Cheating Prevention

By: Stewart Hall

"Recent studies have shown that a steadily growing number of students cheat or plagiarize in college" according to Lawrence Hinman in his article. Many methods to prevent cheating have been conceived and are currently in use. An article from Tallahassee Community College suggests banning everything from cell phones to water bottles and requiring IDs to prevent impersonation. Despite all of the new rules, students will still find ways cheat on exams if they want to. However, these rules are not completely useless; they do serve to maintain a relatively honest testing environment, just not in the way that everyone may think. On the other hand, they may be counterproductive in trying to maintain a fair environment.

Students will still be able to cheat regardless of how many rules are created. If this was not true, there would only be one such rule: don't cheat. Unfortunately, the only thing that these new rules do is force cheaters to come up with new methods. What cheating rules do accomplish, however, is to keep a portion of students honest. If there were no cheating rules, there would be no consequence for cheating, and more students would probably engage in it. The problem with these rules comes in when they force dishonest students to come up with methods of cheating that are even harder to catch. If faculty at schools would simply have one rule against cheating, they might stop making work for themselves, because as more rules are created, more methods of cheating are created. To help end the cycle, faculty could stop creating rules and just use what they know to catch dishonest students.