10 Ways to Prevent Cheating

You’ve seen the stories: “17 Subtle Signs Your Partner Is Cheating” or “8 Signs That Your Significant Other Is Having an Affair.”

You know the clues—they’re suddenly unreachable. They cling to their phone. They’re constantly texting. They claim to be at work late. They’re defensive when you ask innocent questions.

Cheating can take various forms. It can be habitual or intermittent or an isolated occurrence. Infidelity can be emotional, digital or physical. It can take the micro form of flirting or a full-blown affair. It can reflect a personality disorder, like low self-esteem or a self-destructive impulse or simply the quest for an adrenaline rush.

Why do partners cheat? You’ve no doubt heard the explanations. Because they’re unsatisfied with the state of their relationship. Because they and their partner have drifted apart. Because they feel unloved or neglected. Because their needs, whether sexual or emotional or social or intellectual, are unmet.

They’re looking for variety or an emotional connection or excitement or something new. Or they cheat out of anger or a desire for revenge. Or because of situational factors: time spent apart or an unexpected opportunity or drunkenness. Or simply unmatched libidos.

Then come the excuses. They felt trapped or bored or unfulfilled. They needed to prove they are still attractive. Their needs weren’t being met. Or the most common rationalization: it just happened.

Cheating—that is, academic dishonesty—is back in the news.

A new survey of 1,200 current four-year college students and recent graduates by Intelligent.com reports that:

• 40 percent of college applicants claimed volunteer hours they hadn’t completed.
• 39 percent listed fake job experiences.
• 38 percent fabricated internship experiences.
• 30 percent falsified letters of recommendation.
• 39 misrepresented their race or ethnicity.
• 22 percent lied about their disability status.
• 24 percent said someone else had written their admissions essay, and 18 percent acknowledged that their essays were plagiarized.

I can’t speak to the survey’s reliability or representativeness. But it strikes me as reasonable to conclude that our current approach to college admissions incentivizes unethical behavior and that selective colleges aren’t doing enough to guard against admissions fraud.

If even a fraction of the report’s claims is accurate, then the 2019 Varsity Blues scandal is only the tip of a toxic iceberg.

All the following generalizations strike me as true:

• The higher the stakes, the more likely that cheating will take place.
• When students perceive dishonesty as widespread and cheaters are rarely caught or punished, inhibitions against cheating fade.
• Technology can facilitate cheating and blur the line between work produced independently and work generated with improper assistance.

Rationalizations for cheating abound and self-justifications are rife. You’ve no doubt heard them:

• “Everyone cheats”—a rationalization that is worsened by reports of data misrepresentation or invention and plagiarism by faculty.
• “I’m under a lot of pressure”—I was overwhelmed. I was sick. I need to please my parents I was going through a crisis. I didn’t have enough time. I had other work due. I have to get into the business school.
• “Faculty don’t take academic dishonesty seriously”—recycling exam question and handling plagiarism informally or ignoring incidents altogether.
• “The assignment is unfair”—that the professor teaches poorly or the assignment is too demanding or the instructions are unclear,
• “Cheating is a game”—that pits a student and an instructor against one another, with the student trying to avoid detection.
• “I didn’t understand this wasn’t OK”—an excuse that arises whenever a specific act of dishonesty wasn’t explicitly prohibited.

Context, including a lack of oversight or proctoring, can exacerbate the temptation to cheat. So too can psychological factors such as stress, overload and performance anxiety, such as the fear of failure or the pressure to meet lofty expectations and maintain one’s self-image. An inability to manage competing demands is, of course, another major contributor. Then, too, there’s the thrill, the frisson, that accompanies cheating.

It seems likely that the pandemic lockdowns made cheating worse. Students who were struggling to learn looked online for help, whether from sites like Chegg and Course Hero or from peer-led online study groups.

But one contributor that is grossly underestimated is insufficient faculty-student interaction. I know that I don’t provide enough timely, targeted, individualized feedback on student writing.

So what should we do? Here are 10 suggestions:

1. Alleviate anxiety and reduce students’ stress levels. Be clear—about your requirements, timelines and expectations. Avoid surprises and make sure your assignments and examinations cover what you actually teach.
2. Provide guidance. Share the secrets of academic success, including study skills, reading and writing skills and test-taking tips.
3. Substitute frequent quizzing and projects with multiple benchmarks for high-stakes testing. High-stakes assignments invite cheating, while frequent low-stakes assignments reduce the incentive to cheat.
4. Devote more class time to skills development. Well-prepared students are less likely to cheat. Spend more class time actively engaging with the course material, having students answer questions, write brief responses, solve problems and construct rubrics.
5. Spread work more evenly across the semester. Cramming is the enemy of learning. Learning should be a gradual, iterative process, not a dash.
6. Make sure assignments and tests are fair. Test what you teach. Ensure that assignments and exams can be successfully completed within the allotted time.
7. Give students multiple ways to demonstrate their command of the course material. Consider innovative ways for students to show their command of essential knowledge and skills. Examples might include introducing a class session, leading a discussion, helping annotate a text, contributing to a class blog, constructing a concept map, visualizing data, producing a video story or infographic or podcast or timeline, drafting and presenting a speech, making a policy recommendation
8. Reward learning and improvement, not just achievement. Make it clear that effort and improvement count and that those students who make significant strides toward mastery will see their hard work repaid
9. Don’t tempt students to cheat. Create new assignments and tests each semester. Prepare more than one version of an exam and reorder and randomize test questions.
10. Be alert and responsive to cheating. Just as it’s certainty of being caught—not the severity of punishment—that deters crime, students are less likely to cheat if they know that you are concerned about academic dishonesty.

Cheating, whether emotional, sexual or academic, leaves scars. Cheating and plagiarism undercut trust and chip away at intimacy and connection. They’re deeply demoralizing and destabilizing. They’re dishonest, since these acts misrepresent a student’s knowledge, skills and effort. They’re disrespectful, whether of a professor or a published author. They’re also deceitful, inevitable involving duplicity and deception. And they’re unfair to the students who follow the rules.

Whether cheating is avoidable in romantic life, I can’t say. But within the academy, it can be discouraged, deterred and diminished. Before you assert that standards of honesty are failing, that integrity is fading and that veracity is flagging, try the low-effort anti-cheating strategies spelled out above.

In the end, cheating is as much an engineering problem as a moral problem. Unlike ethics, which is difficult or impossible to instill and enforce, it’s far easier to make cheating the least alluring option.

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.