alarm for many educators, who worry about students using the technology to cheat by passing its writing off as their own. But two Stanford researchers say that concern is misdirected, based on their ongoing research into cheating among U.S. high school students before and after the release of ChatGPT.  

“There’s been a ton of media coverage about AI making it easier and more likely for students to cheat,” said Denise Pope , a senior lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE). “But we haven’t seen that bear out in our data so far. And we know from our research that when students do cheat, it’s typically for reasons that have very little to do with their access to technology.”

Pope is a co-founder of Challenge Success , a school reform nonprofit affiliated with the GSE, which conducts research into the student experience, including students’ well-being and sense of belonging, academic integrity, and their engagement with learning. She is the author of Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students , and coauthor of Overloaded and Underprepared: Strategies for Stronger Schools and Healthy, Successful Kids.  

Victor Lee is an associate professor at the GSE whose focus includes researching and designing learning experiences for K-12 data science education and AI literacy. He is the faculty lead for the AI + Education initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning and director of CRAFT (Classroom-Ready Resources about AI for Teaching), a program that provides free resources to help teach AI literacy to high school students. 

Here, Lee and Pope discuss the state of cheating in U.S. schools, what research shows about why students cheat, and their recommendations for educators working to address the problem.

Denise Pope

What do we know about how much students cheat?

Pope: We know that cheating rates have been high for a long time. At Challenge Success we’ve been running surveys and focus groups at schools for over 15 years, asking students about different aspects of their lives — the amount of sleep they get, homework pressure, extracurricular activities, family expectations, things like that — and also several questions about different forms of cheating. 

For years, long before ChatGPT hit the scene, some 60 to 70 percent of students have reported engaging in at least one “cheating” behavior during the previous month. That percentage has stayed about the same or even decreased slightly in our 2023 surveys, when we added questions specific to new AI technologies, like ChatGPT, and how students are using it for school assignments.

Isn’t it possible that they’re lying about cheating? 

Pope: Because these surveys are anonymous, students are surprisingly honest — especially when they know we’re doing these surveys to help improve their school experience. We often follow up our surveys with focus groups where the students tell us that those numbers seem accurate. If anything, they’re underreporting the frequency of these behaviors.

Lee: The surveys are also carefully written so they don’t ask, point-blank, “Do you cheat?” They ask about specific actions that are classified as cheating, like whether they have copied material word for word for an assignment in the past month or knowingly looked at someone else’s answer during a test. With AI, most of the fear is that the chatbot will write the paper for the student. But there isn’t evidence of an increase in that.

So AI isn’t changing how often students cheat — just the tools that they’re using? 

Lee: The most prudent thing to say right now is that the data suggest, perhaps to the surprise of many people, that AI is not increasing the frequency of cheating. This may change as students become increasingly familiar with the technology, and we’ll continue to study it and see if and how this changes. 

But I think it’s important to point out that, in Challenge Success’ most recent survey, students were also asked if and how they felt an AI chatbot like ChatGPT should be allowed for school-related tasks. Many said they thought it should be acceptable for “starter” purposes, like explaining a new concept or generating ideas for a paper. But the vast majority said that using a chatbot to write an entire paper should never be allowed. So this idea that students who’ve never cheated before are going to suddenly run amok and have AI write all of their papers appears unfounded.

But clearly a lot of students are cheating in the first place. Isn’t that a problem? 

Pope: There are so many reasons why students cheat. They might be struggling with the material and unable to get the help they need. Maybe they have too much homework and not enough time to do it. Or maybe assignments feel like pointless busywork. Many students tell us they’re overwhelmed by the pressure to achieve — they know cheating is wrong, but they don’t want to let their family down by bringing home a low grade. 

We know from our research that cheating is generally a symptom of a deeper, systemic problem. When students feel respected and valued, they’re more likely to engage in learning and act with integrity. They’re less likely to cheat when they feel a sense of belonging and connection at school, and when they find purpose and meaning in their classes. Strategies to help students feel more engaged and valued are likely to be more effective than taking a hard line on AI, especially since we know AI is here to stay and can actually be a great tool to promote deeper engagement with learning.

What would you suggest to school leaders who are concerned about students using AI chatbots? 

Pope: Even before ChatGPT, we could never be sure whether kids were getting help from a parent or tutor or another source on their assignments, and this was not considered cheating. Kids in our focus groups are wondering why they can't use ChatGPT as another resource to help them write their papers — not to write the whole thing word for word, but to get the kind of help a parent or tutor would offer. We need to help students and educators find ways to discuss the ethics of using this technology and when it is and isn't useful for student learning.

Lee: There’s a lot of fear about students using this technology. Schools have considered putting significant amounts of money in AI-detection software, which studies show can be highly unreliable. Some districts have tried blocking AI chatbots from school wifi and devices, then repealed those bans because they were ineffective. 

AI is not going away. Along with addressing the deeper reasons why students cheat, we need to teach students how to understand and think critically about this technology. For starters, at Stanford we’ve begun developing free resources to help teachers bring these topics into the classroom as it relates to different subject areas. We know that teachers don’t have time to introduce a whole new class, but we have been working with teachers to make sure these are activities and lessons that can fit with what they’re already covering in the time they have available. 

I think of AI literacy as being akin to driver’s ed: We’ve got a powerful tool that can be a great asset, but it can also be dangerous. We want students to learn how to use it responsibly.

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• Impact and Prevention of Technology Concerning Student Cheating

BY ANNABEL MONAGHAN

The vast majority of Americans – 95 percent – today own a mobile phone. In 2015, 64 percent of American adults owned a smartphone and that percentage has grown to almost 77 percent in recent years. For adults aged 18 to 29, a whopping 94 percent own smartphones, according to Pew Research Center.

While the growing popularity of smartphones is often seen as “progress”, it is also having a monumentally negative impact on the tertiary education sector.  The increased use of technology has contributed to the simplification and ease of copying homework assignments – and cheating in general – across schools and tertiary institutions around the world. Despite the fact that repercussions for cheating are severe, involving possible suspension or expulsion, 62% of U.S. students have reported seeing or hearing of another student using a connected device to cheat on an exam, quiz or project. In the U.K., there has been a 42% rise in cheating cases involving gadgets such as mobile phones and hidden earpieces since 2012, and in Australia cheating via technology is also on the rise at universities, with engineering and international students the most likely offenders. In one study across eight national universities and four colleges in Australia, it was found that a “widespread tolerance for cheating” existed among students and staff, with 68 percent of university staff admitting they had found “suspected contract cheaters” among their students in the past.

“Contract cheating” is perhaps the most serious form of academic dishonesty, involving students putting out a tender for others to complete their homework, coursework and assessments. But most students are cheating in a far simpler way: by switching on their mobile devices and snapping a photo of a classmate’s work, enabling them to copy that homework almost word for word in order to avoid doing it themselves. Students are also using mobile phones or earpieces during exams, by activating their device’s infrared, Bluetooth, or texting applications to share exam information with other test takers.

With the rise of technology, academic cheating is becoming more and more prolific, with hundreds of thousands of websites now offering custom-written papers, selling cheat aids and publishing how-to-cheat videos, teaching students anything from how to load programmable calculators with exam responses to how to replace a water bottle’s nutrition information with mathematics notes. Students are cheating in extremely advanced ways – with some even resorting to the use of a virtual private network to protect their activities.

But teachers are catching up, quickly.

The learning center Happy Numbers notes, “using new technologies, including text-matching software and plagiarism websites, webcams, biometric equipment, as well as drawing on strategies such as virtual students and cheat-proof tests, it is ever so slowly becoming harder to plagiarize other students work”. Surprisingly, teachers often find they have the most success in identifying plagiarism by simply Googling phrases they find in students’ papers. But more tech-savvy professors and teachers set up web “honey pots” – phony Web pages that answer specific questions allocated by them for homework with blatantly out-of-date or inaccurate information. Innovative technologies like Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT) provide a way of improving the accuracy of assessment by addressing cheating concerns, by using an algorithm to choose test items based on students’ strengths and weaknesses. Using this method, every student takes a different test. As a result of new “anti-cheat” innovations like these, the U.S. has seen the percentage of students who admit to cheating – which rose from 20 percent in the mid-1900s to over 50 percent in 2002 – drop down to around 10 percent in recent years.

But the reality is, advances in technology will continue allowing for easy, accessible sharing unless significant steps are taken to address the problem.

Some attribute the rise in student cheating to an ever-increasing workload, others see it as a changing work ethic seen in the Millenial and Gen Z groups. Some see a direct correlation between the rise of standardized testing and cheating. Others hold accountability policies responsible: they have pressured educators to raise test scores. Whatever the cause, it’s evident the education sector needs to address the phenomenon soon before cheating becomes the status quo, as opposed to a rare lapse in judgment.

To ensure you don’t find yourself falling for the same traps other students have and “accidentally” plagiarizing your next assessment, try to implement the following measures. Develop a more efficient weekly schedule so that you can spend more time on each subject – and assessment – so that when deadlines approach you aren’t tempted to find a “quick solution” to completing your work. If in doubt, don’t copy and paste a piece of work found online but if you must, ensure it is correctly referenced. Don’t give in to peer pressure and share your work with others, because developing a habit of cheating – either for yourself or for others – creates a poor work ethic that can damage your future. And lastly, always remember your ethics. They will get a lot further than an A+ will.

Annabel Monaghan is a writer with a passion for education and edtech. She writes education and career articles for The College Puzzle with the aim of providing useful information for students and young professionals. If you have any questions, please feel free to email her at [email protected]. 

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One Third of Teens Use Cellphones to Cheat in School

While most parents think most kids cheat, very few think their own kid does it, according to survey.

Teens, Cellphones, and Classroom Cheating

Forget passing handwritten notes underneath desks or inking your arm with essential math formulas before a killer test. If students today want to cheat, they have a more insidious tool at their disposal: cellphones. More than one third of teens with cellphones admit to having stored information on them to look at during a test or texting friends about answers, a new survey finds.

And teens' parents, while realistic about the frequency of cheating in schools, might need to overcome their own blind spots: More than 75 percent of parents responding to the survey say that cellphone cheating happens at their children's school, but only 3 percent believe their own teen is using a cellphone to cheat.

"I believe my kids' consciences would prevent them from doing it, as they are good kids deep down," one parent said in an interview for the nationwide online poll, conducted by Common Sense Media, a San Francisco-based education company.

"The results should be a wake-up call for educators and parents," says James Steyer, CEO and founder of Common Sense Media. "These versatile technologies have made cheating easier. The call to action is clear."

That action, Steyer says, should consist of parents and teachers educating themselves on how kids use technology to cheat and then helping students understand that the consequences for online or electronic cheating are just as serious as those for old-fashioned cheating.

But first, adults will have to leap another hurdle. Nearly 1 in 4 students thinks that accessing notes on a cellphone, texting friends with answers, or using a phone to search the Internet for answers during a test isn't cheating.

Some students say that the lack of person-to-person contact in new 21st-century methods of cheating makes it harder for them to feel as if they're doing something wrong. Others see texting during tests simply as helping one another, as opposed to looking at someone else's paper during an exam, which they consider cheating.

Madeline Jones, a recent graduate of Baylake Pines School in Virginia Beach, Va., says that for papers or online tests, students might use the Web to copy and paste text from other published reports. And for regular in-class exams, she says sneaky students can easily take advantage of the iPhone and its wireless Internet access, as one of her classmates typically did.

Two thirds of responders to the poll—which surveyed 1,013 teens in late May and early June—say others in their school have cheated with cellphones. More than half admit to using the Internet to cheat.

But even as teens advance their electronic cheating strategies, educators are beginning to fight back with their own anticheating technologies, such as text-matching software, biometric equipment, virtual students, and cheatproof tests, experts say .

At the University of Central Florida, for instance, business students now take their tests on cheat-resistant computers in a supersecure testing center. UCF students report much less cheating than students at other campuses.

"We've scared the living daylights out of them," explains Taylor Ellis, associate dean for undergraduate programs and technology at UCF's college of business.

Researchers at Common Sense Media and school administrators say that parents should not assume that kids know what to do or how to behave ethically when it comes to tests on their own. Families should establish open communication about the use of technology in school—including a strict set of guidelines for kids to follow—and understand that kids are cheating.

Experts also say that if teachers hold open discussions, issue warnings, and present guidelines for taking tests and writing papers, kids will be more hesitant about cheating.

Jack Lorenz, principal of Ridgewood High School in New Jersey, doesn't think restricting cellphones is the answer.

"I think it's a little bit naive to think that that's going to solve the problem," he said in an interview with CBS News. "If you have a culture in your school where . . . there is an expectation that students are honest about their academic achievements, where students and the administration promote it, I think you decrease the opportunities for students to cheat."

Tags: University of Central Florida , technology , cheating , academics , K-12 education , education , smartphones

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All Tech Considered

35% of teens admit using cell phones to cheat on tests.

Laura Sydell

One thing all these new mobile technologies are helping along is cheating on tests. Common Sense Media, an organization that works on making media more kid friendly, released a poll that showed an awful large number of teens are using their cell phones to cheat.

How do they do it? Well, no more worrying about the teacher overhearing your whisper, kids just set their phone on vibrate and get an answer from a friend. They are also visiting the Internet in the middle of a test and using notes stored on their cell phones. I have to wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to require teens to turn off the cell phone while they take tests. Or maybe they should leave them in a basket at the door. What do you think?

Teens Will Use AI for Schoolwork, But Most Think It’s Cheating, Survey Says

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More than 4 in 10 teens are likely to use artificial intelligence to do their schoolwork instead of doing it themselves this coming school year, according to a new survey.

But 60 percent of teens consider using AI for schoolwork as cheating, according to the nationally representative survey of 1,006 13- to 17-year-olds conducted by research firm Big Village in July for the nonprofit Junior Achievement .

The survey findings come as the emergence of ChatGPT —an AI-powered chatbot that can respond instantly to seemingly any prompt—has put discussions about how teachers and students should use it front and center in schools across the country.

Nearly half of educators who responded to an EdWeek Research Center survey conducted this spring said AI would have a negative or very negative impact on teaching and learning in the next five years. Twenty-seven percent said AI’s impact would be positive or very positive.

And in ChatGPT’s early days, some districts—including New York City schools —took a hardline approach and banned the technology in classrooms, because of concerns about cheating and data privacy. (The New York City district has since removed the ban on ChatGPT and is now encouraging students and teachers to learn how to use it effectively.)

When asked why they would use AI to do their schoolwork for them, the top response in the Junior Achievement survey was that AI is just another tool (62 percent). Others said they didn’t like school or schoolwork (24 percent), that they wouldn’t need to know the information because of AI (22 percent), that everybody else is doing it (22 percent), that they would do poorly otherwise (17 percent), and that it’s not important to know the subjects for which they use AI (8 percent).

The survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percent.

“The misuse of AI to do all schoolwork not only raises ethical concerns, but this behavior could also shortchange many students’ educations since they may not be learning the subjects they are using AI for,” Jack E. Kosakowski, the president and CEO of Junior Achievement USA, said in a written statement. “Given the growing demand for marketable skills, this could become very problematic.”

Experts say educators should teach students how to use it as a tool and an assistant in their learning, instead of using it as a replacement for learning.

But given that 44 percent of teens say they’re likely to use AI to do their schoolwork for them, and 48 percent said they know friends and classmates who have used AI this way, schools have a lot of work cut out for them.

So how can educators incorporate AI use into their lessons, guard against cheating, and teach students to use it as a helper? Here are some examples that experts have shared with Education Week :

• Create assignments that are impossible to complete with these tools, such as assignments about very recent news events or about the local community.
• Allow students to complete assignments in class.
• Ask students to give an oral presentation.
• Create project-based learning assignments.
• Allow the use of ChatGPT and other AI tools but require students to acknowledge and document how they used them. For example, students could use ChatGPT to get feedback on their essay drafts and explain which of the tool’s suggestions they agreed with and which ones they didn’t. This approach allows students to learn how to use the tool as a partner, instead of having it do all the work for them.

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The Latest Ways that Kids Cheat on Exams

By Lynn O'Shaughnessy

Updated on: September 11, 2009 / 6:02 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

In a survey conducted by Common Sense Media, one out of three students in grades seven through 12 admit that they have used their cell phones to cheat on tests . What's more, 65% of all the students surveyed say other kids in their schools are using their cell phones to cheat.

Here's how kids who admit to digital cheating pull it off:

• They check notes on their phone during exams. (26%).
• They text friends for tests answers. (25%).
• They hunt for answers on the Internet during tests. (20%).

Cell phone cheating prompted the nonprofit Common Sense Media to suggest that schools and parents need to start searching for solutions to this ethical disconnect:

"The results of this poll show the huge need for a national discussion on the concept of digital ethics. Kids have always found ways to cheat in school, but the tools they now have at their disposal are more powerful than ever. Just as they need to be taught the rules of right and wrong in the offline world, kids should have a similar set of guidelines for good online behavior..." In the meantime, if phones continue growing smarter, students may some day not have to think at all.

View all articles by Lynn O'Shaughnessy on CBS MoneyWatch» Lynn O'Shaughnessy is a best-selling author, consultant and speaker on issues that parents with college-bound teenagers face. She explains how families can make college more affordable through her website TheCollegeSolution.com ; her financial workbook, Shrinking the Cost of College ; and the new second edition of her Amazon best-selling book, The College Solution: A Guide for Everyone Looking for the Right School at the Right Price .

More from CBS News

Has your teen searched for the leaked exam papers online? Amount of students caught 'cheating' has doubled, here's everything you need to know - including consequences

Social media sites also urged to clamp down on scammers selling fake exam papers

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In light of the exam paper leak online, Ofqual have announced the consequences for those found searching for them. This comes as the number of students found cheating has doubled in the last six years.

The season of exam stress is underway for parents and teens up and down the country. As a parent of someone sitting their exams, you might have researched the exam diet to make sure their brains are well fed, and have the top brain foods in your fridge that nutritionists assert will improve their performance. But have you broached the subject of cheating?

While nobody wants to believe their child might cheat, students studying the International Baccalaureate (IB) (find out what the IB is ) recently found exam questions had been leaked online. Taking advantage of time zone differences, several versions of papers were shared by those from different countries to encrypted messaging platform, Telegram. The IB officials insist the papers aren't legitimate, but created by students memorising exam questions.  

The leak has led to concerns of an upturn in teens searching for GSCE and A Level exam questions online, believing there won't be any consequences. The incident has also seen social media scammers selling fake questions and papers, suggesting they're real. Not only is searching for papers classed as malpractice, targeting revision towards counterfeit questions will be detrimental to results. 

Ofqual have responded to reports of students attempting to find leaked exam papers online, issuing a reminder that those caught doing this could be disqualified. Speaking to TES, Ofqual chief regulator Sir Ian Bauckham said: "Students have been working hard to prepare for their exams, and nobody wants them to miss out on their grades and qualifications."

He adds "Thankfully, most students are aware of the risks of malpractice and comply with the rules. It’s important that the rules are followed so that grades reflect what a student knows, understands and can do. Students should also be aware of the risks of exam papers on social media. Accounts claiming to sell this year’s exam papers are almost always scams. Students should report these accounts to teachers."

"Students should also be aware of the risks of exam papers on social media. Accounts claiming to sell this year’s exam papers are almost always scams." Ofqual chief regulator Sir Ian Bauckham

The reminder of consequences comes amid news that instances of cheating by taking a mobile phone into the exam room have almost doubled since 2018. There were 2,180 reported penalties for this in 2023, compared with 1,825 in 2022. General malpractice not specifically relating to mobile phone use, had 4,895 reported cases in 2023, a rise from 4,105 in 2022. 

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Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), discussed both teens taking mobiles into exams, and the issue of leaked papers. He said "We are sure that the vast majority of students taking exams will stick to the rules, but there are always some who do not do so, and unfortunately the misuse of digital technology is a real headache."

He adds "Schools and colleges rigorously police exam rooms to ensure that devices are not brought in by candidates, and they warn students not to try to find exam papers on social media. These are generally fake papers being circulated as a scam, but in the rare event of a genuine paper being leaked, any student accessing that paper risks disqualification."

For more on teens, if you're struggling to get through to your teen, a psychologist shares top tips for overcoming this, and these conversation starters will help. Reflective parenting could help your teen manage their big emotions, and we advise how to start practicing it.

Lucy is a mum-of-two, multi-award nominated writer and blogger with six years’ of experience writing about parenting, family life, and TV. Lucy has contributed content to PopSugar and moms.com. In the last three years, she has transformed her passion for streaming countless hours of television into specialising in entertainment writing. There is now nothing she loves more than watching the best shows on television and sharing why you - and your kids - should watch them.

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How to Cheat on a Test Using Electronics

Last Updated: February 10, 2024

wikiHow is a “wiki,” similar to Wikipedia, which means that many of our articles are co-written by multiple authors. To create this article, 22 people, some anonymous, worked to edit and improve it over time. This article has been viewed 452,148 times. Learn more...

Cheating on a test is never a good idea. You cheat both yourself and your future. However, if you must, at least try to do it right.

Internet Method

Calculator Method 1

Calculator Method 2

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MP3 Method Part 1

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• Cheating is a form of dishonesty. Cheating carries serious consequences such as automatically failing the test, suspension or even expulsion. Instead of cheating, try studying more effectively . Thanks Helpful 19 Not Helpful 24

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About This Article

While cheating on a test is never a good idea, if you need to, do it discreetly by keeping your phone hidden. Before the test, use your phone to take a picture of your notes, then hide your phone in a pencil case or between your thighs during the test. Whenever you need to look at your notes, pretend to stretch your neck downwards to get a quick glimpse before anyone notices. Make sure to put your phone on silent and disable vibrations so you don’t get caught. For tests where you can use a calculator, either write down your notes and hide them in the case or use the text feature on your calculator to write them into a program ahead of time. To learn more, like how to use an mp3 player to listen to your notes, read on. Did this summary help you? Yes No

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10 Cons of Having Cell Phones in Schools

Kids aren't far behind adults in knowing exactly where their phones are at all times, and checking theirs at all hours of the day. Yet, when kids spend a good chunk of time at school, the question rises for staff about how cell phones can affect their students in the classroom, and whether it's a good or bad thing.

Although American schools haven't rolled out a unified policy banning or permitting cell phones in class, there are a number of sound arguments for not allowing them.

With technology becoming more of a teaching element in schools, the question about cell phone use frequently gets brought up. While there's a grab bag of positive and negative things that come with students being able to whip out their phones at any time of the day, there are some specific cons you might never have thought about before.

They Can Be a Distraction

At the end of the day, the purpose of school is to learn, and research shows that cell phones might be hindering students' concentration. According to a 2010 study from Pew Research Center , 64% of students say they've texted in class and 25% have made or taken a call. And it's not just talking to others. That same study noted that 46% of students play games and 23% access social networks on their phone at any time.

More recently, a 2016 study assessing the impact cell phone bans have on student test scores found that students' results on important exams increased by 0.07 standard deviations on average after the bans were implemented.

If students get bored in class, it doesn't take much for them to get their cell phone out and play some games or endlessly scroll on TikTok. If students don't have access to cell phones, they have one less thing to get distracted over. And, given how much stuff you can do on a cell phone - the possibilities for distraction are endless.

Social Media Trends Can Disrupt Learning

If you've walked through the hallways of a middle school or high school in the past few years, you'll see kids filming things everywhere. TikTok is the hot button app right now, and students will break out a TikTok trend at the drop of a hat, including during a lesson.

There's no time or place in the school day that's exempt from being interrupted by some silly dance or challenge. Because documenting and posting your participation in something is almost more important than just doing the thing, cell phones are a vital piece of the disruption puzzle.

They Can Make Cheating Easier

Obviously, kids can't chat each other up in the middle of an exam, but the concept of "passing notes" has made it to the digital age, thanks to texts, notes apps, and galleries. Kids can text each other when teachers aren't looking about answers to the questions, and they can update their friends - or even the whole class - on some of the harder answers with a quick trip to the bathroom.

Cell phones are also advancing and improving faster than teachers can keep up with. Catching cheaters isn't as easy as finding them writing the answers on the inside of a water bottle label or carving out the scantron sheet pattern onto a large eraser.

Just take look at the statistics on how cell phones make cheating easier; a study from The Benenson Strategy Group in 2009 stated that 35% of the surveyed students have used cell phones to cheat . Additionally, 41% of students admit to storing notes on phones to use during tests and 46% of teens admitted to texting friends about answers.

The possibilities for cheating and copying are literally limitless when students have access to cell phones in class. And tech being such a big presence in the curriculum (school-provided laptops and mandatory online assignments, for example), makes it easier than ever for students to use dishonest methods to get the grades they want.

Expensive Phones Pose a Theft Threat

Cell phone theft is a problem in America, with 3.1 million cellphones being stolen in 2013, according to Consumer Reports . In 2020, the Prey Project released its second Mobile Theft & Loss Report, which claimed from its user's experiences that common robbery , which includes cell phone theft, went up by 10.51%.

Now add still developing brains, hormones, and flexible social status to the mix, and you can have the perfect combination for stealing. Considering how expensive cell phones are today, the last thing you want to do is to tempt would-be thieves by sending your kid to school with a $1,000+ phone that makes them a target. Lockers are more likely to be broken into, for example, if perpetrators know there's something of value in there.

There's a Risk of People Taking Illicit Pictures

Kids will be kids, so with hormones raging during their school days, there's a distinct possibility that some students may take explicit pictures or videos. This is especially dangerous when students take explicit pictures of other students, violating their consent. What used to be email chains and text threads have transformed into viral social posts that can't be scrubbed from the internet. So, what can start as a cruel prank can quickly turn into something criminal.

They Can Make Cyberbullying Easier

Along the same lines, cell phones also make it easier to cyberbully, which is when a person uses electronic communication to intimidate, threaten, or humiliate a person. Not only can cell phones make it easier for rumors to spread like wildfire throughout a school, but students can also send mean or hurtful texts to others or post inappropriate pictures of students.

Data from the Cyberbullying Research in 2016 showed that 33.8% of students have been bullied in their lifetime, 11.9% have been threatened through a cell phone text and 11.1% have had a hurtful image of them posted. In addition, a whopping 25.7% have experienced one or more different types of cyberbullying.

By 2022, 49% of 15-17-year-old students polled by the Pew Research Center have experienced some form of cyberbullying . With cell phones readily available in schools, cyberbullying is a lot easier to do.

They Can Exacerbate Social Stratification

In schools, the social hierarchy is everywhere, and it affects everything. Owning the latest cell phone can mean the difference between flying under the radar and being singled out.

Ultimately, the cell phone performs as an extension of class and financial means. People with older phones are viewed (and sometimes treated) differently than their peers. This negative feedback loop only hurts everyone involved. People who want to 'fit in' lean into these social rules and look down on those who can't afford the best tech, while those who don't have access to expensive phones might struggle to find their place in the school's social sphere.

They Make Accessing Inappropriate Material Easier

While most schools have filters and regulations to block out inappropriate material, Gen Z and Gen Alpha students are more tech savvy than any generation before. Large classrooms can also make accessing inappropriate material easier. And, since every cell phone can use data to get online, students can bypass the school servers and look up whatever they want to simply by turning off the Wi-Fi.

They Can Increase Kids' Chances of Being Taken Advantage Of

If you grew up in the early 2000s, then you remember the huge internet safety movement that warned kids about the dangers of talking to strangers online. Oh, the irony of social media creating a central place for kids to interact with complete strangers all the time.

Without having fully developed brains, kids can't even conceive of the consequences that can come from DMing a totally random person. Because cell phones aren't always connected to the wi-fi, and if we're being honest, schools aren't monitoring their daily internet activity at that detailed of a level, it's so difficult to monitor kid's safety online. But, with limited access to devices that let them get online, there are fewer chances for them to be taken advantage of.

There's an Unquantified Health Risk

The EPA has regulations that discourage too much exposure to technology and allowing students to have cell phones in school can increase their screen time during the day. Cell phones give off a low level of non-ionizing radiation, for which the long-term effects at low levels are still being studied. However, letting students use their cell phones during school adds to their exposure to this type of radiation, which could in turn have increased harmful effects on their developing bodies and minds.

It's More Complicated Than a Yes or No

It's important that we don't moralize cell phones. They're just a technological tool that lets us do a myriad of things, both good and bad. Yet, as younger and younger students are bringing phones to school, it's worth thinking through the possible negative side effects that can come with it.