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Are Kids Just Lazy…?

Do kids cheat because they didn’t study before a test? Or maybe they just don’t have the time to write their own research paper? Perhaps they were ambushed by a surprise pop quiz? Well, 60-70% of high school students have cheated before and 90% have copied another’s homework. Is this because kids are lazy and don’t want to do their work…or is it due to another factor?

Maybe It’s The School’s Fault?

“Teachers should be focused on encouraging mastery rather than performance on assessments” (Lahey,  “A Classroom Where No One Cheats”).

Jessica Lahey wrote an article discussing the how the class environment encourages the students to cheat. By assigning numbers to the student’s level of understanding, they are lured into thinking that grades are the end-all be-all. Grades are making students believe that it’s more important to get a good grade than to take the time to fully understand the concept.  According to that article, these are the main contributors for why kids cheat:

– Higher stakes: Getting a good score on a test versus failing a test have started to become sort of a life or death situation for students where if they do not earn a “good” score, they feel as if they have ruined the rest of their lives. It’s natural for students to want to be seen as smart, but when their belief is that the result of one test decides whether they will graduation or flip burgers at McDonalds, the risk of failure pushes students to cheat despite their better judgement.

“The more pressure you load onto an exam or assessment of any kind, the more you are likely to have students who respond to that pressure with academically dishonest measures” (THNK, “3 Reasons Grades Are Bad for Education”).

– Self-efficacy: This is when students have a “belief in their own ability to succeed” or basically, confidence in their abilities. Students with low self-efficacy have a higher probability to cheat, meaning that the influence a teacher has on the student plays a big role in their success. Students want to feel that someone believes they will succeed and when they have the belief that they have the knowledge and skillset to complete the task, it will give them the effort to learn, but more importantly, try.

– The end goal: Grades were originally intended as a means of measuring learning, but have gradually turned into a goal itself. Giving assessments and putting a “grade” on learning essentially forces students to memorize only the necessary materials to pass a test, whilst not making sure the student understands the topic thoroughly. The student’s pursuit of knowledge put on a back burner, eclipsed by the significance that we ourselves have appointed with grades.

If we wanted kids to stop being academically dishonest, then maybe we have to start by changing the way our grading system works.

Does KAS Properly Deal With Academic Dishonesty?

“Furthermore, when students and teachers maintain academic honesty, trust is nurtured and culture of learning is strengthened” (High School Handbook 2018-2019 Kaohsiung American School, 32).  

KAS takes academic honesty seriously and judging from their handbook, it seems as if the school understands the importance academic honesty plays in furthering the student’s understanding and individual growth. Along with taking academic honesty seriously, that means there are consequences such as no credit, conferences, etc, but nothing quite like the consequences for dishonesty in college.

As my group found out when we did research for our presentation, the consequences for academic dishonesty in colleges can include getting kicked out, which is kind of ironic when the source of their dishonesty stemmed from wanting to attend a good college in the first place.  Other consequences can be found in the presentation below –>

The More the Merrier…Or Not

Group work allowed us to be able to come up with a lot of unique examples because each person talked about an example that they were passionate or interested in, which added more depth to the topic of academic (dis)honesty. Through the different examples, we were able to explore how something that seems so insignificant in high school can lead to disastrous results in different universities and colleges.

However, group work made the organization of the presentation hard to arrange, which limited the amount of information we had. There were certainly a lot more colleges or a lot more examples of consequences that could have been included, but in a group, everyone has different visions of what the presentation should look like. Eventually, the flow

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