Why Students Cheat and What We Can Do About It

The prevailing statistics on cheating are disheartening.

Some put the rate at 75%. That means three out of every four students admit to some kind of academic dishonesty at some point during their higher education.

We all know that this is not a new phenomenon. Cheating is as old as higher education itself. Older, really, if you look outside the classroom. Classicists tell us that cheating scandals occurred even during the ancient Olympic Games.

So is there really a way to solve a problem with such ancient roots?

There is when you stop viewing cheating as a student behavior issue and start looking at it as a teaching and learning issue.

Benefits

Cheating happens because students have the opportunity and the incentive to do so. If it was harder to cheat and if cheating didn’t benefit students by leading to higher grades, it would not happen as often.

In that light, the key to inhibiting cheating is to design courses so that it is difficult to cheat and to create grading structures that encourage learning. In fact, there are concrete steps you can take to strategically revise your course designs and classroom practices to stem cheating and increase learning.

• You will finish this seminar with ways to address cheating in your courses and make measurable improvements in student learning.
• This seminar helps you see cheating in a new way and will deliver actionable, concrete steps that you can take to discourage cheating in all its forms in your classrooms.

Learning Goals

After viewing Why Students Cheat and What We Can Do About It, you will be able to:

• Reconceptualize academic dishonesty as a teaching and learning problem
• Construct an assessment system designed to promote mastery learning and reduce cheating
• Reframe or redesign courses to foster intrinsic motivation and reduce the incentive to cheat
• Incorporate frequent, low-stakes assessments that will create deeper learning and increase student self-efficacy, thereby reducing the incentive to cheat

You receive real strategies and tools to discourage academic dishonesty and increase student learning in your courses.

Topics Covered

This seminar prepares you to implement changes that will reduce the incentive and opportunity for students to cheat in your courses. More specifically, this seminar:

• Presents statistics that illustrate the problem of cheating in higher education
• Describes and shows analysis of the features of a learning environment that seem to induce higher levels of academic dishonesty
• Compares these learning environments to those that feature course designs and classroom practices that reduce cheating and increase learning
• Presents several concrete practices that instructors can implement immediately and others that they can incorporate into course design revisions in order to reduce academic dishonesty

Audience

Academic integrity is a concern for all learning institutions. Nearly all instructors confront cheating at some point—whether they realize it or not.

That is why this material is relevant to any educator in any academic environment, from secondary school through graduate programs.

Everyone benefits when instructors know what to do to minimize cheating before the first day of term.

This seminar is particularly useful for the following:

• Faculty and other instructors
• Academic administrators

Purchase

Order Why Students Cheat and What We Can Do About It and discover what you need to do to reframe your attitudes about and revise your approach to academic dishonesty.

Product Code: PC13QA