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Why Students Cheat—and What to Do About It

A teacher seeks answers from researchers and psychologists. 

“Why did you cheat in high school?” I posed the question to a dozen former students.

“I wanted good grades and I didn’t want to work,” said Sonya, who graduates from college in June. [The students’ names in this article have been changed to protect their privacy.]

My current students were less candid than Sonya. To excuse her plagiarized Cannery Row essay, Erin, a ninth-grader with straight As, complained vaguely and unconvincingly of overwhelming stress. When he was caught copying a review of the documentary Hypernormalism , Jeremy, a senior, stood by his “hard work” and said my accusation hurt his feelings.

Cases like the much-publicized ( and enduring ) 2012 cheating scandal at high-achieving Stuyvesant High School in New York City confirm that academic dishonesty is rampant and touches even the most prestigious of schools. The data confirms this as well. A 2012 Josephson Institute’s Center for Youth Ethics report revealed that more than half of high school students admitted to cheating on a test, while 74 percent reported copying their friends’ homework. And a survey of 70,000 high school students across the United States between 2002 and 2015 found that 58 percent had plagiarized papers, while 95 percent admitted to cheating in some capacity.

So why do students cheat—and how do we stop them?

According to researchers and psychologists, the real reasons vary just as much as my students’ explanations. But educators can still learn to identify motivations for student cheating and think critically about solutions to keep even the most audacious cheaters in their classrooms from doing it again.

Rationalizing It


First, know that students realize cheating is wrong—they simply see themselves as moral in spite of it.

“They cheat just enough to maintain a self-concept as honest people. They make their behavior an exception to a general rule,” said Dr. David Rettinger , professor at the University of Mary Washington and executive director of the Center for Honor, Leadership, and Service, a campus organization dedicated to integrity.

According to Rettinger and other researchers, students who cheat can still see themselves as principled people by rationalizing cheating for reasons they see as legitimate.

Some do it when they don’t see the value of work they’re assigned, such as drill-and-kill homework assignments, or when they perceive an overemphasis on teaching content linked to high-stakes tests.

“There was no critical thinking, and teachers seemed pressured to squish it into their curriculum,” said Javier, a former student and recent liberal arts college graduate. “They questioned you on material that was never covered in class, and if you failed the test, it was progressively harder to pass the next time around.”

But students also rationalize cheating on assignments they see as having value.

High-achieving students who feel pressured to attain perfection (and Ivy League acceptances) may turn to cheating as a way to find an edge on the competition or to keep a single bad test score from sabotaging months of hard work. At Stuyvesant, for example, students and teachers identified the cutthroat environment as a factor in the rampant dishonesty that plagued the school.

And research has found that students who receive praise for being smart—as opposed to praise for effort and progress—are more inclined to exaggerate their performance and to cheat on assignments , likely because they are carrying the burden of lofty expectations.

A Developmental Stage

When it comes to risk management, adolescent students are bullish. Research has found that teenagers are biologically predisposed to be more tolerant of unknown outcomes and less bothered by stated risks than their older peers.

“In high school, they’re risk takers developmentally, and can’t see the consequences of immediate actions,” Rettinger says. “Even delayed consequences are remote to them.”

While cheating may not be a thrill ride, students already inclined to rebel against curfews and dabble in illicit substances have a certain comfort level with being reckless. They’re willing to gamble when they think they can keep up the ruse—and more inclined to believe they can get away with it.

Cheating also appears to be almost contagious among young people—and may even serve as a kind of social adhesive, at least in environments where it is widely accepted.  A study of military academy students from 1959 to 2002 revealed that students in communities where cheating is tolerated easily cave in to peer pressure, finding it harder not to cheat out of fear of losing social status if they don’t.

Michael, a former student, explained that while he didn’t need to help classmates cheat, he felt “unable to say no.” Once he started, he couldn’t stop.

Technology Facilitates and Normalizes It

With smartphones and Alexa at their fingertips, today’s students have easy access to quick answers and content they can reproduce for exams and papers.  Studies show that technology has made cheating in school easier, more convenient, and harder to catch than ever before.

To Liz Ruff, an English teacher at Garfield High School in Los Angeles, students’ use of social media can erode their understanding of authenticity and intellectual property. Because students are used to reposting images, repurposing memes, and watching parody videos, they “see ownership as nebulous,” she said.

As a result, while they may want to avoid penalties for plagiarism, they may not see it as wrong or even know that they’re doing it.

This confirms what Donald McCabe, a Rutgers University Business School professor,  reported in his 2012 book ; he found that more than 60 percent of surveyed students who had cheated considered digital plagiarism to be “trivial”—effectively, students believed it was not actually cheating at all.

Strategies for Reducing Cheating

Even moral students need help acting morally, said  Dr. Jason M. Stephens , who researches academic motivation and moral development in adolescents at the University of Auckland’s School of Learning, Development, and Professional Practice. According to Stephens, teachers are uniquely positioned to infuse students with a sense of responsibility and help them overcome the rationalizations that enable them to think cheating is OK.

1. Turn down the pressure cooker. Students are less likely to cheat on work in which they feel invested. A multiple-choice assessment tempts would-be cheaters, while a unique, multiphase writing project measuring competencies can make cheating much harder and less enticing. Repetitive homework assignments are also a culprit, according to research , so teachers should look at creating take-home assignments that encourage students to think critically and expand on class discussions. Teachers could also give students one free pass on a homework assignment each quarter, for example, or let them drop their lowest score on an assignment.

2. Be thoughtful about your language.   Research indicates that using the language of fixed mindsets , like praising children for being smart as opposed to praising them for effort and progress , is both demotivating and increases cheating. When delivering feedback, researchers suggest using phrases focused on effort like, “You made really great progress on this paper” or “This is excellent work, but there are still a few areas where you can grow.”

3. Create student honor councils. Give students the opportunity to enforce honor codes or write their own classroom/school bylaws through honor councils so they can develop a full understanding of how cheating affects themselves and others. At Fredericksburg Academy, high school students elect two Honor Council members per grade. These students teach the Honor Code to fifth graders, who, in turn, explain it to younger elementary school students to help establish a student-driven culture of integrity. Students also write a pledge of authenticity on every assignment. And if there is an honor code transgression, the council gathers to discuss possible consequences. 

4. Use metacognition. Research shows that metacognition, a process sometimes described as “ thinking about thinking ,” can help students process their motivations, goals, and actions. With my ninth graders, I use a centuries-old resource to discuss moral quandaries: the play Macbeth . Before they meet the infamous Thane of Glamis, they role-play as medical school applicants, soccer players, and politicians, deciding if they’d cheat, injure, or lie to achieve goals. I push students to consider the steps they take to get the outcomes they desire. Why do we tend to act in the ways we do? What will we do to get what we want? And how will doing those things change who we are? Every tragedy is about us, I say, not just, as in Macbeth’s case, about a man who succumbs to “vaulting ambition.”

5. Bring honesty right into the curriculum. Teachers can weave a discussion of ethical behavior into curriculum. Ruff and many other teachers have been inspired to teach media literacy to help students understand digital plagiarism and navigate the widespread availability of secondary sources online, using guidance from organizations like Common Sense Media .

There are complicated psychological dynamics at play when students cheat, according to experts and researchers. While enforcing rules and consequences is important, knowing what’s really motivating students to cheat can help you foster integrity in the classroom instead of just penalizing the cheating.

Why Do Students Cheat?

• Posted July 19, 2016
• By Zachary Goldman

In March, Usable Knowledge published an article on ethical collaboration , which explored researchers’ ideas about how to develop classrooms and schools where collaboration is nurtured but cheating is avoided. The piece offers several explanations for why students cheat and provides powerful ideas about how to create ethical communities. The article left me wondering how students themselves might respond to these ideas, and whether their experiences with cheating reflected the researchers’ understanding. In other words, how are young people “reading the world,” to quote Paulo Freire , when it comes to questions of cheating, and what might we learn from their perspectives?

I worked with Gretchen Brion-Meisels to investigate these questions by talking to two classrooms of students from Massachusetts and Texas about their experiences with cheating. We asked these youth informants to connect their own insights and ideas about cheating with the ideas described in " Ethical Collaboration ." They wrote from a range of perspectives, grappling with what constitutes cheating, why people cheat, how people cheat, and when cheating might be ethically acceptable. In doing so, they provide us with additional insights into why students cheat and how schools might better foster ethical collaboration.

Why Students Cheat

Students critiqued both the individual decision-making of peers and the school-based structures that encourage cheating. For example, Julio (Massachusetts) wrote, “Teachers care about cheating because its not fair [that] students get good grades [but] didn't follow the teacher's rules.” His perspective represents one set of ideas that we heard, which suggests that cheating is an unethical decision caused by personal misjudgment. Umna (Massachusetts) echoed this idea, noting that “cheating is … not using the evidence in your head and only using the evidence that’s from someone else’s head.”

Other students focused on external factors that might make their peers feel pressured to cheat. For example, Michima (Massachusetts) wrote, “Peer pressure makes students cheat. Sometimes they have a reason to cheat like feeling [like] they need to be the smartest kid in class.” Kayla (Massachusetts) agreed, noting, “Some people cheat because they want to seem cooler than their friends or try to impress their friends. Students cheat because they think if they cheat all the time they’re going to get smarter.” In addition to pressure from peers, students spoke about pressure from adults, pressure related to standardized testing, and the demands of competing responsibilities.

When Cheating is Acceptable

Students noted a few types of extenuating circumstances, including high stakes moments. For example, Alejandra (Texas) wrote, “The times I had cheated [were] when I was failing a class, and if I failed the final I would repeat the class. And I hated that class and I didn’t want to retake it again.” Here, she identifies allegiance to a parallel ethical value: Graduating from high school. In this case, while cheating might be wrong, it is an acceptable means to a higher-level goal.

Encouraging an Ethical School Community

Several of the older students with whom we spoke were able to offer us ideas about how schools might create more ethical communities. Sam (Texas) wrote, “A school where cheating isn't necessary would be centered around individualization and learning. Students would learn information and be tested on the information. From there the teachers would assess students' progress with this information, new material would be created to help individual students with what they don't understand. This way of teaching wouldn't be based on time crunching every lesson, but more about helping a student understand a concept.”

Sam provides a vision for the type of school climate in which collaboration, not cheating, would be most encouraged. Kaith (Texas), added to this vision, writing, “In my own opinion students wouldn’t find the need to cheat if they knew that they had the right undivided attention towards them from their teachers and actually showed them that they care about their learning. So a school where cheating wasn’t necessary would be amazing for both teachers and students because teachers would be actually getting new things into our brains and us as students would be not only attentive of our teachers but also in fact learning.”

Both of these visions echo a big idea from “ Ethical Collaboration ”: The importance of reducing the pressure to achieve. Across students’ comments, we heard about how self-imposed pressure, peer pressure, and pressure from adults can encourage cheating.

Where Student Opinions Diverge from Research

The ways in which students spoke about support differed from the descriptions in “ Ethical Collaboration .” The researchers explain that, to reduce cheating, students need “vertical support,” or standards, guidelines, and models of ethical behavior. This implies that students need support understanding what is ethical. However, our youth informants describe a type of vertical support that centers on listening and responding to students’ needs. They want teachers to enable ethical behavior through holistic support of individual learning styles and goals. Similarly, researchers describe “horizontal support” as creating “a school environment where students know, and can persuade their peers, that no one benefits from cheating,” again implying that students need help understanding the ethics of cheating. Our youth informants led us to believe instead that the type of horizontal support needed may be one where collective success is seen as more important than individual competition.

Why Youth Voices Matter, and How to Help Them Be Heard

Our purpose in reaching out to youth respondents was to better understand whether the research perspectives on cheating offered in “ Ethical Collaboration ” mirrored the lived experiences of young people. This blog post is only a small step in that direction; young peoples’ perspectives vary widely across geographic, demographic, developmental, and contextual dimensions, and we do not mean to imply that these youth informants speak for all youth. However, our brief conversations suggest that asking youth about their lived experiences can benefit the way that educators understand school structures.

Too often, though, students are cut out of conversations about school policies and culture. They rarely even have access to information on current educational research, partially because they are not the intended audience of such work. To expand opportunities for student voice, we need to create spaces — either online or in schools — where students can research a current topic that interests them. Then they can collect information, craft arguments they want to make, and deliver their messages. Educators can create the spaces for this youth-driven work in schools, communities, and even policy settings — helping to support young people as both knowledge creators and knowledge consumers. 

Additional Resources

• Read “ Student Voice in Educational Research and Reform ” [PDF] by Alison Cook-Sather.
• Read “ The Significance of Students ” [PDF] by Dana L. Mitra.
• Read “ Beyond School Spirit ” by Emily J. Ozer and Dana Wright.

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Why Students Cheat on Homework and How to Prevent It

One of the most frustrating aspects of teaching in today’s world is the cheating epidemic. There’s nothing more irritating than getting halfway through grading a large stack of papers only to realize some students cheated on the assignment. There’s really not much point in teachers grading work that has a high likelihood of having been copied or otherwise unethically completed. So. What is a teacher to do? We need to be able to assess students. Why do students cheat on homework, and how can we address it?

Like most new teachers, I learned the hard way over the course of many years of teaching that it is possible to reduce cheating on homework, if not completely prevent it. Here are six suggestions to keep your students honest and to keep yourself sane.

ASSIGN LESS HOMEWORK

One of the reasons students cheat on homework is because they are overwhelmed. I remember vividly what it felt like to be a high school student in honors classes with multiple extracurricular activities on my plate. Other teens have after school jobs to help support their families, and some don’t have a home environment that is conducive to studying.

While cheating is  never excusable under any circumstances, it does help to walk a mile in our students’ shoes. If they are consistently making the decision to cheat, it might be time to reduce the amount of homework we are assigning.

I used to give homework every night – especially to my advanced students. I wanted to push them. Instead, I stressed them out. They wanted so badly to be in the Top 10 at graduation that they would do whatever they needed to do in order to complete their assignments on time – even if that meant cheating.

When assigning homework, consider the at-home support, maturity, and outside-of-school commitments involved. Think about the kind of school and home balance you would want for your own children. Go with that.

PROVIDE CLASS TIME

Allowing students time in class to get started on their assignments seems to curb cheating to some extent. When students have class time, they are able to knock out part of the assignment, which leaves less to fret over later. Additionally, it gives them an opportunity to ask questions.

When students are confused while completing assignments at home, they often seek “help” from a friend instead of going in early the next morning to request guidance from the teacher. Often, completing a portion of a homework assignment in class gives students the confidence that they can do it successfully on their own. Plus, it provides the social aspect of learning that many students crave. Instead of fighting cheating outside of class , we can allow students to work in pairs or small groups  in class to learn from each other.

Plus, to prevent students from wanting to cheat on homework, we can extend the time we allow them to complete it. Maybe students would work better if they have multiple nights to choose among options on a choice board. Home schedules can be busy, so building in some flexibility to the timeline can help reduce pressure to finish work in a hurry.

GIVE MEANINGFUL WORK

If you find students cheat on homework, they probably lack the vision for how the work is beneficial. It’s important to consider the meaningfulness and valuable of the assignment from students’ perspectives. They need to see how it is relevant to them.

In my class, I’ve learned to assign work that cannot be copied. I’ve never had luck assigning worksheets as homework because even though worksheets have value, it’s generally not obvious to teenagers. It’s nearly impossible to catch cheating on worksheets that have “right or wrong” answers. That’s not to say I don’t use worksheets. I do! But. I use them as in-class station, competition, and practice activities, not homework.

So what are examples of more effective and meaningful types of homework to assign?

• Ask students to complete a reading assignment and respond in writing .
• Have students watch a video clip and answer an oral entrance question.
• Require that students contribute to an online discussion post.
• Assign them a reflection on the day’s lesson in the form of a short project, like a one-pager or a mind map.

As you can see, these options require unique, valuable responses, thereby reducing the opportunity for students to cheat on them. The more open-ended an assignment is, the more invested students need to be to complete it well.

DIFFERENTIATE

Part of giving meaningful work involves accounting for readiness levels. Whenever we can tier assignments or build in choice, the better. A huge cause of cheating is when work is either too easy (and students are bored) or too hard (and they are frustrated). Getting to know our students as learners can help us to provide meaningful differentiation options. Plus, we can ask them!

This is what you need to be able to demonstrate the ability to do. How would you like to show me you can do it?

REDUCE THE POINT VALUE

If you’re sincerely concerned about students cheating on assignments, consider reducing the point value. Reflect on your grading system.

Are homework grades carrying so much weight that students feel the need to cheat in order to maintain an A? In a standards-based system, will the assignment be a key determining factor in whether or not students are proficient with a skill?

Each teacher has to do what works for him or her. In my classroom, homework is worth the least amount out of any category. If I assign something for which I plan on giving completion credit, the point value is even less than it typically would be. Projects, essays, and formal assessments count for much more.

CREATE AN ETHICAL CULTURE

To some extent, this part is out of educators’ hands. Much of the ethical and moral training a student receives comes from home. Still, we can do our best to create a classroom culture in which we continually talk about integrity, responsibility, honor, and the benefits of working hard. What are some specific ways can we do this?

Building Community and Honestly

• Talk to students about what it means to cheat on homework. Explain to them that there are different kinds. Many students are unaware, for instance, that the “divide and conquer (you do the first half, I’ll do the second half, and then we will trade answers)” is cheating.
• As a class, develop expectations and consequences for students who decide to take short cuts.
• Decorate your room with motivational quotes that relate to honesty and doing the right thing.
• Discuss how making a poor decision doesn’t make you a bad person. It is an opportunity to grow.
• Share with students that you care about them and their futures. The assignments you give them are intended to prepare them for success.
• Offer them many different ways to seek help from you if and when they are confused.
• Provide revision opportunities for homework assignments.
• Explain that you partner with their parents and that guardians will be notified if cheating occurs.
• Explore hypothetical situations.  What if you have a late night? Let’s pretend you don’t get home until after orchestra and Lego practices. You have three hours of homework to do. You know you can call your friend, Bob, who always has his homework done. How do you handle this situation?

EDUCATE ABOUT PLAGIARISM

Many students don’t realize that plagiarism applies to more than just essays. At the beginning of the school year, teachers have an energized group of students, fresh off of summer break. I’ve always found it’s easiest to motivate my students at this time. I capitalize on this opportunity by beginning with a plagiarism mini unit .

While much of the information we discuss is about writing, I always make sure my students know that homework can be plagiarized. Speeches can be plagiarized. Videos can be plagiarized. Anything can be plagiarized, and the repercussions for stealing someone else’s ideas (even in the form of a simple worksheet) are never worth the time saved by doing so.

In an ideal world, no one would cheat. However, teaching and learning in the 21st century is much different than it was fifty years ago. Cheating? It’s increased. Maybe because of the digital age… the differences in morals and values of our culture…  people are busier. Maybe because students don’t see how the school work they are completing relates to their lives.

No matter what the root cause, teachers need to be proactive. We need to know why students feel compelled to cheat on homework and what we can do to help them make learning for beneficial. Personally, I don’t advocate for completely eliminating homework with older students. To me, it has the potential to teach students many lessons both related to school and life. Still, the “right” answer to this issue will be different for each teacher, depending on her community, students, and culture.

STRATEGIES FOR ADDRESSING CHALLENGING BEHAVIORS IN SECONDARY

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You are so right about communicating the purpose of the assignment and giving students time in class to do homework. I also use an article of the week on plagiarism. I give students points for the learning – not the doing. It makes all the difference. I tell my students why they need to learn how to do “—” for high school or college or even in life experiences. Since, they get an A or F for the effort, my students are more motivated to give it a try. No effort and they sit in my class to work with me on the assignment. Showing me the effort to learn it — asking me questions about the assignment, getting help from a peer or me, helping a peer are all ways to get full credit for the homework- even if it’s not complete. I also choose one thing from each assignment for the test which is a motivator for learning the material – not just “doing it.” Also, no one is permitted to earn a D or F on a test. Any student earning an F or D on a test is then required to do a project over the weekend or at lunch or after school with me. All of this reinforces the idea – learning is what is the goal. Giving students options to show their learning is also important. Cheating is greatly reduced when the goal is to learn and not simply earn the grade.

Thanks for sharing your unique approaches, Sandra! Learning is definitely the goal, and getting students to own their learning is key.

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The Real Roots of Student Cheating

Let's address the mixed messages we are sending to young people..

Updated September 28, 2023 | Reviewed by Ray Parker

• Why Education Is Important
• Find a Child Therapist
• Cheating is rampant, yet young people consistently affirm honesty and the belief that cheating is wrong.
• This discrepancy arises, in part, from the tension students perceive between honesty and the terms of success.
• In an integrated environment, achievement and the real world are not seen as at odds with honesty.

The release of ChatGPT has high school and college teachers wringing their hands. A Columbia University undergraduate rubbed it in our face last May with an opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled I’m a Student. You Have No Idea How Much We’re Using ChatGPT.

He goes on to detail how students use the program to “do the lion’s share of the thinking,” while passing off the work as their own. Catching the deception , he insists, is impossible.

As if students needed more ways to cheat. Every survey of students, whether high school or college, has found that cheating is “rampant,” “epidemic,” “commonplace, and practically expected,” to use a few of the terms with which researchers have described the scope of academic dishonesty.

In a 2010 study by the Josephson Institute, for example, 59 percent of the 43,000 high school students admitted to cheating on a test in the past year. According to a 2012 white paper, Cheat or Be Cheated? prepared by Challenge Success, 80 percent admitted to copying another student’s homework. The other studies summarized in the paper found self-reports of past-year cheating by high school students in the 70 percent to 80 percent range and higher.

At colleges, the situation is only marginally better. Studies consistently put the level of self-reported cheating among undergraduates between 50 percent and 70 percent depending in part on what behaviors are included. 1

The sad fact is that cheating is widespread.

Commitment to Honesty

Yet, when asked, most young people affirm the moral value of honesty and the belief that cheating is wrong. For example, in a survey of more than 3,000 teens conducted by my colleagues at the University of Virginia, the great majority (83 percent) indicated that to become “honest—someone who doesn’t lie or cheat,” was very important, if not essential to them.

On a long list of traits and qualities, they ranked honesty just below “hard-working” and “reliable and dependent,” and far ahead of traits like being “ambitious,” “a leader ,” and “popular.” When asked directly about cheating, only 6 percent thought it was rarely or never wrong.

Other studies find similar commitments, as do experimental studies by psychologists. In experiments, researchers manipulate the salience of moral beliefs concerning cheating by, for example, inserting moral reminders into the test situation to gauge their effect. Although students often regard some forms of cheating, such as doing homework together when they are expected to do it alone, as trivial, the studies find that young people view cheating in general, along with specific forms of dishonesty, such as copying off another person’s test, as wrong.

They find that young people strongly care to think of themselves as honest and temper their cheating behavior accordingly. 2

The Discrepancy Between Belief and Behavior

Bottom line: Kids whose ideal is to be honest and who know cheating is wrong also routinely cheat in school.

What accounts for this discrepancy? In the psychological and educational literature, researchers typically focus on personal and situational factors that work to override students’ commitment to do the right thing.

These factors include the force of different motives to cheat, such as the desire to avoid failure, and the self-serving rationalizations that students use to excuse their behavior, like minimizing responsibility—“everyone is doing it”—or dismissing their actions because “no one is hurt.”

While these explanations have obvious merit—we all know the gap between our ideals and our actions—I want to suggest another possibility: Perhaps the inconsistency also reflects the mixed messages to which young people (all of us, in fact) are constantly subjected.

Mixed Messages

Consider the story that young people hear about success. What student hasn’t been told doing well includes such things as getting good grades, going to a good college, living up to their potential, aiming high, and letting go of “limiting beliefs” that stand in their way? Schools, not to mention parents, media, and employers, all, in various ways, communicate these expectations and portray them as integral to the good in life.

They tell young people that these are the standards they should meet, the yardsticks by which they should measure themselves.

In my interviews and discussions with young people, it is clear they have absorbed these powerful messages and feel held to answer, to themselves and others, for how they are measuring up. Falling short, as they understand and feel it, is highly distressful.

At the same time, they are regularly exposed to the idea that success involves a trade-off with honesty and that cheating behavior, though regrettable, is “real life.” These words are from a student on a survey administered at an elite high school. “People,” he continued, “who are rich and successful lie and cheat every day.”

In this thinking, he is far from alone. In a 2012 Josephson Institute survey of 23,000 high school students, 57 percent agreed that “in the real world, successful people do what they have to do to win, even if others consider it cheating.” 3

Putting these together, another high school student told a researcher: “Grades are everything. You have to realize it’s the only possible way to get into a good college and you resort to any means necessary.”

In a 2021 survey of college students by College Pulse, the single biggest reason given for cheating, endorsed by 72 percent of the respondents, was “pressure to do well.”

What we see here are two goods—educational success and honesty—pitted against each other. When the two collide, the call to be successful is likely to be the far more immediate and tangible imperative.

A young person’s very future appears to hang in the balance. And, when asked in surveys , youths often perceive both their parents’ and teachers’ priorities to be more focused on getting “good grades in my classes,” than on character qualities, such as being a “caring community member.”

In noting the mixed messages, my point is not to offer another excuse for bad behavior. But some of the messages just don’t mix, placing young people in a difficult bind. Answering the expectations placed on them can be at odds with being an honest person. In the trade-off, cheating takes on a certain logic.

The proposed remedies to academic dishonesty typically focus on parents and schools. One commonly recommended strategy is to do more to promote student integrity. That seems obvious. Yet, as we saw, students already believe in honesty and the wrongness of (most) cheating. It’s not clear how more teaching on that point would make much of a difference.

Integrity, though, has another meaning, in addition to the personal qualities of being honest and of strong moral principles. Integrity is also the “quality or state of being whole or undivided.” In this second sense, we can speak of social life itself as having integrity.

It is “whole or undivided” when the different contexts of everyday life are integrated in such a way that norms, values, and expectations are fairly consistent and tend to reinforce each other—and when messages about what it means to be a good, accomplished person are not mixed but harmonious.

While social integrity rooted in ethical principles does not guarantee personal integrity, it is not hard to see how that foundation would make a major difference. Rather than confronting students with trade-offs that incentivize “any means necessary,” they would receive positive, consistent reinforcement to speak and act truthfully.

Talk of personal integrity is all for the good. But as pervasive cheating suggests, more is needed. We must also work to shape an integrated environment in which achievement and the “real world” are not set in opposition to honesty.

1. Liora Pedhazur Schmelkin, et al. “A Multidimensional Scaling of College Students’ Perceptions of Academic Dishonesty.” The Journal of Higher Education 79 (2008): 587–607.

2. See, for example, the studies in Christian B. Miller, Character and Moral Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, Ch. 3.

3. Josephson Institute. The 2012 Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth (Installment 1: Honesty and Integrity). Josephson Institute of Ethics, 2012.

Joseph E. Davis is Research Professor of Sociology and Director of the Picturing the Human Colloquy of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.

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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.

Students cheat for good grades. Why not make the classroom about learning and not testing?

Professor, Educational Psychology, The Ohio State University

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Eric Anderman received funding from National Institutes of Health.

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We have been hearing stories about academic cheating: from students caught cheating on homework assignments as well as college entrance exams to teachers being caught in cheating scandals, such as the ones in Atlanta , Georgia, and Columbus , Ohio.

Today, between 75% and 98% of college students surveyed each year report having cheated in high school. So, if cheating is happening at that large a scale, is it just inevitable? And can we even blame our students?

In order to figure out how to answer these questions, it’s important to consider why students cheat in the first place. Although the obvious reason seems to be the desire of students to get ahead (eg, to get a good grade, or to avoid a punishment), the real reason is actually a bit more complicated.

Academic goals matter

When students do their schoolwork (which includes everything from daily homework assignments to major examinations), they usually have certain goals in mind. These goals vary from one academic task to another.

In other words, if you were to ask a student, “What is your goal in taking next week’s chemistry test?”, the student should be able to tell you what she wants to get out of the experience.

My colleagues and I have been studying the psychology behind academic cheating for the past two decades, and we have found that students’ goals in their academic tasks are related in very predictable ways to their likelihood of cheating. Research also indicates that teachers and parents can influence those goals, and thus potentially deter cheating.

If the sole reason for engaging in an academic task is to get a good grade, then it’s probably easy for a student to justify the act of cheating.

As my colleagues and I found , some students might have short-term reasons. For instance, for some students, it might be as simple a motivation as the desire to go to a friend’s party on Saturday night. If they think that their parents will not let them go if they fail the test, they might take the easier option to cheat, to be able to go to the party.

For some others, it might be a longer-term reason: They might want a good salary and other luxuries in their adult life and believe that the only path to those things would be a good college. And they might be willing to cheat on their tests to be able to get ahead in their future.

Students have different goals

Whereas these reasons may seem selfish and shortsighted to some adults, to many adolescents, who are still unable to consider the consequences of their actions, these goals may seem perfectly reasonable.

We refer to these goals as “extrinsic” goals. Research indicates that students who experience classrooms in which extrinsic goals are common are more likely to cheat.

Clearly, not all students have these goals. Some students are motivated by their desire to learn.

So, for some students, the goal might be to truly understand and master the material that is being studied. In other words, whereas some students might have a goal of getting a good grade on a chemistry test in order to get something (eg, to go to a party), others might have the goal of truly learning chemistry: “I want to understand chemistry because I want to develop drugs to help fight cancer; I know that understanding chemistry is essential for me to be successful in this career.”

We refer to these goals as “mastery” goals. Research indicates that students who experience classrooms in which mastery goals are valued and encouraged are less likely to cheat .

If one thinks about this, it starts to make sense. When students are learning in classrooms where the teacher truly values mastery of the academic content (as opposed to getting a good grade on an assessment), then “cheating” really doesn’t offer any benefits to the students.

Teachers can help

The ways in which assessments of student learning are administered are particularly relevant in discussions of academic cheating. If results of assessments ultimately come down to a grade on a test or an assignment (eg, an “A” or an “F”), then students often will come to value the grade more than what they are actually learning.

However, if, in contrast, the assessment truly focuses on a demonstration of mastery of content, then students will focus on mastering that content and not just on getting an “A.”

When students have to demonstrate mastery of material, cheating doesn’t serve much of a purpose – if you truly have to show the teacher that you understand and can apply the information that you learned, then cheating won’t buy you any shortcuts.

Fortunately, there are strategies that educators can use to facilitate students’ adoption of mastery goals instead of extrinsic goals.

Here are a few suggestions, based on our research :

Make sure that assignments and exams require students to demonstrate mastery of content, as opposed to just requiring the regurgitation of memorized facts.

When students do not demonstrate mastery on an assignment or a test, allow them to redo the assignment. Educators sometimes don’t think that this recommendation is fair – after all, if one student gets all of the answers right the first time, why should someone else get a second chance? But, if the goal is really to learn or “master” the content, then does it really matter if the student gets a second chance?

Avoid high-stakes, one-time assessments.

Always provide students’ grades privately – don’t share results publicly or display distributions of scores; students often will cheat in order to avoid looking “dumb.”

Ultimately, some students will inevitably cheat. But, by considering why students are doing various academic tasks in the first place and helping them set their “mastery” goals, educators can make a significant dent in the epidemic of academic cheating.

• Adolescents
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• Atlanta Cheating scandal
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Academic dishonesty when doing homework: How digital technologies are put to bad use in secondary schools

Juliette c. désiron.

Institute of Education, University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

Dominik Petko

Associated data.

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in SISS base at 10.23662/FORS-DS-1285-1, reference number 1285.

The growth in digital technologies in recent decades has offered many opportunities to support students’ learning and homework completion. However, it has also contributed to expanding the field of possibilities concerning homework avoidance. Although studies have investigated the factors of academic dishonesty, the focus has often been on college students and formal assessments. The present study aimed to determine what predicts homework avoidance using digital resources and whether engaging in these practices is another predictor of test performance. To address these questions, we analyzed data from the Program for International Student Assessment 2018 survey, which contained additional questionnaires addressing this issue, for the Swiss students. The results showed that about half of the students engaged in one kind or another of digitally-supported practices for homework avoidance at least once or twice a week. Students who were more likely to use digital resources to engage in dishonest practices were males who did not put much effort into their homework and were enrolled in non-higher education-oriented school programs. Further, we found that digitally-supported homework avoidance was a significant negative predictor of test performance when considering information and communication technology predictors. Thus, the present study not only expands the knowledge regarding the predictors of academic dishonesty with digital resources, but also confirms the negative impact of such practices on learning.

Introduction

Academic dishonesty is a widespread and perpetual issue for teachers made even more easier to perpetrate with the rise of digital technologies (Blau & Eshet-Alkalai, 2017 ; Ma et al., 2008 ). Definitions vary but overall an academically dishonest practices correspond to learners engaging in unauthorized practice such as cheating and plagiarism. Differences in engaging in those two types of practices mainly resides in students’ perception that plagiarism is worse than cheating (Evering & Moorman, 2012 ; McCabe, 2005 ). Plagiarism is usually defined as the unethical act of copying part or all of someone else’s work, with or without editing it, while cheating is more about sharing practices (Krou et al., 2021 ). As a result, most students do report cheating in an exam or for homework (Ma et al., 2008 ). To note, other research follow a different distinction for those practices and consider that plagiarism is a specific – and common – type of cheating (Waltzer & Dahl, 2022 ). Digital technologies have contributed to opening possibilities of homework avoidance and technology-related distraction (Ma et al., 2008 ; Xu, 2015 ).

The question of whether the use of digital resources hinders or enhances homework has often been investigated in large-scale studies, such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). While most of the early large-scale studies showed positive overall correlations between the use of digital technologies for learning at home and test scores in language, mathematics, and science (e.g., OECD, 2015 ; Petko et al., 2017 ; Skryabin et al., 2015 ), there have been more recent studies reporting negative associations as well (Agasisti et al., 2020 ; Odell et al., 2020 ). One reason for these inconclusive findings is certainly the complex interplay of related factors, which include diverse ways of measuring homework, gender, socioeconomic status, personality traits, learning goals, academic abilities, learning strategies, motivation, and effort, as well as support from teachers and parents. Despite this complexity, it needs to be acknowledged that doing homework digitally does not automatically lead to productive learning activities, and it might even be associated with counter-productive practices such as digital distraction or academic dishonesty. Digitally enhanced academic dishonesty has mostly been investigated regarding formal assessment-related examinations (Evering & Moorman, 2012 ; Ma et al., 2008 ); however, it might be equally important to investigate its effects regarding learning-related assignments such as homework. Although a large body of research exists on digital academic dishonesty regarding assignments in higher education, relatively few studies have investigated this topic on K12 homework. To investigate this issue, we integrated questionnaire items on homework engagement and digital homework avoidance in a national add-on to PISA 2018 in Switzerland. Data from the Swiss sample can serve as a case study for further research with a wider cultural background. This study provides an overview of the descriptive results and tries to identify predictors of the use of digital technology for academic dishonesty when completing homework.

Prevalence and factors of digital academic dishonesty in schools

According to Pavela’s ( 1997 ) framework, four different types of academic dishonesty can be distinguished: cheating by using unauthorized materials, plagiarism by copying the work of others, fabrication of invented evidence, and facilitation by helping others in their attempts at academic dishonesty. Academic dishonesty can happen in assessment situations, as well as in learning situations. In formal assessments, academic dishonesty usually serves the purpose of passing a test or getting a better grade despite lacking the proper abilities or knowledge. In learning-related situations such as homework, where assignments are mandatory, cheating practices equally qualify as academic dishonesty. For perpetrators, these practices can be seen as shortcuts in which the willingness to invest the proper time and effort into learning is missing (Chow, 2021; Waltzer & Dahl,  2022 ). The interviews by Waltzer & Dahl ( 2022 ) reveal that students do perceive cheating as being wrong but this does not prevent them from engaging in at least one type of dishonest practice. While academic dishonesty is not a new phenomenon, it has been changing together with the development of new digital technologies (Anderman & Koenka, 2017 ; Ercegovac & Richardson, 2004 ). With the rapid growth in technologies, new forms of homework avoidance, such as copying and plagiarism, are developing (Evering & Moorman, 2012 ; Ma et al., 2008 ) summarized the findings of the 2006 U.S. surveys of the Josephson Institute of Ethics with the conclusion that the internet has led to a deterioration of ethics among students. In 2006, one-third of high school students had copied an internet document in the past 12 months, and 60% had cheated on a test. In 2012, these numbers were updated to 32% and 51%, respectively (Josephson Institute of Ethics, 2012 ). Further, 75% reported having copied another’s homework. Surprisingly, only a few studies have provided more recent evidence on the prevalence of academic dishonesty in middle and high schools. The results from colleges and universities are hardly comparable, and until now, this topic has not been addressed in international large-scale studies on schooling and school performance.

Despite the lack of representative studies, research has identified many factors in smaller and non-representative samples that might explain why some students engage in dishonest practices and others do not. These include male gender (Whitley et al., 1999 ), the “dark triad” of personality traits in contrast to conscientiousness and agreeableness (e.g., Cuadrado et al., 2021 ; Giluk & Postlethwaite, 2015 ), extrinsic motivation and performance/avoidance goals in contrast to intrinsic motivation and mastery goals (e.g., Anderman & Koenka,  2017 ; Krou et al., 2021 ), self-efficacy and achievement scores (e.g., Nora & Zhang,  2010 ; Yaniv et al., 2017 ), unethical attitudes, and low fear of being caught (e.g., Cheng et al., 2021 ; Kam et al., 2018 ), influenced by the moral norms of peers and the conditions of the educational context (e.g., Isakov & Tripathy,  2017 ; Kapoor & Kaufman, 2021 ). Similar factors have been reported regarding research on the causes of plagiarism (Husain et al., 2017 ; Moss et al., 2018 ). Further, the systematic review from Chiang et al. ( 2022 ) focused on factors of academic dishonesty in online learning environments. The analyses, based on the six-components behavior engineering, showed that the most prominent factors were environmental (effect of incentives) and individual (effect of motivation). Despite these intensive research efforts, there is still no overarching model that can comprehensively explain the interplay of these factors.

Effects of homework engagement and digital dishonesty on school performance

In meta-analyses of schools, small but significant positive effects of homework have been found regarding learning and achievement (e.g., Baş et al., 2017 ; Chen & Chen, 2014 ; Fan et al., 2017 ). In their review, Fan et al. ( 2017 ) found lower effect sizes for studies focusing on the time or frequency of homework than for studies investigating homework completion, homework grades, or homework effort. In large surveys, such as PISA, homework measurement by estimating after-school working hours has been customary practice. However, this measure could hide some other variables, such as whether teachers even give homework, whether there are school or state policies regarding homework, where the homework is done, whether it is done alone, etc. (e.g., Fernández-Alonso et al., 2015 , 2017 ). Trautwein ( 2007 ) and Trautwein et al. ( 2009 ) repeatedly showed that homework effort rather than the frequency or the time spent on homework can be considered a better predictor for academic achievement Effort and engagement can be seen as closely interrelated. Martin et al. ( 2017 ) defined engagement as the expressed behavior corresponding to students’ motivation. This has been more recently expanded by the notion of the quality of homework completion (Rosário et al., 2018 ; Xu et al., 2021 ). Therefore, it is a plausible assumption that academic dishonesty when doing homework is closely related to low homework effort and a low quality of homework completion, which in turn affects academic achievement. However, almost no studies exist on the effects of homework avoidance or academic dishonesty on academic achievement. Studies investigating the relationship between academic dishonesty and academic achievement typically use academic achievement as a predictor of academic dishonesty, not the other way around (e.g., Cuadrado et al., 2019 ; McCabe et al., 2001 ). The results of these studies show that low-performing students tend to engage in dishonest practices more often. However, high-performing students also seem to be prone to cheating in highly competitive situations (Yaniv et al., 2017 ).

Present study and hypotheses

The present study serves three combined purposes.

First, based on the additional questionnaires integrated into the Program for International Student Assessment 2018 (PISA 2018) data collection in Switzerland, we provide descriptive figures on the frequency of homework effort and the various forms of digitally-supported homework avoidance practices.

Second, the data were used to identify possible factors that explain higher levels of digitally-supported homework avoidance practices. Based on our review of the literature presented in Section 1.1 , we hypothesized (Hypothesis 1 – H1) that these factors include homework effort, age, gender, socio-economic status, and study program.

Finally, we tested whether digitally-supported homework avoidance practices were a significant predictor of test score performance. We expected (Hypothesis 2 – H2) that technology-related factors influencing test scores include not only those reported by Petko et al. ( 2017 ) but also self-reported engagement in digital dishonesty practices. .

Participants

Our analyses were based on data collected for PISA 2018 in Switzerland, made available in June 2021 (Erzinger et al., 2021 ). The target sample of PISA was 15-year-old students, with a two-phase sampling: schools and then students (Erzinger et al., 2019 , p.7–8, OECD, 2019a ). A total of 228 schools were selected for Switzerland, with an original sample of 5822 students. Based on the PISA 2018 technical report (OECD, 2019a ), only participants with a minimum of three valid responses to each scale used in the statistical analyses were included (see Section 2.2 ). A final sample of 4771 responses (48% female) was used for statistical analyses. The mean age was 15 years and 9 months ( SD  = 3 months). As Switzerland is a multilingual country, 60% of the respondents completed the questionnaires in German, 23% in French, and 17% in Italian.

Digital dishonesty in homework scale

This six-item digital dishonesty for homework scale assesses the use of digital technology for homework avoidance and copying (IC801 C01 to C06), is intended to work as a single overall scale for digital homework dishonesty practice constructed to include items corresponding to two types of dishonest practices from Pavela ( 1997 ), namely cheating and plagiarism (see Table  1 ). Three items target individual digital practices to avoid homework, which can be referred to as plagiarism (items 1, 2 and 5). Two focus more on social digital practices, for which students are cheating together with peers (items 4 and 6). One item target cheating as peer authorized plagiarism. Response options are based on questions on the productive use of digital technologies for homework in the common PISA survey (IC010), with an additional distinction for the lowest frequency option (6-point Likert scale). The scale was not tested prior to its integration into the PISA questionnaire, as it was newly developed for the purposes of this study.

Frequencies of averaged digital dishonesty in homework (weighted data)

Homework engagement scale

The scale, originally developed by Trautwein et al. (Trautwein, 2007 ; Trautwein et al., 2006 ), measures homework engagement (IC800 C01 to C06) and can be subdivided into two sub-scales: homework compliance and homework effort. The reliability of the scale was tested and established in different variants, both in Germany (Trautwein et al., 2006 ; Trautwein & Köller, 2003 ) and in Switzerland (Schnyder et al., 2008 ; Schynder Godel, 2015 ). In the adaptation used in the PISA 2018 survey, four items were positively poled (items 1, 2, 4, and 6), and two items were negatively poled (items 3 and 5) and presented with a 4-point Likert scale ranging from “Does not apply at all” to “Applies absolutely.” This adaptation showed acceptable reliability in previous studies in Switzerland (α = 0.73 and α = 0.78). The present study focused on homework effort, and thus only data from the corresponding sub-scale was analyzed (items 2 [I always try to do all of my homework], 4 [When it comes to homework, I do my best], and 6 [On the whole, I think I do my homework more conscientiously than my classmates]).

Demographics

Previous studies showed that demographic characteristics, such as age, gender, and socioeconomic status, could impact learning outcomes (Jacobs et al., 2002 ) and intention to use digital tools for learning (Tarhini et al., 2014 ). Gender is a dummy variable (ST004), with 1 for female and 2 for male. Socioeconomic status was analyzed based on the PISA 2018 index of economic, social, and cultural status (ESCS). It is computed from three other indices (OECD, 2019b , Annex A1): parents’ highest level of education (PARED), parents’ highest occupational status (HISEI), and home possessions (HOMEPOS). The final ESCS score is transformed so that 0 corresponds to an average OECD student. More details can be found in Annex A1 from PISA 2018 Results Volume 3 (OECD, 2019b ).

Study program

Although large-scale studies on schools have accounted for the differences between schools, the study program can also be a factor that directly affects digital homework dishonesty practices. In Switzerland, 15-year-old students from the PISA sampling pool can be part of at least six main study programs, which greatly differ in terms of learning content. In this study, study programs distinguished both level and type of study: lower secondary education (gymnasial – n  = 798, basic requirements – n  = 897, advanced requirements – n  = 1235), vocational education (classic – n  = 571, with baccalaureate – n  = 275), and university entrance preparation ( n  = 745). An “other” category was also included ( n  = 250). This 6-level ordinal variable was dummy coded based on the available CNTSCHID variable.

Technologies and schools

The PISA 2015 ICT (Information and Communication Technology) familiarity questionnaire included most of the technology-related variables tested by Petko et al. ( 2017 ): ENTUSE (frequency of computer use at home for entertainment purposes), HOMESCH (frequency of computer use for school-related purposes at home), and USESCH (frequency of computer use at school). However, the measure of student’s attitudes toward ICT in the 2015 survey was different from that of the 2012 dataset. Based on previous studies (Arpacı et al., 2021 ; Kunina-Habenicht & Goldhammer, 2020 ), we thus included INICT (Student’s ICT interest), COMPICT (Students’ perceived ICT competence), AUTICT (Students’ perceived autonomy related to ICT use), and SOIACICT (Students’ ICT as a topic in social interaction) instead of the variable ICTATTPOS of the 2012 survey.

Test scores

The PISA science, mathematics, and reading test scores were used as dependent variables to test our second hypothesis. Following Aparicio et al. ( 2021 ), the mean scores from plausible values were computed for each test score and used in the test score analysis.

Data analyses

Our hypotheses aim to assess the factors explaining student digital homework dishonesty practices (H1) and test score performance (H2). At the student level, we used multilevel regression analyses to decompose the variance and estimate associations. As we used data for Switzerland, in which differences between school systems exist at the level of provinces (within and between), we also considered differences across schools (based on the variable CNTSCHID).

Data were downloaded from the main PISA repository, and additional data for Switzerland were available on forscenter.ch (Erzinger et al., 2021 ). Analyses were computed with Jamovi (v.1.8 for Microsoft Windows) statistics and R packages (GAMLj, lavaan).

Additional scales for Switzerland

Digital dishonesty in homework practices.

The digital homework dishonesty scale (6 items), computed with the six items IC801, was found to be of very good reliability overall (α = 0.91, ω = 0.91). After checking for reliability, a mean score was computed for the overall scale. The confirmatory factor analysis for the one-dimensional model reached an adequate fit, with three modifications using residual covariances between single items χ 2 (6) = 220, p  < 0.001, TLI = 0.969, CFI = 0.988, RMSEA (Root Mean Square Error of Approximation) = 0.086, SRMR = 0.016).

On the one hand, the practice that was the least reported was copying something from the internet and presenting it as their own (51% never did). On the other hand, students were more likely to partially copy content from the internet and modify it to present as their own (47% did it at least once a month). Copying answers shared by friends was rather common, with 62% of the students reporting that they engaged in such practices at least once a month.

When all surveyed practices were taken together, 7.6% of the students reported that they had never engaged in digitally dishonest practices for homework, while 30.6% reported cheating once or twice a week, 12.1% almost every day, and 6.9% every day (Table  1 ).

Homework effort

The overall homework engagement scale consisted of six items (IC800), and it was found to be acceptably reliable (α = 0.76, ω = 0.79). Items 3 and 5 were reversed for this analysis. The homework compliance sub-scale had a low reliability (α = 0.58, ω = 0.64), whereas the homework effort sub-scale had an acceptable reliability (α = 0.78, ω = 0.79). Based on our rationale, the following statistical analyses used only the homework effort sub-scale. Furthermore, this focus is justified by the fact that the homework compliance scale might be statistically confounded with the digital dishonesty in homework scale.

Descriptive weighted statistics per item (Table  2 ) showed that while most students (80%) tried to complete all of their homework, only half of the students reported doing those diligently (53.3%). Most students also reported that they believed they put more effort into their homework than their peers (77.7%). The overall mean score of the composite scale was 2.81 ( SD  = 0.69).

Frequencies of averaged homework engagement (weighted data)

Multilevel regression analysis: Predictors of digital dishonesty in homework (H1)

Mixed multilevel modeling was used to analyze predictors of digital homework avoidance while considering the effect of school (random component). Based on our first hypothesis, we compared several models by progressively including the following fixed effects: homework effort and personal traits (age, gender) (Model 2), then socio-economic status (Model 3), and finally, study program (Model 4). The results are presented in Table  3 . Except for the digital homework dishonesty and homework efforts scales, all other scales were based upon the scores computed according to the PISA technical report (OECD, 2019a ).

Multilevel models explaining variations in students’ self-reported homework avoidance with digital resources

Note : * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001

We first compared variance components. Variance was decomposed into student and school levels. Model 1 provides estimates of the variance component without any covariates. The intraclass coefficient (ICC) indicated that about 6.6% of the total variance was associated with schools. The parameter (b  = 2.56, SE b  = 0.025 ) falls within the 95% confidence interval. Further, CI is above 0 and thus we can reject the null hypothesis. Comparing the empty model to models with covariates, we found that Models 2, 3 and 4 showed an increase in total explained variance to 10%. Variance explained by the covariates was about 3% in Models 2 and 3, and about 4% in Model 4. Interestingly, in our models, student socio-economic status, measured by the PISA index, never accounted for variance in digitally-supported dishonest practices to complete homework.

Further, model comparison based on AIC indicates that Model 4, including homework effort, personal traits, socio-economic status, and study program, was the better fit for the data. In Model 4 (Table  3 ; Fig.  1 ), we observed that homework effort and gender were negatively associated with digital dishonesty. Male students who invested less effort in their homework were more prone to engage in digital dishonesty. The study program was positively but weakly associated with digital dishonesty. Students in programs that target higher education were less likely to engage in digital dishonesty when completing homework.

Summary of the two-steps Model 4 (estimates - β, with standard errors and significance levels, *** p < 0.001)

Multilevel regression analysis: Cheating and test scores (H2)

Our first hypothesis aimed to provide insights into characteristics of students reporting that they regularly use digital resources dishonestly when completing homework. Our second hypothesis focused on whether digitally-supported homework avoidance practices was linked to results of test scores. Mixed multilevel modeling was used to analyze predictors of test scores while considering the effect of school (random component). Based on the study by Petko et al. ( 2017 ), we compared several models by progressively including the following fixed effects ICT use (three measures) (Model 2), then attitude toward ICT (four measures) (Model 3), and finally, digital dishonesty in homework (single measure) (Model 4). The results are presented in Table  4 for science, Table  5 for mathematics, and Table  6 for reading.

Multilevel models explaining variations in student test scores in science (standardized coefficients and model parameters)

Multilevel models explaining variations in student test scores in mathematics (standardized coefficients and model parameters)

Multilevel models explaining variations in student test scores in reading (standardized coefficients and model parameters)

Variance components were decomposed into student and school level. ICC for Model 1 indicated that 37.9% of the variance component without covariates was associated with schools.

Taking Model 1 as a reference, we observed an increase in total explained variance to 40.5% with factors related to ICT use (Model 2), to 40.8% with factors related to attitude toward ICT (Model 3), and to 41.1% with the single digital dishonesty factor. It is interesting to note that we obtained different results from those reported by Petko et al. ( 2017 ). In their study, they found significant effects on the explained variances of ENTUSE, USESCH, and ICTATTPOS but not of HOMESCH for Switzerland. In the present study (Model 3), HOMESCH and USESCH were significant predictors but not ENTUSE, and for attitude toward ICT, all but INTICT were significant predictors of the variance. However, factors corresponding to ICT use were negatively associated with test performance, as in the study by Petko et al. ( 2017 ). Similarly, all components of attitude toward ICT positively affected science test scores, except for students’ ICT as a topic in social interaction.

Based on the AIC values, Model 4, including ICT use, attitude toward ICT, and digital dishonesty, was the better fit for the data. The parameter ( b  = 498.00, SE b  = 3.550) shows that our sample falls within the 95% confidence interval and that we can reject the null hypothesis. In this model, all factors except the use of ICT outside of school for leisure were significant predictors of explained variance in science test scores. These results are consistent with those reported by Petko et al. ( 2017 ), in which more frequent use of ICT negatively affected science test scores, with an overall positive effect of positive attitude toward ICT. Further, we observed that homework avoidance with digital resources strongly negatively affected performance, with lower performance associated with students reporting a higher frequency of engagement in digital dishonesty practices.

For mathematics test scores, results from Models 2 and 3 showed a similar pattern than those for science, and Model 4 also explained the highest variance (41.2%). The results from Model 4 contrast with those found by Petko et al. ( 2017 ), as in this study, HOMESCH was the only significant variable of ICT use. Regarding attitudes toward ICT, only two measures (COMPICT and AUTICT) were significant positive factors in Model 4. As for science test scores, digital dishonesty practices were a significantly strong negative predictor. Students who reported cheating more frequently were more likely to perform poorly on mathematics tests.

The analyses of PISA test scores for reading in Model 2 was similar to that of science and mathematics, with ENTUSE being a non-significant predictor when we included only measures of ICT use as predictors. In Model 3, contrary to the science and mathematics test scores models, in which INICT was non-significant, all measures of attitude toward ICT were positively significant predictors. Nevertheless, as for science and mathematics, Model 4, which included digital dishonesty, explained the greater variance in reading test scores (42.2%). We observed that for reading, all predictors were significant in Model 4, with an overall negative effect of ICT use, a positive effect of attitude toward ICT—except for SOIAICT, and a negative effect of digital dishonesty on test scores. Interestingly, the detrimental effect of using digital resources to engage in dishonest homework completion was the strongest in reading test scores.

In this study, we were able to provide descriptive statistics on the prevalence of digital dishonesty among secondary students in the Swiss sample of PISA 2018. Students from this country were selected because they received additional questions targeting both homework effort and the frequency with which they engaged in digital dishonesty when doing homework. Descriptive statistics indicated that fairly high numbers of students engage in dishonest homework practices, with 49.6% reporting digital dishonesty at least once or twice a week. The most frequently reported practice was copying answers from friends, which was undertaken at least once a month by more than two-thirds of respondents. Interestingly, the most infamous form of digital dishonesty, that is plagiarism by copy-pasting something from the internet (Evering & Moorman, 2012 ), was admitted to by close to half of the students (49%). These results for homework avoidance are close to those obtained by previous research on digital academic plagiarism (e.g., McCabe et al., 2001 ).

We then investigated what makes a cheater, based on students’ demographics and effort put in doing their homework (H1), before looking at digital dishonesty as an additional ICT predictor of PISA test scores (mathematics, reading, and science) (H2).

The goal of our first research hypothesis was to determine student-related factors that may predict digital homework avoidance practices. Here, we focused on factors linked to students’ personal characteristics and study programs. Our multilevel model explained about 10% of the variance overall. Our analysis of which students are more likely to digital resources to avoid homework revealed an increased probability for male students who did not put much effort into doing their homework and who were studying in a program that was not oriented toward higher education. Thus, our findings tend to support results from previous research that stresses the importance of gender and motivational factors for academic dishonesty (e.g., Anderman & Koenka,  2017 ; Krou et al., 2021 ). Yet, as our model only explained little variance and more research is needed to provide an accurate representation of the factors that lead to digital dishonesty. Future research could include more aspects that are linked to learning, such as peer-related or teaching-related factors. Possibly, how closely homework is embedded in the teaching and learning culture may play a key role in digital dishonesty. Additional factors might be linked to the overall availability and use of digital tools. For example, the report combining factors from the PISA 2018 school and student questionnaires showed that the higher the computer–student ratio, the lower students scored in the general tests (OECD, 2020b ). A positive association with reading disappeared when socio-economic background was considered. This is even more interesting when considering previous research indicating that while internet access is not a source of divide among youths, the quality of use is still different based on gender or socioeconomic status (Livingstone & Helsper, 2007 ). Thus, investigating the usage-related “digital divide” as a potential source of digital dishonesty is an interesting avenue for future research (Dolan, 2016 ).

Our second hypothesis considered that digital dishonesty in homework completion can be regarded as an additional ICT-related trait and thus could be included in models targeting the influence of traditional ICT on PISA test scores, such as Petko et al. ( 2017 ) study. Overall, our results on the influence of ICT use and attitudes toward ICT on test scores are in line with those reported by Petko et al. ( 2017 ). Digital dishonesty was found to negatively influence test scores, with a higher frequency of cheating leading to lower performance in all major PISA test domains, and particularly so for reading. For each subject, the combined models explained about 40% of the total variance.

Conclusions and recommendations

Our results have several practical implications. First, the amount of cheating on homework observed calls for new strategies for raising homework engagement, as this was found to be a clear predictor of digital dishonesty. This can be achieved by better explaining the goals and benefits of homework, the adverse effects of cheating on homework, and by providing adequate feedback on homework that was done properly. Second, teachers might consider new forms of homework that are less prone to cheating, such as doing homework in non-digital formats that are less easy to copy digitally or in proctored digital formats that allow for the monitoring of the process of homework completion, or by using plagiarism software to check homework. Sometimes, it might even be possible to give homework and explicitly encourage strategies that might be considered cheating, for example, by working together or using internet sources. As collaboration is one of the 21st century skills that students are expected to develop (Bray et al., 2020 ), this can be used to turn cheating into positive practice. There is already research showing the beneficial impact of computer-supported collaborative learning (e.g., Janssen et al., 2012 ). Zhang et al. ( 2011 ) compared three homework assignment (creation of a homepage) conditions: individually, in groups with specific instructions, and in groups with general instructions. Their results showed that computer supported collaborative homework led to better performance than individual settings, only when the instructions were general. Thus, promoting digital collaborative homework could support the development of students’ digital and collaborative skills.

Further, digital dishonesty in homework needs to be considered different from cheating in assessments. In research on assessment-related dishonesty, cheating is perceived as a reprehensible practice because grades obtained are a misrepresentation of student knowledge, and cheating “implies that efficient cheaters are good students, since they get good grades” (Bouville, 2010 , p. 69). However, regarding homework, this view is too restrictive. Indeed, not all homework is graded, and we cannot know for sure whether students answered this questionnaire while considering homework as a whole or only graded homework (assessments). Our study did not include questions about whether students displayed the same attitudes and practices toward assessments (graded) and practice exercises (non-graded), nor did it include questions on how assessments and homework were related. By cheating on ungraded practice exercises, students will primarily hamper their own learning process. Future research could investigate in more depth the kinds of homework students cheat on and why.

Finally, the question of how to foster engaging homework with digital tools becomes even more important in pandemic situations. Numerous studies following the switch to home schooling at the beginning of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic have investigated the difficulties for parents in supporting their children (Bol, 2020 ; Parczewska, 2021 ); however, the question of digital homework has not been specifically addressed. It is unknown whether the increase in digital schooling paired with discrepancies in access to digital tools has led to an increase in digital dishonesty practices. Data from the PISA 2018 student questionnaires (OECD, 2020a ) indicated that about 90% of students have a computer for schoolwork (OECD average), but the availability per student remains unknown. Digital homework can be perceived as yet another factor of social differences (see for example Auxier & Anderson,  2020 ; Thorn & Vincent-Lancrin, 2022 ).

Limitations and directions

The limitations of the study include the format of the data collected, with the accuracy of self-reports to mirror actual practices restricted, as these measures are particularly likely to trigger response bias, such as social desirability. More objective data on digital dishonesty in homework-related purposes could, for example, be obtained by analyzing students’ homework with plagiarism software. Further, additional measures that provide a more complete landscape of contributing factors are necessary. For example, in considering digital homework as an alternative to traditional homework, parents’ involvement in homework and their attitudes toward ICT are factors that have not been considered in this study (Amzalag, 2021 ). Although our results are in line with studies on academic digital dishonesty, their scope is limited to the Swiss context. Moreover, our analyses focused on secondary students. Results might be different with a sample of younger students. As an example, Kiss and Teller ( 2022 ) measured primary students cheating practices and found that individual characteristics were not a stable predictor of cheating between age groups. Further, our models included school as a random component, yet other group variables, such as class and peer groups, may well affect digital homework avoidance strategies.

The findings of this study suggest that academic dishonesty when doing homework needs to be addressed in schools. One way, as suggested by Chow et al. ( 2021 ) and Djokovic et al. ( 2022 ), is to build on students’ practices to explain which need to be considered cheating. This recommendation for institutions to take preventive actions and explicit to students the punishment faced in case of digital academic behavior was also raised by Chiang et al. ( 2022 ). Another is that teachers may consider developing homework formats that discourage cheating and shortcuts (e.g., creating multimedia documents instead of text-based documents, using platforms where answers cannot be copied and pasted, or using advanced forms of online proctoring). It may also be possible to change homework formats toward more open formats, where today’s cheating practices are allowed when they are made transparent (open-book homework, collaborative homework). Further, experiences from the COVID-19 pandemic have stressed the importance of understanding the factors related to the successful integration of digital homework and the need to minimize the digital “homework gap” (Auxier & Anderson, 2020 ; Donnelly & Patrinos, 2021 ). Given that homework engagement is a core predictor of academic dishonesty, students should receive meaningful homework in preparation for upcoming lessons or for practicing what was learned in past lessons. Raising student’s awareness of the meaning and significance of homework might be an important piece of the puzzle to honesty in learning.

List of abbreviations related to PISA datasets

Juliette C. Désiron: Formal analysis, Writing (Original, Review and Editing), Dominik Petko: Conceptualization, Writing (Original, Review and Editing), Supervision.

Open access funding provided by University of Zurich

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Declarations.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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September 28, 2020 Teaching & Learning

How to avoid online cheating & encourage learning instead.

Students tempted to find easy answers while distance learning

By Sherry Posnick-Goodwin

Joline Martinez suspected many of her students were cheating after her school closed last spring and she transitioned to distance learning. They showed their work on equations and came up with the correct answers, but something was definitely off, says the Yosemite High School math teacher.

Joline Martinez

“My students were solving problems with ridiculous fractions,” says Martinez, a member of Yosemite Unified Teachers Association. “They were using steps they had never been taught. It was a huge issue. I suspected they were cheating. I was losing sleep over this.”

Martinez was so frustrated, she posted about it on CTA’s “Teaching, Learning and Life During COVID-19” Facebook page, and found she was not alone. Numerous CTA members responded to her post, saying they also suspected students were cheating while working from home.

One of them, Maggie Strode, was troubled that students who were struggling when attending school on campus were suddenly turning in perfect papers during distance learning.

“Students were combining several steps into one while solving equations, and always moved the variable to the left side of the equation,” says Strode, a math teacher at South Hills High School and member of the Covina Unified Education Association. “It’s something I do not have my students do, because when they are doing the equations on their own, it leads to errors.” During online office hours she asked them to solve similar problems, and they didn’t have a clue.

Both teachers figured out their students were using Photomath, an app that utilizes a cellphone’s camera to recognize mathematical equations and display a step-by-step solution onscreen — which may differ from how students were taught.

“It’s frustrating,” says Strode. “I was creating videos showing students how to do the work, but they weren’t watching them. Instead, they used this app. It’s much easier to keep an eye on students when you have them in your classroom. When they work from home, it is much more challenging.”

“I gave them the opportunity to resubmit. Students were going through a lot, and I wanted to demonstrate compassion.” — Karin Prasad, Liberty Education Association

Students are more tempted with distance learning

When schools closed abruptly last March due to COVID-19, older students knew that their grades couldn’t be lowered, only raised. Nonetheless, many cheated while working from home, even those with passing grades, say teachers.

Educators admit they were so overwhelmed with transitioning to distance learning that it was difficult to police students who were intent on beating the system. Students can Google answers instantly on their phones during exams and watch videos about how to cheat on YouTube. (Some colleges are having students install a second camera on their devices and clearing their workspace, so that instructors can see students’ hands during exam time.)

Karin Prasad

Distance learning has created more temptations for students, observes Karin Prasad, an English teacher at Heritage High School in Brentwood. She uses turnitin.com , an online program that compares her students’ work with other student essays in the system and also published work. After schools closed due to the pandemic, two essays were red-flagged in what’s called a “similarity report.”

Normally she would have given both students a zero on the assignment. But Prasad gave them some leeway because of the state of the world.

“Being in a pandemic is weird and scary,” says the Liberty Education Association member. “So instead of giving them a zero, which I would have done in a normal school year, I gave them the opportunity to resubmit. Students were going through a lot, and I wanted to demonstrate compassion.”

Martinez also didn’t make a big fuss the way she would have under normal circumstances. “I didn’t really push the issue. I didn’t want to have to contact all of the parents; I have 200 students in my classes. It was definitely an uphill battle.”

This year will be different, vows Martinez, whose district will begin the year online. Students will be held accountable for work done from home, and the no-cheating rule will be strictly enforced.

“I give timed quizzes, where they only have a short time for each question — and no time to look it up.” — Pedro Quintanilla, Imperial Valley Teachers Association

• How teachers can put the kibosh on cheating

“If you can Google the answer to a question, it’s not worth asking,” says Katie Hollman, a seventh grade math teacher at Walter Stiern Middle School in Bakersfield. “Students immediately jump on Google to hunt for answers in class by opening a second tab on their computer, so you can just imagine what happens at home on cellphones.”

Hollman, a member of the Bakersfield Elementary Teachers Association, asks students to explain their work on Flipgrid videos they create. She also has students create their own real-world math word problems, and then solve them. It might involve visiting a restaurant and explaining the bill, deciding how much they want to tip, adding the tax, and figuring out percentages, for example. Or going to various grocery stores and comparing the unit rates of various items for sale to discern which is a better bargain. Because students are mostly at home, the research for menu and grocery store items happens online, of course.

Pedro Quintanilla

Imperial High School teacher Pedro Quintanilla can tell if students are cheating on exams while solving math problems with paper and pencil, by looking at handwriting when assignments are submitted online. If the work seems too perfect, without pressure points in some spots and nothing crossed out or erased, he becomes suspicious.

“If you don’t see any struggle, that is a big sign,” says Quintanilla, an Imperial Valley Teachers Association member.

“One of the ways I assess knowledge of major concepts is by giving a timed quiz, and have them submit their answers to each question, one at a time, almost immediately. Also, I include a Quizzizz activity [a fast-paced, interactive game] where they need to perform the skills learned in a lesson. In addition, no pun intended, I have them submit their notes for a lesson. And I give timed quizzes, where they only have a short time for each question — and no time to look it up.”

Suzie Priebe

Suzie Priebe, a history teacher at Amelia Earhart Middle School, asks students to write about things they are knowledgeable about on the first day of class so she can hear their “voice” and get a “flavor” of how they write. She compares their tone to essay questions later, to determine authenticity.

She also asks them interpretive questions on history, such as “What do you think is the most important thing about the Bill of Rights and why?”

“In history, it’s not as important to memorize, because you look up things on Google, such as when the Declaration of Independence was signed. But knowing why it was signed and being able to explain that is just better.”

Other ideas to prevent cheating online:

• Mix it up , with tests having a variety of multiple-choice, true/false and open-ended questions. It’s more difficult for students to share answers when they must explain concepts.
• Have every student start the exam at the same time and set a time limit. The key is having enough time for students who know the information to respond, but not enough time for students who don’t know the material to search online for answers.
• Only show one question at a time , so students can’t be searching ahead on Google.
• Change test question sequence , so that all students do not have the same question at one time, to avoid screen sharing.
• Give students different versions of the same test to thwart screen sharing.
• Give students their scores all at the same time , so that students who finish early don’t confirm answers for those still working.
• Increase points for class participation .
• Talk about integrity , and have students sign an “academic integrity” agreement.

“I want my students to be successful. If they rely on shortcuts and cheat, they won’t survive in the real world.” —Maggie Strode, Covina Unified Education Association

Encourage students to be honest

Talking to students about integrity, trust and doing the right thing also prevents cheating.

Maggie Strode

“I let my students know that once you are labeled a cheat, it’s very hard to regain trust,” says Strode. “I tell students I’d rather they not turn in an assignment than turn in work they didn’t do. They don’t realize that they sometimes put more time and effort into cheating than it would take to just do the assignment. I love my students. I want them to be successful — not only in my classroom, but in life. If they rely on shortcuts and cheat, they won’t survive in the real world. No one will make allowances for them there.”

Hollman discusses cheating in her weekly “Life Lessons with Hollman” sessions, urging students to resist the temptation and instead ask for help.

Katie Hollman

“I want to help them understand the material so we can fix the problem. I make time for tutoring during online office hours. And I explain that if they cheat in college, they won’t just get a zero on an assignment — they will get kicked out of school.”

She also explains that it’s in their own best interest: If enough students cheat, the teacher assumes the class has mastered the material, and makes the curriculum even more challenging.

Quintanilla talks to his students about the importance of digital citizenship and the value of the honor system in his classes.

“With distance learning, you have to establish a good relationship with students, and then, when you emphasize honesty, you have more buy-in from them.”

“I would rather see the child attempt something, fail, and ask for help, rather than not try.”

Distance Learning: Parents Doing Children’s Work?

Even in normal times, second grade teacher Nailah Legohn has seen the lines blur between parental support and parents doing the homework, so their children don’t fall behind. But with distance learning, parents and sometimes older siblings are doing schoolwork of children more frequently.

Nailah Legohn

“Sometimes it’s hard to know who is really doing the work,” says Legohn, a teacher at Ridgemoor Elementary School in Sun City. “The little ones need a lot of parent support. And they may be saying, ‘I don’t get it.’ If they whine and cry enough, the parent may give in and provide the answer because they want the child to get credit — or they want their child to go outside and play. Parents are under so much pressure. Many of them are also working at home while trying to help their children.”

Parents think they are helping, but they are not, says Legohn, a member of the Menifee Teachers Association. “I tell them, ‘Please don’t do the work for them.’ I explain that they are not setting up their child for success. If kids know that someone else is going to provide the answer, they will expect that to happen when they go back into the regular classroom. And that’s not how it’s going to be. When schools reopen, students are going to have to do the work themselves. If they aren’t used to it, it will be much more of a struggle.”

Legohn asks her students to circle problems that are difficult for them, and then she helps students understand the material by offering extra help during virtual office hours. They can also message her on Google Classroom to ask questions.

“I want my students to love learning and understand how to learn,” says Legohn. “I am pushing for them to have a growth mindset and the ability to ask questions. I would rather see the child attempt something, fail, and ask for help, rather than not try. Parents are role models, and the best way they can help is teaching their children to take responsibility for their own learning.”

#online learning

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EdTech Goes Undercover: An Insider’s View of What Students Post on Contract Cheating Sites

Amelia Pang is a journalist and an editor at EdTech: Focus on Higher Education. Her work has appeared in the New Republic, Mother Jones, and  The New York Times Sunday Review, among other publications.

Editor’s Note: This is part 1 of a 2-part investigation. Part 2 covers how IT departments can detect and prevent contract cheating in higher education.

“Please complete my assignment,” a student posts on a microtutoring website that universities say  facilitates contract cheating . The assignment is on the history of public health. APA format. Three sources. At least 750 words. In less than 15 minutes,  EdTech  sees a university ghostwriter accepting the assignment for $20.

There are hundreds of “homework help” websites that have seen an  exponential increase in customers  since the start of the pandemic. The services offered on sites like these typically run the gamut of legitimate tutoring to selling exam documents and answers. Some flat out offer to take an entire online course or exam for students.

The shadow industry of contract cheating falls into a legal gray area. When students and tutors make an account on a homework help site, they must sign a terms-of-service agreement and honor code that forbids academic cheating. But an undercover  EdTech  investigation found this agreement appears to be rarely enforced.

“I have definitely seen an increase in customers since the pandemic began,” Alex, an academic ghostwriter who currently works for a homework help site, tells  EdTech.  “Specifically, there has been an increase in the number of students posting that they want full online classes done for them. Most of the time, students have no problem finding a contractor.”

What Is Contract Cheating, and How Does It Work?

To avoid legal liability, some homework help sites are using automation tools to edit the language of posts. Whenever students submit a post, the first line always says something like “I need help understanding the assignment,” or “Help me learn.”

But  EdTech  saw this as mostly a cursory statement. Many students will also directly say, “Please complete my assignment.” Some even go so far as to request that the “tutor” be available at a certain date and time to take an online exam for them.

“I would say that 30 percent of the requests are for ‘help’ versus completing assignments,”  a tutor for one of these sites told BRIGHT Magazine in 2016.  “It is largely a place for students to cheat.”

When  EdTech  created a tutor account at a homework help site earlier this year, we found that not much has changed since the BRIGHT Magazine article came out five years ago.

An insider's view of what students post on contract cheating sites.

Although students are blatantly asking for “tutors” to complete assignments and exams for them,  EdTech  saw academic ghostwriters making bids and accepting the work — often within minutes.

Students Hire Academic Ghostwriters to Take Online Courses for Them

Former and current academic ghostwriters also say that taking an entire online course for students is a common practice in the industry — a practice that has existed since the inception of online education. “That was always standard operating procedure,” says Dave Tomar, a former academic ghostwriter who started his decade-long career in contract cheating in 2000. He is currently the managing editor of  Academic Influence , where he  shares his insights  on how educators can counter the surge of contract cheating during the pandemic.

“When I started doing this, I would frequently get these full online modules at the beginning of a rolling semester," Tomar says. “I got the full syllabus, and everything that I was expected to do over the next couple of months. Now, with countless students forced into remote learning, you have a whole new customer pool that is growing.”

As for how much students are willing to pay, the contractors charge “anywhere from $300 to $700 for a full class depending on the student, the subject and the difficulty,” says Alex, who currently works for a homework help site.

INSIDER EXCLUSIVE:   Read Part 2 – What can universities do about contract cheating?

Fake Tutors Entice Unknowing Students to Engage in Contract Cheating

Academic cheating sites also strongly encourage students to sell their coursework— an act that may be illegal in 17 states.

“Distributing any post-secondary assignment for a profit with reasonable knowledge that it will be submitted by another person for academic credit is a crime in many US states,” Citron Research, an investment research firm that investigates overvalued fraudulent companies, stated in  a report.

It’s a big problem for many institutions. According to Douglas Harrison, vice president and dean of the school of cybersecurity and information technology at the  University of Maryland Global Campus , some of these contract cheating websites are “facilitating massive transfers of institutional proprietary material into their file-sharing systems.”

Harrison says many students may not even realize they are cheating when they download a university’s copyrighted classroom assessment materials because these websites reframe downloading answers to tests as a form of studying or tutoring. “They reframe file-sharing as educational, even though these are behaviors that conventional norms of academic integrity would consider misconduct,” he says.

Dave Tomar former academic ghostwriter.

To make matters worse, these websites have mastered sophisticated techniques to lure unsuspecting students. Several of these prominent homework tutoring sites will offer to give students a discount if they let their academic ghostwriter have access to the online course. This often results in the contract cheater stealing other students’ personal information.

“So the contract cheater then reaches out to other students and says, ‘I’m a tutor in your course. And I’ve helped another student in your class with their assignments. Would you like a little help?’” Harrison says, describing how the contract cheater pitches cheating “services” to other students.

This can be especially confusing for students, who may not know how to tell the difference between a contract cheater and a legitimate tutor who is affiliated with the university.

“Most of the students who we find in academic misconduct settings after inappropriately using materials on these sites, they did not set out to be malicious cheaters. Now that doesn’t mean we don’t hold them accountable, but we have to hold them accountable in proportion to the root cause of the situation,” Harrison says.

Who Is Using Academic Ghostwriters?

According to the ghostwriters who are contracted to help students cheat, their customers are usually underserved students who need access to remedial courses, and nontraditional students who struggle to balance coursework with full-time employment.

“I would argue that what is facilitating the surge of contract cheating is the fact that students are increasingly desperate and lacking support,” says Tomar.

During Tomar’s time as an academic ghostwriter, he caught glimpses into their personal circumstances. “Some would tell you they are a parent working full time. And they just can’t deal with this challenge right now. Some say, ‘I’ve invested X number of dollars into this education, and I cannot afford to fail this class. But I don’t know how to do this assignment.’”

Alex mentions that many are also English language learners. “As I noted, some students are asking for whole classes to be done, and a lot of those are English or writing-intensive courses,” he says. “That does not mean that they are ESL, but [my sense is] most of them are.”

To fundamentally address the cheating pandemic, universities and colleges may need to invest in more resources for vulnerable student populations.

“It begins with figuring out who’s struggling, why they’re struggling and what we can do to help them before they end up as contract cheating customers,” Tomar says.

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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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• Teaching & Learning

When does ‘homework help’ become cheating?

A fair dice has six sides, numbered 1 to 6. After it is rolled, five of the numbers can be seen. What is the probability that one of these five numbers is 2?”

I have a confession to make: I’m terrible at maths. Questions like this one used to bring me out in a cold sweat, but now, thanks to so-called “homework help” websites, I can quickly find the answer.

I know this because I submitted the dice question to one such website and was told that, for a monthly subscription fee, I could gain access to myriad educational materials, including an “ask the expert” option that promises to deliver answers to questions, just like the one above, in a little over half an hour.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that during successive lockdowns over the past year and a half, the number of requests for help submitted to these sites has soared.

But at what point does “help” tip over into plain old “cheating”?

The answer to that question could soon become a lot clearer, as the government has recently announced that it plans to make “contract cheating” - the practice of students engaging a third party to complete assignments - illegal as one of a number of measures being introduced to the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill.

This move comes not before time, according to Thomas Lancaster, a higher education professional who specialises in computer science, academic integrity and contract cheating. He explains that, while Covid lockdowns might have fuelled the recent boom in visits to homework help sites, this type of academic information sharing has been around for decades.

“Even 20 years ago, university students had worked out that the same questions and assignments would be used repeatedly and they would create archives of materials to share between different years,” he explains.

“What happened then was that companies saw this as a good business model and started to set up sites to archive solutions, marketed at students from different universities.”

While some of the more successful homework help sites have been around for a decade or more, “it’s really only the past three or four years where the major players have really pushed their marketing and tried to get inroads into every university”, says Lancaster.

Earlier this year, Lancaster and Codrin Cotarlan, from Imperial College London, published a paper in the International Journal for Educational Integrity that reported on a surge in requests to homework help websites and the rapid growth of online “essay mills” - sites that provide full essays to download for a fee.

While the researchers’ work focused on the activities of university students, Lancaster says one of the problems he has witnessed at university level is that students are “bringing with them the bad habits they picked up at school”.

As he suggests, a quick search on some of these sites for GCSE maths or chemistry help reveals “no shortage” of questions posted and answered.

“I was actually sent an example recently of a UK school resource guide, which was referring students to one of these sites for revision, not perhaps realising that this same site sells ‘homework help’ solutions to students,” he says.

Keeping ‘bad habits’ at bay

While Lancaster has only anecdotal evidence that school-age children are using homework help sites, he strongly believes that the use of these sites is increasing across the age spectrum.

“I talk to a lot of people working in the academic-integrity field and universities worldwide are finding more cases of homework help sites being used by students,” he says.

“My own research suggests that the number of questions posted has gone up by almost 200 per cent from before the pandemic. We can’t easily say if the questions are at university or school level. My impression is most are university level but there’s evidence of both.”

Offering essay-writing services to students for a fee is set to become a become a criminal offence. But for now, how worried should teachers be about all this? And what, if anything, could they do to prevent pupils from relying too heavily on homework help sites?

Perhaps the biggest concern is that we simply have very little evidence at the moment about how many pupils may be accessing the sites, how often, and the long-term impact of regular access. It stands to reason, though, that if pupils are increasingly relying on them for all their answers, their learning is bound to suffer.

Lekha Sharma, a former primary teacher and vice-principal who is now a curriculum designer at the Teacher Development Trust, admits that while she has not had much experience of pupils using homework help sites, she has had “lots of experiences of internet resources being used, and sometimes overused, for home learning”.

This is something that she believes requires intervention to prevent pupils from getting into those “bad habits” that Lancaster mentioned earlier.

“That line between ‘help’ and ‘plagiarism’ is often something I’ve had to discuss with pupils, particularly at [key stage 2] in primary, where they become increasingly tech savvy,” says Sharma.

Laura Webb, head of English at Churchdown School Academy, in Gloucestershire, reports a similar situation at secondary level - and agrees that there can be a fine line between “encouraging independence and encouraging cheating”.

“Completing research and copying and pasting is one thing, but copying and pasting into a piece of coursework or an essay is frustrating,” she says.

“I find it quite easy to detect when a student does this - voice changes, style changes, Spag (spelling, punctuation and grammar) changes - so a quick Google [to check if it’s been lifted] and then a conversation, and it never happens again. But, of course, students do try it.”

Webb believes that the “real trick” to tackling plagiarism of this kind is to take a proactive rather than reactive approach by telling students about it early.

“The truth is we teach the ideas behind plagiarism probably too late, often at A level. For me, I first encountered the concept at university but, then, there were far fewer sites of this type available,” she says.

The good news is that a lot of sites charge for access and, as Webb says, “not many students would spend their money on an essay”.

Lancaster agrees that while school-age children might be aware of the existence of these sites, which are “so well optimised, they are going to appear prominently” in search results, they may not have the financial means to pay for access. Yet a lack of money is not always a deterrent. He says he has detected lots of discussions online between children “about how to get around the paywall, and people looking to trade accounts”.

Unfortunately, it sounds as if Covid lockdowns have added fuel to these discussions. With pupils spending more learning time sitting in front of a computer, it’s only natural that they might use the internet to search for answers to questions they have been set, Lancaster says.

Webb agrees. “I think that the pandemic has indeed opened up their eyes to what is available on the internet,” she says.

So, what can be done, besides teaching pupils about plagiarism at an early age and better educating children about appropriate sources of online support?

Lancaster points to a number of ways educators could combat the problem. For instance, he notes that schools often recycle questions that have been asked in previous exams - the answers to which are already floating around on the internet. By ending this practice of “recycling”, schools could reduce the risk of cheating.

Webb suggests there is another approach that, while it might not cut out cheating altogether, could help teachers to circumnavigate it. “Coursework aside, I never assess anything that is not done in the classroom in front of me - for this very reason,” she says.

“I recognise that students have always been able to [cheat at home] and so I set limitations that prevent them from being able to use that to prove their level of attainment; any research tasks are for the sole use of them gaining knowledge. I rarely check the copy-and-paste sheets they create.”

Taking this advice on board would go some way towards lessening the impact of these practices. And there is always the hope that requests to these sites will tail off now that pupils are back in classrooms. Without the temptation that comes from sitting at a computer all day, the cost of homework help might become more of a deterrent again.

To find out the answer to my dice probability question, the homework help site wanted to charge me a monthly subscription fee of £11. The probability of my stumping up this amount to address my mathematical blind spots is zero. Let’s hope most children feel the same way.

Simon Creasey is a freelance journalist

None of the homework help sites contacted for this article responded to interview requests

This article originally appeared in the 15 October 2021 issue under the headline “Tes focus on...Cheating”

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When does “homework help” cross the line and become “cheating”?

It is quite common for friends and relatives of a student to help him or her with homework. Getting homework help in order to do homework is generally not considered cheating. In fact, it is considered essential in many cases.  Some students use study guides to to help them with their homework. So, if all these sources of assistance are considered necessary, when does it cross the line to become cheating?

Let’s look at the case of family members (e.g.  parent or elder siblings) helping out with a student homework. When the teacher explicitly states that certain work has to be done by the student, without the help of anyone else, getting help would definitely be cheating. Even if there is no one to monitor whether the student has taken the help of others or not, a teacher who knows the student well can often tell whether he or she has received help.

There are other potential forms of cheating with respect to homework. These include getting answers from homework guides, getting answers from older students who have done the same homework in a previous year, etc. In all these cases, there is little in the ‘legal’ sense to say that one has cheated. Rather the difference is subtle. In most cases, the choice is left to the student, who has the option of using or not using a source of superior information. Using such superior sources of information, which are not available to others, might be considered cheating. Teachers should monitor the quantum of help that each of their students get, and take that into account when assigning grades.

Generally, parents/elder siblings help out children/younger siblings with their homework. Taking the help of these elders to do proper and error-free homework is not considered cheating. In fact, it is considered essential in most instances. Even teachers monitor the quantum of assistance given by the elders in the family to the children. Sometimes, children are required to use the Internet to do their homework. So, if all these sources of assistance are considered necessary, when does it cross the thin line to become cheating?

Let’s look at the case of parents/elder siblings helping out with the homework of their children/younger siblings, which slips into the realm of cheating. Where the teacher explicitly states that certain work has to be done by the student, without the help of anyone else, in such cases taking the help of others would definitely be cheating. This is so, since there is no one to monitor whether the student has taken the help of others or not.

In the case where the student has to take the help of the Internet to gather certain information and draw his or her own conclusions from the information, if the student takes the help of the Internet to find out the optimum conclusion, it would be termed as cheating.

There are various other forms of cheating in ‘homework’. These include getting answers from Guides, getting answers from older batches that have done the same work in the previous year, el al.

In all these cases, there is little in the ‘legal’ sense to say or charge that one has cheated. Rather the difference is subtle. In most cases, the choice is left to the student who has the option of using or not using a source of superior information, which is not be available to other students of his/her batch. Using such superior source of information, which is not available to others, would be considered cheating.

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• How much homework help from friends and family is appropriate?
• Vectors, Dot Products, Cross Products, 3D Kinematics
• Online Homework Help

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Homework . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.

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Silver Streak

Is Homework Necessary to Assign?

Fiona Trinh , Junior Staff Writer | May 25, 2021

• Fiona Trinh

Is homework really beneficial? I think homework is not necessary because it takes the enjoyment out of school, and wastes everyone’s time.

The benefits of homework have been debated by students, parents, and teachers for many years. The first reason that students should not be given homework is that they need time to relax and take their minds off work. The pressure of having to complete homework every night is quite stressful for most students and they need time to refresh their minds and bodies. Too much homework can encourage cheating because students end up copying off one another in an attempt to finish all their assignments. They then end up being rewarded for cheating which doesn’t benefit them at all.

Secondly, there are students that are in sports and have sports practices after school. Some during the season, come home from games after midnight. Homework just puts more pressure and stress on students. Too much homework can lead to copying and cheating. Most of the time, a lot of teachers don’t often have the time to grade papers properly as they are too busy with designing lesson plans and consulting teaching resources in order to just manage lessons. So by the time students are getting their papers back, the class has moved on to a new topic.

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Thirdly, homework can affect students both physically and mentally. According to a study by Stanford University, 56 percent of students considered homework a primary source of stress. Homework over a certain time limit can cause stress, depression, anxiety, and more. Too much homework can result in a lack of sleep, headaches, exhaustion, and weight loss. Homework can cause conflict between students and parents when the parent wants the child to do their homework but meets resistance from the student to do an overwhelming task.

In conclusion, homework has been a controversial topic for many years. I believe that homework is unbeneficial.

Fiona Trinh is a freshman, and this is her first year in Journalism. She decided to take Journalism because she likes to write.  Other interests: Band...

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Why does homework encourage cheating?

Table of Contents

• 1 Why does homework encourage cheating?
• 2 How can we help classmates?
• 3 Can Too Much homework cause cheating?
• 4 What do you teach a class in 5 minutes?
• 5 How do you treat weak students?
• 6 Who is a weak student?
• 7 Who is in trouble for copying an assignment?
• 8 What happens if you copy someones homework in China?

Too much homework can encourage cheating because children end up copying off one another in an attempt to finish all their assignments. They then end up being rewarded for cheating which doesn’t benefit them at all.

How can we help classmates?

Use these 10 tips to connect with your peers, whether you’re learning on campus or online.

• Join a Club.
• Attend Events Regularly.
• Start a Study Group.
• Introduce Yourself to People in Class.
• Reach Out to Classmates Online.
• Become a Tutor.
• Study on Campus.

What to do if a student plagiarizes?

Review what plagiarism is and isn’t, providing students with strong examples. Teach your students about paraphrasing and how to cite sources. Advocate for a school-wide Honor Code, which clearly states the consequences for cheating and plagiarizing offenses.

How would you help your friend if he she is weak in studies?

Mention four ways in which you can help your classmates who are weak in studies

• Make sure that no one is teasing him/her.
• Help them with questions in which they find difficulty.
• Provide them notes which may help them to understand the chapters.
• Regularly give them tips and encourage them to achieve their goal.

Can Too Much homework cause cheating?

The pressure to complete homework can also lead to students cheating by copying from their peers or getting a tutor who does it for them. It is obvious that the amount of homework kids now receive in school is unnecessary and is leading to kids cheating and plagiarizing is schools.

What do you teach a class in 5 minutes?

27 useful life skills you can learn in less than five minutes

• Skill 1: Change a tire or jumpstart a car.
• Skill 2: Speed Reading.
• Skill 3: Enable Undo Send in Gmail.
• Skill 4: Use a fire extinguisher.
• Skill 5: Survive in a rip current.
• Skill 6: Righty Tighty Lefty Loosey.
• Skill 7: Pack a suitcase.

How do I communicate with my classmates?

One way you can communicate is by exchanging contact info, for future peer feedback. Another way to communicate is by networking with your classmates, for future ventures. Another way to communicate is studying , for better scores on exams. It’s the first day of class, and you pick a spot beside two other people.

Why do students struggle to reference?

Skills such as organizing research notes and learning to add citations as you write, rather than as part of the editing process, can get lost. This can cause students to struggle with remembering what information came from where and leaving off important citations.

How do you treat weak students?

Plan for every class; never try to wing it. Pay attention to the strengths and limitations of each of your students. Reward their strengths and strengthen their weaknesses. If possible, set your room in a U-shape to encourage interaction among students.

Who is a weak student?

Weak student is low academic achiever who is less interested in academic work i.e. reading, and writing. Weak student does not show much interest in study at all.

Why did my friend want to copy my homework?

What does it mean to copy someone’s homework assignment?

Who is in trouble for copying an assignment?

What happens if you copy someones homework in china.

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Fans Ripped Refs Over Brutal Call at End of Iowa’s Final Four Win Over UConn

• Author: Andy Nesbitt

Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes are going back to the national title game after beating Paige Bueckers and the UConn Huskies , 71–69, in a Final Four showdown that lived up to the hype in Cleveland.

It also came with some controversy, as a brutal offensive foul called against UConn's Aaliyah Edwards in the final seconds helped Iowa hold on for the win.

UConn trailed by a point with under five seconds left when Edwards was called for an illegal screen, which gave Iowa the ball back with 3.9 seconds remaining.

UConn's players and fans will be talking about this call for years to come:

Offensive foul?? pic.twitter.com/dpf45GPyHp — Jomboy Media (@JomboyMedia) April 6, 2024

Here's another look at it:

Legitimately one of the worst offensive foul calls I’ve ever seen… Let alone with 4 seconds left & the game on the line. Feel sick for Aaliyah Edwards & UCONN. There’s just no world where this is a moving screen. Brutal. pic.twitter.com/73AYbGmAnT — Josh Reynolds (@JoshReynolds24) April 6, 2024

Fans blasted the refs:

I have no dog in this fight, I want Dawn Staley’s team to win it all, but this call was absolutely disgraceful. https://t.co/m7uvxvRtw4 — Shibe Vintage Sports (@ShibeSports) April 6, 2024

It isn’t a foul, but regardless... An official making THAT THE GAME DECIDING CALL is atrocious. #UConn https://t.co/zMxtanQxc0 — John Sonsalla (@JSonsalla) April 6, 2024

Just an all time bad call. I am so sick and tired of games being tainted but referees who lack zero judgement. Its truly criminal. https://t.co/dzrMwMpl8y — Jerome Sweatpants (@talkintrashlin) April 6, 2024

I’m not a swallow the whistle proponent, but this is the lamest call in a big moment I’ve ever seen. It’s pretty clear Iowa is getting the calls this tournament and it’s hard to enjoy because of the officiating. https://t.co/Djgqg4v19J — Nick Klus (@JudSchmails) April 6, 2024

That is so incredibly soft. https://t.co/UUuaBwNc0J — Chad Ryan (@ChadwikoTWW) April 6, 2024

YOU CAN NOT CALL AN OFFENSIVE FOUL WITH THIS MUCH ON THE LINE, I FEEL BAD FOR UCONN, THEY WERE ROBBED https://t.co/qh45d00XEz — JayMo (@crassiux) April 6, 2024

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South Carolina-Iowa highlights: Gamecocks top Caitlin Clark for national title

CLEVELAND – It was a revenge tour, indeed.  

South Carolina avenged its only loss of last season, beating Iowa 87-75  Sunday afternoon for the Gamecocks’ third national championship under Dawn Staley and topping a perfect 2023-24 season.

This one is extra sweet for Staley & Co. because a year ago, the Hawkeyes stunned top-seeded South Carolina in the semifinals, dealing the previously undefeated Gamecocks their only loss of the season.  

USC players had been asked all weekend if they wanted another shot at Iowa, and they didn’t shy away from saying yes. 

South Carolina’s win also ends the brilliant college career of Caitlin Clark on a low note. The all-time leading scorer in the history of Division I basketball took her team to two Final Fours, a tremendous feat, but came up short in the national championship game each time.

FOLLOW THE MADNESS: NCAA basketball bracket, scores, schedules, teams and more.

That’s a heartache Staley knows well: As a player at Virginia from 1988-92, Staley led her team to three Final Fours, never winning a championship. 

Dawn Staley earns six-figure bonus after winning title

With South Carolina’s NCAA championship and undefeated season, coach Dawn Staley earned another six-figure bonus. The national title gives Staley a $250,000 bonus. Staley will end this season with $680,000 in bonuses in addition to her $3.1 million in basic pay from the school. – Steve Berkowitz

How Dawn Staley forged championship legacy after heartbreak

CLEVELAND —  Dawn Staley  still goes over critical mistakes from 1991. 

It was March 31, 33 years ago. Staley was the point guard for the Virginia Cavaliers and the best player in America. 

The Cavaliers were up five with 1:25 to play in regulation in the national championship game against the Tennessee Lady Vols and legendary coach Pat Summitt. 

Then, suddenly, they were only up two with 48 seconds to play. Then-UVA coach Debbie Ryan called a timeout and drew up a play for Staley to get to the rim. (You could not advance the ball in the final minute back then.) Read the rest of the story here.

South Carolina and other undefeated women's teams who won title

The Gamecocks spun a season of perfection, capped Sunday with a third national championship after  defeating the Hawkeyes .

South Carolina , which entered the women's NCAA Tournament as the overall No. 1 seed, marched through March Madness with what looked like relative ease. Dawn Staley's players had not lost since the Hawkeyes beat them in last year’s Final Four, and the Gamecocks were winning by nearly 30 points a game.

Kamilla Cardoso  anchored the offense and defense and will be among the top five picks in the WNBA Draft on April 15. Read the rest of the story here.

Opinion: Caitlin Clark forever changed college game

CLEVELAND — There are athletes so transcendent, their impact so transformative, their sports are forever defined by the before and after.

There is baseball before and after Babe Ruth. Golf before and after Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, and then again before and after Tiger Woods. Basketball before and after Magic Johnson and Larry Bird.

And there will be basketball before and after Caitlin Clark,  whose college career ended   Sunday with an 87-75 loss to South Carolina  in the national championship game. She has changed both her game and how women’s sports overall are viewed,  very much for the better , and neither will ever be the same. Read the rest of the column here.

What's next for Caitlin Clark?

CLEVELAND — What’s next for CC? 

Caitlin Clark’s brilliant, record-breaking collegiate career has come to an end. The Iowa star, a  two-time national player of the year , and the Hawkeyes  fell in the national championship game  for the second consecutive year as South Carolina capped a perfect season. 

Clark, a logo-shooting supernova who captured the hearts and  eyes of millions  over the past couple of seasons while  re-writing the scoring record books , will go down as one of the  most transcendent stars in all of sports , at all of 22 years old. In a state with a  deep history of hoops known for producing stellar women's basketball players , Clark stands above the rest. Read the rest of the story here.

Final: South Carolina 87, Iowa 75

For the third time in eight seasons, and twice in the last three, the South Carolina Gamecocks are NCAA champions.

South Carolina withstood late charges from Iowa and pulled away in the NCAA Women’s Tournament final, 87-75, to claim its third championship in program history.

South Carolina relied on its height, presence inside the paint and depth.

The Gamecocks secured an edge in rebounds (51-29), offensive rebounds (18-7), second-chance points (30-16), points in the paint (48-32) and bench points (37-0).

Iowa closed the margin with an 8-0 run midway through the fourth quarter while Gamecocks center Kamilla Cardoso was getting a spell on the bench, but the Gamecocks steadied and converted their clutch shots.

Cardoso posted a double-double with 15 points and 17 rebounds, and Gamecocks freshman Tessa Johnson led all South Carolina players with 19 points.

Iowa guard Caitlin Clark, playing her last game for the Hawkeyes, finished with 30 points on 10-of-28 shooting.

Gamecocks in control

South Carolina is a quarter away from winning it all for the second time in three seasons.

The Gamecocks extended their lead in the third quarter, outscoring Iowa by six, and go into the final frame up 68-59.

South Carolina, going back to late in the second quarter, opened the second half on an 11-0 run. Iowa’s defense delivered some stops midway through the period and the Hawkeyes were able to cut the deficit to two, but South Carolina closed the quarter on an 11-4 run.

Gamecocks freshman Tessa Johnson hit a pair of 3-pointers late in the quarter and now leads all South Carolina players, despite coming off the bench.

After sprinting out of the gates in a torrid start, Iowa’s shots have stopped dropping — in large part because of South Carolina’s pressure defense. The Hawkeyes are now just 20-of-50 (40%) from the floor.

Star Iowa guard Caitlin Clark dropped 18 points in the first quarter, but has gone just 3-of-13 (23.1%) from the floor since then. She leads all scorers with 25.

Iowa needs to step up on defense

CLEVELAND — If there’s been a knock against Iowa all season, it’s been the Hawkeyes’ defense.

Iowa is incredible offensively, especially when the Hawks are out in transition; no one loves to floor and distribute like Caitlin Clark.

But trailing 65-55, Iowa could really use a defensive stop. That’s hard against a team that has great size and athleticism. But Iowa needs to figure out a way to slow down South Carolina, which fired off an 8-0 run faster than you could blink. Meanwhile, Iowa went scoreless for more than three minutes.

In a game like this, momentum matters, big-time.

And that’s why Iowa coach Lisa Bluder just burned her second timeout, to try to stop the bleeding, as South Carolina has taken a 68-57 lead after a three from Tessa Johnson. There's only 1:06 left in the third, but Bluder knows it matters. 

Tamika Catchings, Jalen Hurts among celebs at game

The stars have descended on Cleveland for the national championship game between Iowa and South Carolina. Hall of Famer Tamika Catchings and WNBA MVP Candace Parker are at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse to watch the new generation of talent.

Parker was sitting with USWNT legend Megan Rapinoe. Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts is there, as is “Ted Lasso” star Jason Sudeikis and singer and Gamecocks alum Darius Rucker.

Caitlin Clark getting help from teammates

CLEVELAND – Bree Hall looks frustrated.

The 6-foot junior guard has done a terrific job guarding Caitlin Clark this afternoon. She’s had a hand in her face — literally — every time Clark has crossed half-court, and Clark has worked hard for each of her 23 points.

But Hall can’t do everything.

After a missed three from South Carolina, Clark corralled the ball and raced up the court — with Hall right with her. Hall managed to get in front of Clark, who retreated to the corner … but then Hannah Stuelke flew toward the basket for a layup. After she scored, bringing the Hawkeyes within four, Hall turned away from the basket and let out a heavy sigh, visibly annoyed.

That’s a testament, again, to how well Clark’s teammates have played this tournament and how dependable they’ve become. You might be able to slow Clark, but she’s far from your only problem.

South Carolina in control to start third quarter

The Gamecocks stayed hot to start the third quarter, going on an 11-0 run that went back to the end of the second quarter. Iowa finally scored on a Clark jumper at around the 7-minute mark.

South Carolina fights back, leads Iowa at halftime

CLEVELAND — Well, that was exhilarating.

Caitlin Clark is sucking wind, Raven Johnson is breathing hard and we’ve got one hell of a game on our hands. Are you ready for two more quarters?

It’s clear that everyone on the floor is exhausted — that’s partially how Johnson just managed to sneak a steal from Clark. This game might come down to who’s more in shape, including if it turns into a free-throw shooting contest. At the end of the game when you’ve lost your legs, you have to be even more conscious of bending your knees and getting the ball to the rim.

Pay close attention the second half if shots are short. Both teams shot reasonably well in the first half — 47% for South Carolina and 45% for Iowa — but the Gamecocks have 12 more attempts, a direct result of their 12 offensive rebounds, which they’ve turned into 19 second-chance points.

Gamecocks course-correct in second quarter, lead 49-46

If the first quarter was all Caitlin Clark and Iowa, the second was a course-correction for South Carolina.

The Gamecocks opened the period on a 7-0 run to erase Iowa’s early lead and take a three-point lead — its largest of the game — into halftime.

This has been a game of contrasting styles. Iowa is looking to grab defensive rebounds and sprint out in transition. South Carolina, meanwhile, is crowding the paint and using its height to secure offensive rebounds and extend possessions; the Gamecocks have a 12-4 advantage on offensive boards and have scored 19 second-chance points, compared to Iowa’s 11.

South Carolina also holds a 27-18 overall edge on the glass and has scored 30 points in the paint.

Clark scored just three points in the second quarter after dropping 18 in the first and leads all scorers with 21.

Gamecocks center Kamilla Cardoso leads her team with 11 points on 5-of-10 shooting, but South Carolina’s bench has been a big factor, chipping in nearly half of the team’s points, with 22. Iowa’s bench, by comparison, hasn’t scored a single point.

South Carolina is up, 49-46.

Dawn Staley is fired up

After Kamilla Cardoso grabbed an offensive board and flipped it right back into the basket, Dawn Staley turned to her bench and held out her arms as if to say, “Why aren’t we doing that EVERY time?” The Hawkeyes have no answer for Cardoso, and Staley knows it.

Staley is visibly upset — extremely upset. She’s been on the officials since the jump, furious that Iowa star Caitlin Clark has already been able to draw numerous fouls against South Carolina. (Clark is 5-of-6 from the line.)

Staley’s assistants have rushed on the floor a few times to pull her back, encouraging her to back off the officials so she doesn’t get hit with a technical. She’s sat down a couple of times then popped right back up, and spent the first chunk of the most recent media timeout giving official Brenda Pantoja an earful.

She hasn’t been warned officially yet, but it’s something to keep an eye on. Midway through the second quarter, Iowa has shot nine free throws and South Carolina just three.

Caitlin Clark takes down another record

The records continue to fall for Caitlin Clark.

Already the NCAA's all-time leading scorer, Clark needed 18 points in today's game to pass Tennessee great Chamique Holdsclaw for the most total points in a single women's NCAA Tournament.

It took her one quarter to break the record.

Clark went 5-for-8 from the field and her 3-pointer with 20 seconds left in the quarter put her over the top.

"When she feels it, she feels it, " Iowa coach Lisa Bluder said between periods.

Holdsclaw won three straight NCAA championships with the Vols in 1996, '97 and '98 and, like Clark, was a two-time national player of the year.

Caitlin Clark already has 18 points

Caitlin Clark poured in a blistering 18 points on five-of-eight shooting in the first quarter, including three-of-four from beyond the arc.

Iowa off to blazing start but Gamecocks fight back

South Carolina may have entered as the undefeated favorite, but it was Iowa who started the game on a torrid pace.

The Gamecocks would settle, but star Hawkeyes guard Caitlin Clark poured in a blistering 18 points on five-of-eight shooting, including three-of-four from beyond the arc.

The Hawkeyes scored the game’s first 10 points and ripped off a 20-9 run within the first five minutes of the game to build an early lead. Iowa looked to push the pace in transition to prevent the Gamecocks from settling into their base defense.

Iowa hit six of its first eight shots and — behind Clark drawing a couple of fouls on attempted 3 pointers — the Hawkeyes also drew an early edge on free throws.

Iowa enters the second quarter up 27-20.

Mike Trout shows up at ballpark wearing Caitlin Clark jersey

Count Angels superstar Mike Trout among Caitlin Clark's legion of fans.

In a photo posted on Instagram Sunday, Trout was shown wearing a black No. 22 Clark jersey over what appeared to be a black hoodie as he walked through the tunnel at Angel Stadium in Anaheim.

Trout may catch the start of the women's championship game before taking the field to face the Red Sox.

Kamilla Cardoso looks OK warming up, despite injured knee

Kamilla Cardoso is wearing a sleeve on her right leg – it's white today, unlike Friday's black one – to cover the brace she's got on her injured knee. Cardoso hurt it in the second quarter against NC State, but was able to return for the second half and said after the game that she was fine, just needed more treatment. She looks OK, playfully kicking the ball as if it's a soccer ball during warm-ups. (Like pretty much everyone from Brazil, Cardoso is a big soccer fan.)

What time is Iowa vs. South Carolina?  

Iowa vs. South Carolina tips off at 3 p.m. ET today. 

Iowa vs. South Carolina predictions  

USA TODAY’s Nancy Armour has Caitlin Clark and Iowa getting the victory over undefeated South Carolina while Lindsay Schnell has the Gamecocks remaining undefeated to grab their third national championship. 

How to watch Iowa vs. South Carolina  

ESPN is airing and streaming Iowa vs. South Carolina . 

How to stream Iowa vs. South Carolina  

All games will be broadcast on ESPN. Here are additional streaming options to watch all the action on your devices. 

• Stream through  HULU with Live TV  
• NCAA March Madness Live app  
• Stream through  DirecTV Stream  
• Watch all tournament games with a subscription to fuboTV  

When does Caitlin Clark play again?  

Caitlin Clark and top-seeded Iowa takes to the court today in Cleveland against No. 1 South Carolina. They tip off about 3 p.m. ET. 

How many points has Caitlin Clark scored?  

As Iowa’s Caitlin Clark continues to rewrite the record books, USA TODAY Sports is tracking all her stats during the NCAA Tournament. Here’s everything you need to know about the superstar guard. Here is an in-depth, illustrated look at the Iowa star and her race to the all-time NCAA Division I scoring record. 

Kamilla Cardoso injury update  

South Carolina star Kamilla Cardoso left the Final Four game against NC State on Friday night after a fall that tweaked her right knee . She and coach Dawn Staley said after the game she was fine and would play against Iowa in the national championship. 

Dawn Staley thinks Caitlin Clark needs a ring to be the GOAT  

As she’s rewritten the record books over the course of her brilliant four-year career,  Caitlin Clark  has sparked numerous debates about if she is, in fact, the greatest of all time (GOAT) when it comes to college women’s basketball.  

No offense to Clark, who earlier this season became the all-time leading scorer in Division I history regardless of gender, but South Carolina coach Dawn Staley thinks that title belongs to former UConn standout Brenna Stewart.  

“I was really good in college, never won a championship,” said Staley , who led Virginia to three Final Fours, losing the only national championship she played for, in 1991. “You've got to win a championship. That's (my opinion) personally. Like I had a great career. But it's always, did you win a championship?” Read Lindsay Schnell’s full story . 

Caitlin Clark, Iowa shouldn't be able to beat South Carolina. But they will.  

Look at Iowa and South Carolina on paper, and it’s obvious the Gamecocks should win the national championship Sunday. 

Kamilla Cardoso is a force of nature , and Iowa has no one who can counter her. Shot-blocker Ashlyn Watkins has quietly been having a spectacular tournament . No one will sag off Raven Johnson this year . Dominant as South Carolina’s starting five are, the “second string” is equally lethal. 

And yet … there are teams that seem destined to win, and Iowa feels like one of them. 

It would be the fitting end to Caitlin Clark’s stupendous career , of course. She is already major college basketball’s all-time leading scorer and has altered the trajectory not only of women’s basketball but women’s sports. Sunday is the last game for her and Iowa’s super seniors, Kate Martin and Gabbie Marshall. 

Read Nancy Armour’s full column . 

Why South Carolina will beat Iowa and win third women's national championship  

By now you know all about when Caitlin Clark waved off Raven Johnson last year during the national semifinal, implying to Johnson – as well as everyone watching – that she didn’t view Johnson as enough of a shooting threat to guard her.  

Johnson was so haunted by that moment , she considered quitting basketball. But she’s lived in the gym since then, becoming a sharpshooter and go-to option in the clutch. She dubbed this season “the revenge tour,” and the last stop is Sunday. You really think she’s letting the Gamecocks lose again? Absolutely not. I’ll take South Carolina as my 2024 national championship pick. And don’t be surprised if South Carolina wins by 15+ — the Gamecocks are that good, that deep and that motivated. Read Lindsay Schnell’s full column . 

Caitlin Clark mastered her mental game and that has Iowa in the title game  

Iowa probably doesn’t make this national championship game earlier in Caitlin Clark’s career. 

 When the Hawkeyes’ offense was struggling against UConn on Friday night, when none of Clark’s shots were falling, when the Huskies were bodying the Iowa players from the moment they inbounded the ball, Clark could easily have gotten frustrated. Would easily have gotten frustrated in seasons past. Instead, she stayed almost preternaturally calm. 

Impressive as those logo 3s and her scoring average are, it’s Clark’s maturity that has brought the Hawkeyes within one game of winning it all. And she and everyone else at Iowa agree it’s that part of her game that’s come the furthest these last four seasons. 

“That doesn’t come without work. She’s put in a lot of work to the mental side of her game,” Kate Martin, who has played with Clark all four years, said Saturday. “That just shows how good of a teammate she is. She wanted to be better. She has all the basketball skills that she needs. She’s the best player in the country. But to work on the mental side, you can always get better on that.” Read Nancy Armour’s full story . 

How South Carolina's Raven Johnson used Final Four snub from Caitlin Clark to get even better 

Caitlin Clark almost made Raven Johnson quit basketball. 

The South Carolina guard spent weeks alone in her room, crying as she re-watched last year’s Final Four loss to Iowa. Over and over and over again. 

“More than 100 times probably,” Johnson said Saturday. 

It wasn’t only that Clark had waved off the unguarded Johnson, deeming her to be a non-threat offensively. It was that the clip of Clark doing it had gone viral, Johnson’s humiliation taking on epic proportions. 

“Caitlin's competitive, so I don't blame her for what she did. But it did hurt me,” Johnson said. “I'm just glad I had the resources that I had, the coaches that I had, the teammates that I had to help me get over that hump. And I just feel like it helped me. It made me mentally strong. 

“I feel like if I can handle that, I can handle anything in life." 

Johnson eventually did come out of her room. So she could head to the gym to work on her shot. Read Nancy Armour’s full story . 

South Carolina has chance to be greatest undefeated women's team 

Dawn Staley knows what the stat sheet says.  

According to the numbers, the top-seeded South Carolina Gamecocks are undefeated in the 2023-24 season, having been perfect in 37 games heading into their final contest, a rematch with Iowa which will be played Sunday with a national championship on the line.  

But Staley, in her 16th year with the program, isn’t totally sure it’s true. 

“It doesn’t feel like it,” Staley said. “We’ve played some bad basketball this season that made it feel like we lost.”  

In the history of the women’s NCAA Tournament, there have been nine undefeated champions. If South Carolina beats Iowa, the Gamecocks will become the 10th. Read Lindsay Schnell’s full story . 

College coaches demand more accountability from refs. Iowa-UConn call is the latest example 

As women’s basketball explodes in popularity and administrators realize its power as a revenue-generator , pressure to win has ratcheted up. And that makes every call, especially in a close game, matter. 

For all the discourse around the varying issues in college sports — out-of-control, booster-led NIL collectives, a transfer portal that never stops churning and the looming reality of revenue sharing with athletes — coaches, administrators and even officials agree on one thing: The officiating in women’s basketball needs major work. 

The NCAA declined to make Penny Davis, the head of women’s officiating, available to USA TODAY Sports. But others spoke about one of the game’s most problematic issues.  

“I think to the overall point as the game has gotten more spotlight and just more people purchasing tickets, watching on television, the fundamental question as administrators is, have we done enough to look at the officiating?” Utah athletic director Mark Harlan told USA TODAY Sports. “And I think the answer is no.” 

Read Lindsay Schnell’s full story here . 

Kamilla Cardoso is formidable and immovable force for South Carolina 

The most impressive part of Kamilla Cardoso ’s game isn’t the fact that she played through pain Friday night , injuring her knee late in the second half before returning to play the third quarter. It’s that she’s improved throughout the season. Even if she’s not at full strength, she’s a load on the block . 

Most people take noticeable jumps in skill, strength or athleticism in the offseason, when they can devote hours to their craft. It’s hard to work on your individual game during the season, when you’re juggling class, scouting reports and daily practice that’s usually focused on the team. But just a couple months ago, Cardoso had a bad habit of getting buried on the block. She was often rushed when she caught the ball and took terrible angles on shots, frequently shooting underneath the rim.  

Against NC State, she looked like a first-team All-American. She was patient and polished, taking her time to feel the defense before going the other way and scoring — often through a few sets of outstretched arms. For her size, she has impressive body control. And given her mobility, she could be making a case to move up to No. 2 in this month's WNBA Draft . Read Lindsay Schnell's full story from the Final Four . 

Caitlin Clark average points per game

Iowa superstar guard Caitlin Clark is averaging 32 points per game this season on 46% shooting. She also averages nine assists, 7.3 rebounds and 1.8 steals per game. We are tracking all of Caitlin Clark's stats here . 

Caitlin Clark 3-point percentage 

Caitlin Clark is shooting 38 percent from 3-point range this season. For her career at Iowa, she is shooting 38.8 percent from 3-point range.

Tessa Johnson stats  

South Carolina guard Tessa Johnson averages 6.2 points, 1.7 rebounds, 1.1 assists and 17.3 minutes per game. The 6-foot freshman has appeared in 33 games this season, shooting 43.1 percent from the field and 42.5 percent from 3. 

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Science News

Your last-minute guide to the 2024 total solar eclipse.

Millions of people are inside the path of totality in the United States for the April 8, 2024, total solar eclipse. Cities in the path are making plans to celebrate the event, like erecting giant eclipse glasses.

SUZANNE CORDEIRO/AFP via Getty Images

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By Karen Kwon

April 5, 2024 at 12:00 pm

For many living in North America, April 8 will be a day to remember for years to come.

The moon is going to travel between the sun and Earth, blocking the fiery ball from our view in the middle of the day, causing a total solar eclipse ( SN: 1/4/24 ). Tens of millions of people in the path of totality will experience up to 4.5 minutes of darkness, nearly two minutes longer than the 2017 Great American Eclipse . People not in the path of totality will still get to enjoy the partial blockage for at least a few minutes or longer, depending on their location.

Here are answers to some of the biggest questions about watching this incredible event.

When and where can I watch the eclipse?

The sun’s shadow is scheduled to enter North America via the west coast of Mexico around 12 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time. The path of totality then continues diagonally across the continental United States, hitting states such as Texas, Arkansas, Indiana, Ohio and New York, Vermont and Maine. It creeps into Canada via Ontario and Quebec, before finally exiting through Newfoundland and Labrador at about 5:15 p.m. Newfoundland Daylight Time.

This interactive map from NASA can help you prepare for your eclipse viewing. Search and click on your location, and a pop-up panel will inform you of the spot’s weather and the exact times of the solar eclipse’s progression.

What are eclipse glasses and where can I get them?

Wearing proper eyewear is essential. Regular sunglasses will not protect you when you look directly at the sun ( SNE: 4/27/17 ). And you do not want to stare at the sun with naked eyes; that can damage your eyes. Therefore, you need to get your hands on eclipse glasses if you have not already done so.

It might be too late for you to order a pair from an online retailer. Plus, the American Astronomical Society issued a warning on counterfeit and fake eclipse glasses that are sold on the internet. It posted lists of trusted manufacturers and vendors that sell pairs that are ISO certified, which ensures safety. Both webpages can also be helpful when checking the validity of the glasses that you already own.

Fear not if you have not secured eclipse glasses. Big-box stores such as Lowe’s Home Improvement might still have some in stock. You might also be able to pick up a free pair of eclipse glasses at a library, museum or Warby Parker store .

What if I don’t get a pair of eclipse glasses in time?

There are still several ways to observe the eclipse. One of the easiest ways is to use a strainer or a colander — or any object with holes , really — to observe the object’s shadow. You can also cross your fingers so they look like a waffle to create holes if you’re in a pinch. It might feel less exciting than watching the sun itself, but it is still pretty cool to see the shadows going from their original shapes to crescents as the moon overtakes the sun. You can also devise your own pinhole camera if you are feeling crafty.

There will also be plenty of livestreams. U.S. National Science Foundation will stream one from Dallas . NASA will offer several , including one in Spanish and another with a telescope feed. The agency will also broadcast the launch of three rockets during the eclipse to study how the dimming of the sun affects Earth’s upper atmosphere.

Other science projects will also offer live feeds. One example is the Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project , which will send weather balloons to observe the atmospheric perturbations during the eclipse. Participating teams plan to stream the views from the edge of space .

Are there cool science phenomena to watch out for?

If you happen to look away from the sun, you may notice a perceived shift in color occurring on Earth ( SN: 4/1/24 ). Blues and green will become more noticeable, while reds become dark or even black. And because the sun will be close to its solar maximum, people might be able to see petal-like streams or a large puff of gas shooting away from the star’s surface ( SN: 1/4/24 ).

For more eclipse stories, our student magazine Science News Explores prepared a special issue for young eclipse watchers, and our publisher Society for Science collected resources , ready for you to browse.

How can I take good pictures of the solar eclipse using a smartphone?

You can place a solar filter or an extra pair of eclipse glasses in front of the smartphone’s lens to photograph the partial eclipse. But make sure to remove the filter during the totality. Also, don’t forget to turn of the camera’s flash. Space.com has an eight-step guide for acing the shots.

Are there any cool citizen science projects that I can participate in?

There are a few that are still taking volunteers. One is SunSketcher. Using the SunSketcher app to capture images of the sun will help scientists to study the bright spots called Baily’s beads that appear before and after totality. Download the app on your phone and start running it at least five minutes before the total eclipse to contribute.

The Eclipse Soundscapes Project will collect sound data to study how eclipses affect life on Earth. It might be too late to sign up to become a data collector, but you can still participate by becoming a data analyst .

When is the next total solar eclipse?

There will not be a total eclipse in the United States and Canada for another 20 years. But if you’re up for travel, other countries will experience totality before 2044 ( SN: 4/4/24 ) . For example, Spain will be on the path of totality in 2026 and 2027, China and Japan in 2035, and Australia in 2028, 2030, 2037 and 2038.

And stay tuned for coverage from our astronomy writer Adam Mann, who will be on-site near Dallas with some scientists studying — and experiencing the wonder — of this total solar eclipse.   

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