Centerville: Cheating and Other Dishonesty

What is Considered an Act of Cheating

With changes in education due to the shifting of in-person studies to online courses, there have been many new instances of cheating and academic dishonesty that had not been a problem previously, let alone the continuing issues.

As simple statement, cheating is the act of conducting immoral efforts in submitted works.

This involves but is not limited to:

• Unauthorized use of notes or materials in exams
• Talking to other students during class when answering questions
• Forging or altering assignments
• Collaborating with others on work that is not assigned teamwork
• Copying or allowing copies of assignments
• Providing answers from assignments to others
• Submitting assignments that are not your own work
• Reusing papers for different assignments (can lead to self plagiarism)
• Having different windows open during online tests (even if they do not have the answers)

It is important to remember that cheating is easy, but getting caught is just as easy and will lead to you failing, if not being dropped from the course or even the school.

You Will Get Caught.

Contrary to common conceptions, you will get caught if you are cheating or being academically dishonest.

Whether you are handwriting papers or submitting documents online, there are dozens of systems in place to catch dishonest efforts.

For in-person papers, your instructors read over your documents, and they are not mindlessly reading. They recognize when your writing is your own and when someone else has written the information. Professors also recognize previous student's works, they watch you during exams for looking at notes or hidden items, and they confer with each other about students' papers. Lastly, your instructors have been doing this for a while, even the new hires. Those who teach deal with students every day, reading hundreds of papers every week, having new students with new problems every semester, and by the time your instructors are hired, they will have seen it all.

For online documents, the anti-cheating systems scan hundreds of thousands of documents within a minute of your submission, and they detect any similarities to other submissions, journals, textbooks, and any other documentation related to the subject. These advanced systems not only look into our schools' submissions and other schools in the nation, but they also look through cheating websites and automated paper websites. Because of this, some professors have students submit all documentation online to more easily catch academic dishonesty.

Make no mistake: you will get caught and you will receive a zero. That is the best case scenario. Worst case scenario, you are dropped from the program, banned from the school, and blacklisted from attending any college worth receiving education.