But Everybody Cheats!
An alarming number of students will do anything to make the grade. What’s behind this epidemic?

By Stuart Foxman

It was nearing the end of the semester, and the second-year business student at Dalhousie University in Halifax was feeling the heat. He had been getting reasonable grades, but he now found himself with just two weeks to do five term papers and study for five exams. The young man, whose interests range from basketball to Jean-Paul Sartre, was already spending the whole day in the library, and a deadline was looming for a computer class. He knew he could have done the assignment easily enough—but he also knew that a roommate had taken the same course the year before, and that this year’s assignment was identical.

He figured it would be easier to cheat. So he retrieved the old assignment, changed it slightly and passed it off as his own. But he got caught, and was given an F for the course. For two years, his transcript will note that the mark was because of a violation of university regulations. His grade point average has fallen, and he must take an extra course to make up for the lost credit.

“It was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done,” says the student (who wishes to remain anonymous). “I was really disappointed in myself. That’s not the kind of person I am.”

While this student and his professor say the incident resulted from a momentary lapse in judgement, the sad fact is it’s hardly an isolated act. There’s plenty to suggest that academic cheating is an epidemic in Canada’s high schools and universities.

Consider a few higher profile cases. In 2002, 44 business and economics students at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., were suspended or otherwise disciplined after handing in papers that came from one source outside the university. The same year, 29 engineering students at Carleton University in Ottawa received penalties ranging from a zero grade on the assignment to a mandatory failure in the course after being caught cheating on an essay—about professional ethics. Beyond these anecdotes, a stream of data indicates that cheating is rampant.

Donald McCabe, founder of the Centre for Academic Integrity and a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, has been surveying students at dozens of U.S. and Canadian universities since 1990. His latest findings show that almost 25 percent of students admitted to cheating on tests in the previous year, and half on written assign- ments. Worse, while just ten percent of students engaged in cut-and-paste Internet plagiarism in 1999, 40 percent of students do so now—and 74 percent of students don’t think it’s a serious issue.

McCabe’s discoveries about cheating in Canadian high schools were even more alarming. When he surveyed over 1,000 first-year university students in Canada about their high-school experiences, 58 percent said they had cheated on tests, and 73 percent said they had cheated in written work at least once.

Cheating isn’t new. As long as there have been rules, there have been people breaking them. What’s so worrying now, says Phil O’Hara, who teaches at Dalhousie, is how blatant cheating has become. “I overhear students talking about copying essays,” he says. “It’s not as under-the-table as it once was. And there’s a lot of peer pressure to turn a blind eye.”

Julia Christensen Hughes of the University of Guelph and one of McCabe’s research collaborators, agrees: “The idea is that it doesn’t matter how you get there, as long as you get the glory. It’s a cheating-to-win culture that some students can’t help being influenced by.”
Success at Any Cost

The experts who are grappling with the issue say two forces are behind the rise of academic dishonesty. First, advances in technology—chiefly the Internet and portable digital devices—have made cheating easier. A bigger factor, though, is how bad behaviour across society—athletes popping steroids, executives cooking corporate books, writers passing off fiction as reality—signals that nothing is out of bounds when success is at stake.

Says David Callahan, author of The Cheating Culture: “It’s the normalization of cheating. Everybody’s doing it. And if you don’t, you feel like a chump.”

The imperative to succeed, which drives some to cheat, starts early, says Tara McLean, a Grade 11 student at Strathmore High School, east of Calgary. “By Grade 9, teachers are talking about how the classes you pick in high school determine whether you’ll go to college, university or straight to work,” says the 16-year-old. “That’s a lot of pressure.”

William Hua, a Grade 12 student at Father Henry Carr Catholic Secondary School in Toronto, says many students are just taking the shortcut to the next level: “It’s all about achieving the mark and getting to university, not about learning.” And, he adds, some cheaters brag if they get a higher mark than someone who studied. “They’re cocky about it.”

Harlan Miltchin of Toronto, 19, certainly is. He remembers being caught once, in Grade 7, but continued cheating throughout high school in Thornhill, Ont. He used a cellphone to store information or send text messages during exams (“The teachers were oblivious.”), and once paid a classmate to write an essay for him (“It was a good investment.”). Gayle Brocklebank-Vincent, former principal at Miltchin’s old school, Westmount Collegiate Institute, says his comments capture the brazen attitude of some students. “There will always be a few students just trying to slide by,” she says. “Maybe he needs a class in ethics.”

Some experts decry how education has become, in part, a commodity to help people gain wealth and status. While the best students have a passion for learning, for others, the desire is just to reach the next level. “Society is promoting success as opposed to an education,” says Deborah Eerkes, acting director of Student Judicial Affairs at the University of Alberta and the first Canadian to serve on the board of the Centre for Academic Integrity. “Universities have encouraged it by talking about how their degrees lead to better jobs.”

The message? It’s more important to get that grade or credential than it is to be moral. We could be cultivating a generation of corporate pirates and tax cheats to whom ethics are always negotiable, says Eerkes.

Rose Fedorak, code administrator in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Montreal’s Concordia University, agrees. “Students who cheat in university may not stop when they graduate. They may continue with these habits because they’ve gotten away with them.”

Digital Deception

It would be hard to understate technology’s role in the current wave of academic dishonesty. Students flock to online term-paper mills that sell reports on virtually any topic. (As one site advertises, without a hint of irony, “We don’t cut corners when it comes to delivering the best product possible.”) They use camera phones to send and transmit pictures of tests. Their MP3 players can hold digitized notes. Their graphing calculators can store formulas to solve math problems.
The anonymous quality of the Internet and instant messaging—no need to peek at a classmate’s test page, or ask a friend if you can copy their paper —lets students be in denial about what they’re actually doing, says Eerkes.

“On some level, you know it’s cheating, but you justify it,” says Eerkes. “Once you get fabulous ideas on the Internet, it’s easy to forget they’re not yours.” Eerkes and others link the problem partly to today’s grab-and-go culture, where cutting and pasting paragraphs into your essay is seen as no different than downloading music.

“Students may feel that information is theirs for the taking,” says Fedorak. “It’s a combination of technology making it easy and not recognizing the morality.”

Where Are the Parents?

What’s needed more than ever, say educators, are morality lessons from parents. While mom and dad can go overboard in providing homework help to their children, they sometimes fall short when it comes to clearly articulating the importance of following the rules.

Whereas in the past if students got caught cheating, they’d be ashamed and their parents would be angry at them, today things have changed. Brocklebank-Vincent says parents of kids who are caught cheating sometimes downplay the transgression. “They’ll say it’s not that big a deal, that kids will be kids.”

Other parents do get angry—but at the institution for doing something that might blot their child’s record. Says Eerkes, “I’ve had parents say, ‘I’m going to sue you for daring to put my child through this.’ I’ve also seen instances where the parent was involved in the cheating, by ‘overediting’ a paper or by helping a student invent an excuse to defer an exam.”

Callahan says parents must be explicit in talking with kids about cheating: “We hear so often that we should talk to kids about sex, smoking, drunk driving, but what about integrity?”

More than that, parents have to set the right example. When they buy a bootleg DVD or fail to declare a purchase at customs, they aren’t committing that act of dishonesty in isolation, says Eerkes. “Your kids are seeing you and taking note.”

An Honest Effort

It’s not all grim. Some schools have banned cellphones, cameras and other gadgets during school hours. And teachers are using technology to turn the tables on cheaters.

In Canada 22 universities and hundreds of high schools rely on Turnitin.com, a website teachers use to check students’ written work for plagiarism, by reviewing it against Internet pages, a huge database of books and journals, and previously submitted papers written by students from around the world. According to the site’s United States-based creator, John Barrie, Turnitin.com analyzes 50,000 to 60,000 student papers a day, 30 percent of which contain a significant amount (more than 25 percent) of unoriginal material. “In many of those cases, some plagiarism has occurred,” says Barrie.

Beyond detection and discipline, schools are looking at ways to deter cheating, by increasing education on academic integrity—through student orientation sessions and online tutorials, for example—and promoting student-support services for stress and time management.

Perhaps most encouraging is how some kids are taking a stand against cheaters. Nalini Singh and Rebecca Singh (no relation), former students of Father Henry Carr Catholic Secondary School in Toronto, are irked with classmates who take the easy way out—sometimes on the back of their hard work. Nalini says people offered to buy her notes, and that she received text messages from a student imploring her to feed him test answers. Once during an essay exam, Rebecca noticed a fellow student who had smuggled in a prewritten paper: “He just smiled the whole time, while I sat there struggling.”

Nalini and Rebecca were members of the school’s student-leadership group that works with first-year high-school students. Before each school year starts and around exam time, the group advises the younger students on issues such as bullying and cheating. They have one message: Even one instance of cheating can start you on a slippery slope.

“Maybe you’ll get by, but you won’t have any foundation,” says Rebecca. “How will you pass next year?”

Cheaters can lose something just as important as an education, adds Nalini. “Before anyone else respects you, you have to respect yourself. By cheating, or helping someone else cheat, you’re hurting yourself.”

It’s a lesson that should be learned in classrooms across the country.