is getting help on an assignment cheating

The Real Roots of Student Cheating

Let's address the mixed messages we are sending to young people..

Updated September 28, 2023 | Reviewed by Ray Parker

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• Cheating is rampant, yet young people consistently affirm honesty and the belief that cheating is wrong.
• This discrepancy arises, in part, from the tension students perceive between honesty and the terms of success.
• In an integrated environment, achievement and the real world are not seen as at odds with honesty.

The release of ChatGPT has high school and college teachers wringing their hands. A Columbia University undergraduate rubbed it in our face last May with an opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled I’m a Student. You Have No Idea How Much We’re Using ChatGPT.

He goes on to detail how students use the program to “do the lion’s share of the thinking,” while passing off the work as their own. Catching the deception , he insists, is impossible.

As if students needed more ways to cheat. Every survey of students, whether high school or college, has found that cheating is “rampant,” “epidemic,” “commonplace, and practically expected,” to use a few of the terms with which researchers have described the scope of academic dishonesty.

In a 2010 study by the Josephson Institute, for example, 59 percent of the 43,000 high school students admitted to cheating on a test in the past year. According to a 2012 white paper, Cheat or Be Cheated? prepared by Challenge Success, 80 percent admitted to copying another student’s homework. The other studies summarized in the paper found self-reports of past-year cheating by high school students in the 70 percent to 80 percent range and higher.

At colleges, the situation is only marginally better. Studies consistently put the level of self-reported cheating among undergraduates between 50 percent and 70 percent depending in part on what behaviors are included. 1

The sad fact is that cheating is widespread.

Commitment to Honesty

Yet, when asked, most young people affirm the moral value of honesty and the belief that cheating is wrong. For example, in a survey of more than 3,000 teens conducted by my colleagues at the University of Virginia, the great majority (83 percent) indicated that to become “honest—someone who doesn’t lie or cheat,” was very important, if not essential to them.

On a long list of traits and qualities, they ranked honesty just below “hard-working” and “reliable and dependent,” and far ahead of traits like being “ambitious,” “a leader ,” and “popular.” When asked directly about cheating, only 6 percent thought it was rarely or never wrong.

Other studies find similar commitments, as do experimental studies by psychologists. In experiments, researchers manipulate the salience of moral beliefs concerning cheating by, for example, inserting moral reminders into the test situation to gauge their effect. Although students often regard some forms of cheating, such as doing homework together when they are expected to do it alone, as trivial, the studies find that young people view cheating in general, along with specific forms of dishonesty, such as copying off another person’s test, as wrong.

They find that young people strongly care to think of themselves as honest and temper their cheating behavior accordingly. 2

The Discrepancy Between Belief and Behavior

Bottom line: Kids whose ideal is to be honest and who know cheating is wrong also routinely cheat in school.

What accounts for this discrepancy? In the psychological and educational literature, researchers typically focus on personal and situational factors that work to override students’ commitment to do the right thing.

These factors include the force of different motives to cheat, such as the desire to avoid failure, and the self-serving rationalizations that students use to excuse their behavior, like minimizing responsibility—“everyone is doing it”—or dismissing their actions because “no one is hurt.”

While these explanations have obvious merit—we all know the gap between our ideals and our actions—I want to suggest another possibility: Perhaps the inconsistency also reflects the mixed messages to which young people (all of us, in fact) are constantly subjected.

Mixed Messages

Consider the story that young people hear about success. What student hasn’t been told doing well includes such things as getting good grades, going to a good college, living up to their potential, aiming high, and letting go of “limiting beliefs” that stand in their way? Schools, not to mention parents, media, and employers, all, in various ways, communicate these expectations and portray them as integral to the good in life.

They tell young people that these are the standards they should meet, the yardsticks by which they should measure themselves.

In my interviews and discussions with young people, it is clear they have absorbed these powerful messages and feel held to answer, to themselves and others, for how they are measuring up. Falling short, as they understand and feel it, is highly distressful.

At the same time, they are regularly exposed to the idea that success involves a trade-off with honesty and that cheating behavior, though regrettable, is “real life.” These words are from a student on a survey administered at an elite high school. “People,” he continued, “who are rich and successful lie and cheat every day.”

In this thinking, he is far from alone. In a 2012 Josephson Institute survey of 23,000 high school students, 57 percent agreed that “in the real world, successful people do what they have to do to win, even if others consider it cheating.” 3

Putting these together, another high school student told a researcher: “Grades are everything. You have to realize it’s the only possible way to get into a good college and you resort to any means necessary.”

In a 2021 survey of college students by College Pulse, the single biggest reason given for cheating, endorsed by 72 percent of the respondents, was “pressure to do well.”

What we see here are two goods—educational success and honesty—pitted against each other. When the two collide, the call to be successful is likely to be the far more immediate and tangible imperative.

A young person’s very future appears to hang in the balance. And, when asked in surveys , youths often perceive both their parents’ and teachers’ priorities to be more focused on getting “good grades in my classes,” than on character qualities, such as being a “caring community member.”

In noting the mixed messages, my point is not to offer another excuse for bad behavior. But some of the messages just don’t mix, placing young people in a difficult bind. Answering the expectations placed on them can be at odds with being an honest person. In the trade-off, cheating takes on a certain logic.

The proposed remedies to academic dishonesty typically focus on parents and schools. One commonly recommended strategy is to do more to promote student integrity. That seems obvious. Yet, as we saw, students already believe in honesty and the wrongness of (most) cheating. It’s not clear how more teaching on that point would make much of a difference.

Integrity, though, has another meaning, in addition to the personal qualities of being honest and of strong moral principles. Integrity is also the “quality or state of being whole or undivided.” In this second sense, we can speak of social life itself as having integrity.

It is “whole or undivided” when the different contexts of everyday life are integrated in such a way that norms, values, and expectations are fairly consistent and tend to reinforce each other—and when messages about what it means to be a good, accomplished person are not mixed but harmonious.

While social integrity rooted in ethical principles does not guarantee personal integrity, it is not hard to see how that foundation would make a major difference. Rather than confronting students with trade-offs that incentivize “any means necessary,” they would receive positive, consistent reinforcement to speak and act truthfully.

Talk of personal integrity is all for the good. But as pervasive cheating suggests, more is needed. We must also work to shape an integrated environment in which achievement and the “real world” are not set in opposition to honesty.

1. Liora Pedhazur Schmelkin, et al. “A Multidimensional Scaling of College Students’ Perceptions of Academic Dishonesty.” The Journal of Higher Education 79 (2008): 587–607.

2. See, for example, the studies in Christian B. Miller, Character and Moral Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, Ch. 3.

3. Josephson Institute. The 2012 Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth (Installment 1: Honesty and Integrity). Josephson Institute of Ethics, 2012.

Joseph E. Davis is Research Professor of Sociology and Director of the Picturing the Human Colloquy of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.

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What do ai chatbots really mean for students and cheating.

The launch of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots has triggered an alarm for many educators, who worry about students using the technology to cheat by passing its writing off as their own. But two Stanford researchers say that concern is misdirected, based on their ongoing research into cheating among U.S. high school students before and after the release of ChatGPT.  

“There’s been a ton of media coverage about AI making it easier and more likely for students to cheat,” said Denise Pope , a senior lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE). “But we haven’t seen that bear out in our data so far. And we know from our research that when students do cheat, it’s typically for reasons that have very little to do with their access to technology.”

Pope is a co-founder of Challenge Success , a school reform nonprofit affiliated with the GSE, which conducts research into the student experience, including students’ well-being and sense of belonging, academic integrity, and their engagement with learning. She is the author of Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students , and coauthor of Overloaded and Underprepared: Strategies for Stronger Schools and Healthy, Successful Kids.  

Victor Lee is an associate professor at the GSE whose focus includes researching and designing learning experiences for K-12 data science education and AI literacy. He is the faculty lead for the AI + Education initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning and director of CRAFT (Classroom-Ready Resources about AI for Teaching), a program that provides free resources to help teach AI literacy to high school students. 

Here, Lee and Pope discuss the state of cheating in U.S. schools, what research shows about why students cheat, and their recommendations for educators working to address the problem.

Denise Pope

What do we know about how much students cheat?

Pope: We know that cheating rates have been high for a long time. At Challenge Success we’ve been running surveys and focus groups at schools for over 15 years, asking students about different aspects of their lives — the amount of sleep they get, homework pressure, extracurricular activities, family expectations, things like that — and also several questions about different forms of cheating. 

For years, long before ChatGPT hit the scene, some 60 to 70 percent of students have reported engaging in at least one “cheating” behavior during the previous month. That percentage has stayed about the same or even decreased slightly in our 2023 surveys, when we added questions specific to new AI technologies, like ChatGPT, and how students are using it for school assignments.

Isn’t it possible that they’re lying about cheating? 

Pope: Because these surveys are anonymous, students are surprisingly honest — especially when they know we’re doing these surveys to help improve their school experience. We often follow up our surveys with focus groups where the students tell us that those numbers seem accurate. If anything, they’re underreporting the frequency of these behaviors.

Lee: The surveys are also carefully written so they don’t ask, point-blank, “Do you cheat?” They ask about specific actions that are classified as cheating, like whether they have copied material word for word for an assignment in the past month or knowingly looked at someone else’s answer during a test. With AI, most of the fear is that the chatbot will write the paper for the student. But there isn’t evidence of an increase in that.

So AI isn’t changing how often students cheat — just the tools that they’re using? 

Lee: The most prudent thing to say right now is that the data suggest, perhaps to the surprise of many people, that AI is not increasing the frequency of cheating. This may change as students become increasingly familiar with the technology, and we’ll continue to study it and see if and how this changes. 

But I think it’s important to point out that, in Challenge Success’ most recent survey, students were also asked if and how they felt an AI chatbot like ChatGPT should be allowed for school-related tasks. Many said they thought it should be acceptable for “starter” purposes, like explaining a new concept or generating ideas for a paper. But the vast majority said that using a chatbot to write an entire paper should never be allowed. So this idea that students who’ve never cheated before are going to suddenly run amok and have AI write all of their papers appears unfounded.

But clearly a lot of students are cheating in the first place. Isn’t that a problem? 

Pope: There are so many reasons why students cheat. They might be struggling with the material and unable to get the help they need. Maybe they have too much homework and not enough time to do it. Or maybe assignments feel like pointless busywork. Many students tell us they’re overwhelmed by the pressure to achieve — they know cheating is wrong, but they don’t want to let their family down by bringing home a low grade. 

We know from our research that cheating is generally a symptom of a deeper, systemic problem. When students feel respected and valued, they’re more likely to engage in learning and act with integrity. They’re less likely to cheat when they feel a sense of belonging and connection at school, and when they find purpose and meaning in their classes. Strategies to help students feel more engaged and valued are likely to be more effective than taking a hard line on AI, especially since we know AI is here to stay and can actually be a great tool to promote deeper engagement with learning.

What would you suggest to school leaders who are concerned about students using AI chatbots? 

Pope: Even before ChatGPT, we could never be sure whether kids were getting help from a parent or tutor or another source on their assignments, and this was not considered cheating. Kids in our focus groups are wondering why they can't use ChatGPT as another resource to help them write their papers — not to write the whole thing word for word, but to get the kind of help a parent or tutor would offer. We need to help students and educators find ways to discuss the ethics of using this technology and when it is and isn't useful for student learning.

Lee: There’s a lot of fear about students using this technology. Schools have considered putting significant amounts of money in AI-detection software, which studies show can be highly unreliable. Some districts have tried blocking AI chatbots from school wifi and devices, then repealed those bans because they were ineffective. 

AI is not going away. Along with addressing the deeper reasons why students cheat, we need to teach students how to understand and think critically about this technology. For starters, at Stanford we’ve begun developing free resources to help teachers bring these topics into the classroom as it relates to different subject areas. We know that teachers don’t have time to introduce a whole new class, but we have been working with teachers to make sure these are activities and lessons that can fit with what they’re already covering in the time they have available. 

I think of AI literacy as being akin to driver’s ed: We’ve got a powerful tool that can be a great asset, but it can also be dangerous. We want students to learn how to use it responsibly.

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When Does Getting Help On An Assignment Turn Into Cheating?

Thanks for visiting InnerSelf.com , where there are 20,000+ life-altering articles promoting "New Attitudes and New Possibilities." All articles are translated into 30+ languages .  Subscribe to InnerSelf Magazine, published weekly, and Marie T Russell's Daily Inspiration. InnerSelf Magazine has been published since 1985.

Students – whether at university or school – can get help from many places. They can go to a tutor, parent, teacher, a friend or consult a textbook.

But at which point does getting help cross the line into cheating?

Sometimes it’s clear. If you use a spy camera or smartwatch in an exam, you’re clearly cheating. And you’re cheating if you get a friend to sit an exam for you or write your assignment.

At other times the line is blurry. When it’s crossed, it constitutes academic misconduct. Academic misconduct is any action or attempted action that may result in creating an unfair academic advantage for yourself or others.

What about getting someone else to read a draft of your essay? What if they do more than proofread and they alter sections of an assignment? Does that constitute academic misconduct?

Learning, teaching or cheating?

There are a wide range of activities that constitute academic misconduct. These can include:

fabrication, which is just making things up. I could say “90 % of people admit to fabricating their assignments”, when this is not a fact but a statement I just invented

falsification, which is manipulating data to inaccurately portray results. This can occur by taking research results out of context and drawing conclusions not supported by data

misrepresentation, which is falsely representing yourself. Did you know I have a master’s degree from the University of Oxford on this topic? (Actually, I don’t)

plagiarism, which is when you use other people’s ideas or words without appropriate attribution. For instance, this list came from other people’s research and it is important to reference the source.

Sometimes students and teachers have different ideas of academic misconduct. One study found around 45% of academics thought getting someone else to correct a draft could constitute academic misconduct. But only 32% of students thought the same thing.

In the same survey, most academics and students agreed having someone else like a parent or friend identify errors in a draft assignment, as opposed to correcting them, was fine.

Generally when a lecturer, teacher or another marker is assessing an assignment they need to establish the authenticity of the work. Authenticity means having confidence the work actually relates to the performance of the person being assessed, and not of another person.

The Australian government’s vocational education and training sector’s quality watchdog, for instance, considers authenticity as one of four so-called rules of evidence for an “effective assessment”.

The rules are:

validity, which is when the assessor is confident the student has the skills and knowledge required by the module or unit

sufficiency, which is when the quality, quantity and relevance of the assessment evidence is enough for the assessor to make a judgement

authenticity, where the assessor is confident the evidence presented for assessment is the learner’s own work

currency, where the assessor is confident the evidence relates to what the student can do now instead of some time in the past.

Generally speaking, if the assessor is confident the work is the product of a student’s thoughts and where help has been provided there is proper acknowledgement, it should be fine.

Why is cheating a problem?

It’s difficult to get a handle on how big the cheating problem is. Nearly 30% of students who responded to a 2012 UK survey agreed they had “submitted work taken wholly from an internet source” as their own.

In Australia, 6% of students in a survey of 14,000 reported they had engaged in “outsourcing behaviours” such as submitting someone else’s assignment as their own, and 15% of students had bought, sold or traded notes.

Getting someone to help with your assignment might seem harmless but it can hinder the learning process. The teacher needs to understand where the student is at with their learning, and too much help from others can get in the way.

Read more: Children learn from stress and failure: all the more reason you shouldn't do their homework

Some research describes formal education as a type of “ signal ”. This means educational attainment communicates important information about an individual to a third party such as an employer, a customer, or to an authority like a licensing body or government department. Academic misconduct interferes with that process.

How to deal with cheating

It appears fewer cheaters are getting away with it than before. Some of the world’s leading academic institutions have reported a 40% increase in academic misconduct cases over a three year period.

Technological advances mean online essay mills and “ contract cheating ” have become a bigger problem. This type of cheating involves outsourcing work to third parties and is concerning because it is difficult to detect .

But while technology has made cheating easier, it has also offered sophisticated systems for educators to verify the work is a person’s own. Software programs such as Turnitin can check if a student has plagiarised their assignment.

Institutions can also verify the evidence they are assessing relates to a student’s actual performance by using a range of assessment methods such as exams, oral presentations, and group assignments.

Academic misconduct can be a learning and cultural issue . Many students, particularly when they are new to higher education, are simply not aware what constitutes academic misconduct. Students can often be under enormous pressure that leads them to make poor decisions.

About The Author

Peter Hurley, Policy Fellow, Mitchell Institute, Victoria University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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When does “homework help” cross the line and become “cheating”?

It is quite common for friends and relatives of a student to help him or her with homework. Getting homework help in order to do homework is generally not considered cheating. In fact, it is considered essential in many cases.  Some students use study guides to to help them with their homework. So, if all these sources of assistance are considered necessary, when does it cross the line to become cheating?

Let’s look at the case of family members (e.g.  parent or elder siblings) helping out with a student homework. When the teacher explicitly states that certain work has to be done by the student, without the help of anyone else, getting help would definitely be cheating. Even if there is no one to monitor whether the student has taken the help of others or not, a teacher who knows the student well can often tell whether he or she has received help.

There are other potential forms of cheating with respect to homework. These include getting answers from homework guides, getting answers from older students who have done the same homework in a previous year, etc. In all these cases, there is little in the ‘legal’ sense to say that one has cheated. Rather the difference is subtle. In most cases, the choice is left to the student, who has the option of using or not using a source of superior information. Using such superior sources of information, which are not available to others, might be considered cheating. Teachers should monitor the quantum of help that each of their students get, and take that into account when assigning grades.

Generally, parents/elder siblings help out children/younger siblings with their homework. Taking the help of these elders to do proper and error-free homework is not considered cheating. In fact, it is considered essential in most instances. Even teachers monitor the quantum of assistance given by the elders in the family to the children. Sometimes, children are required to use the Internet to do their homework. So, if all these sources of assistance are considered necessary, when does it cross the thin line to become cheating?

Let’s look at the case of parents/elder siblings helping out with the homework of their children/younger siblings, which slips into the realm of cheating. Where the teacher explicitly states that certain work has to be done by the student, without the help of anyone else, in such cases taking the help of others would definitely be cheating. This is so, since there is no one to monitor whether the student has taken the help of others or not.

In the case where the student has to take the help of the Internet to gather certain information and draw his or her own conclusions from the information, if the student takes the help of the Internet to find out the optimum conclusion, it would be termed as cheating.

There are various other forms of cheating in ‘homework’. These include getting answers from Guides, getting answers from older batches that have done the same work in the previous year, el al.

In all these cases, there is little in the ‘legal’ sense to say or charge that one has cheated. Rather the difference is subtle. In most cases, the choice is left to the student who has the option of using or not using a source of superior information, which is not be available to other students of his/her batch. Using such superior source of information, which is not available to others, would be considered cheating.

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Common Reasons Students Cheat

Poor Time Management

The most common reason students cite for committing academic dishonesty is that they ran out of time. The good news is that this is almost always avoidable. Good time management skills are a must for success in college (as well as in life). Visit the Undergraduate Academic Advisement website  for tips on how to manage your time in college.

Stress/Overload

Another common reason students engage in dishonest behavior has to do with overload: too many homework assignments, work issues, relationship problems, COVID-19. Before you resort to behaving in an academically dishonest way, we encourage you to reach out to your professor, your TA, your academic advisor or even  UB’s counseling services .

Wanting to Help Friends

While this sounds like a good reason to do something, it in no way helps a person to be assisted in academic dishonesty. Your friends are responsible for learning what is expected of them and providing evidence of that learning to their instructor. Your unauthorized assistance falls under the “ aiding in academic dishonesty ” violation and makes both you and your friend guilty.

Fear of Failure

Students report that they resort to academic dishonesty when they feel that they won’t be able to successfully perform the task (e.g., write the computer code, compose the paper, do well on the test). Fear of failure prompts students to get unauthorized help, but the repercussions of cheating far outweigh the repercussions of failing. First, when you are caught cheating, you may fail anyway. Second, you tarnish your reputation as a trustworthy student. And third, you are establishing habits that will hurt you in the long run. When your employer or graduate program expects you to have certain knowledge based on your coursework and you don’t have that knowledge, you diminish the value of a UB education for you and your fellow alumni.

"Everyone Does it" Phenomenon

Sometimes it can feel like everyone around us is dishonest or taking shortcuts. We hear about integrity scandals on the news and in our social media feeds. Plus, sometimes we witness students cheating and seeming to get away with it. This feeling that “everyone does it” is often reported by students as a reason that they decided to be academically dishonest. The important thing to remember is that you have one reputation and you need to protect it. Once identified as someone who lacks integrity, you are no longer given the benefit of the doubt in any situation. Additionally, research shows that once you cheat, it’s easier to do it the next time and the next, paving the path for you to become genuinely dishonest in your academic pursuits.

Temptation Due to Unmonitored Environments or Weak Assignment Design

When students take assessments without anyone monitoring them, they may be tempted to access unauthorized resources because they feel like no one will know. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, students have been tempted to peek at online answer sites, Google a test question, or even converse with friends during a test. Because our environments may have changed does not mean that our expectations have. If you wouldn’t cheat in a classroom, don’t be tempted to cheat at home. Your personal integrity is also at stake.

Different Understanding of Academic Integrity Policies

Standards and norms for academically acceptable behavior can vary. No matter where you’re from, whether the West Coast or the far East, the standards for academic integrity at UB must be followed to further the goals of a premier research institution. Become familiar with our policies that govern academically honest behavior.

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Why Students Cheat—and What to Do About It

A teacher seeks answers from researchers and psychologists. 

“Why did you cheat in high school?” I posed the question to a dozen former students.

“I wanted good grades and I didn’t want to work,” said Sonya, who graduates from college in June. [The students’ names in this article have been changed to protect their privacy.]

My current students were less candid than Sonya. To excuse her plagiarized Cannery Row essay, Erin, a ninth-grader with straight As, complained vaguely and unconvincingly of overwhelming stress. When he was caught copying a review of the documentary Hypernormalism , Jeremy, a senior, stood by his “hard work” and said my accusation hurt his feelings.

Cases like the much-publicized ( and enduring ) 2012 cheating scandal at high-achieving Stuyvesant High School in New York City confirm that academic dishonesty is rampant and touches even the most prestigious of schools. The data confirms this as well. A 2012 Josephson Institute’s Center for Youth Ethics report revealed that more than half of high school students admitted to cheating on a test, while 74 percent reported copying their friends’ homework. And a survey of 70,000 high school students across the United States between 2002 and 2015 found that 58 percent had plagiarized papers, while 95 percent admitted to cheating in some capacity.

So why do students cheat—and how do we stop them?

According to researchers and psychologists, the real reasons vary just as much as my students’ explanations. But educators can still learn to identify motivations for student cheating and think critically about solutions to keep even the most audacious cheaters in their classrooms from doing it again.

Rationalizing It


First, know that students realize cheating is wrong—they simply see themselves as moral in spite of it.

“They cheat just enough to maintain a self-concept as honest people. They make their behavior an exception to a general rule,” said Dr. David Rettinger , professor at the University of Mary Washington and executive director of the Center for Honor, Leadership, and Service, a campus organization dedicated to integrity.

According to Rettinger and other researchers, students who cheat can still see themselves as principled people by rationalizing cheating for reasons they see as legitimate.

Some do it when they don’t see the value of work they’re assigned, such as drill-and-kill homework assignments, or when they perceive an overemphasis on teaching content linked to high-stakes tests.

“There was no critical thinking, and teachers seemed pressured to squish it into their curriculum,” said Javier, a former student and recent liberal arts college graduate. “They questioned you on material that was never covered in class, and if you failed the test, it was progressively harder to pass the next time around.”

But students also rationalize cheating on assignments they see as having value.

High-achieving students who feel pressured to attain perfection (and Ivy League acceptances) may turn to cheating as a way to find an edge on the competition or to keep a single bad test score from sabotaging months of hard work. At Stuyvesant, for example, students and teachers identified the cutthroat environment as a factor in the rampant dishonesty that plagued the school.

And research has found that students who receive praise for being smart—as opposed to praise for effort and progress—are more inclined to exaggerate their performance and to cheat on assignments , likely because they are carrying the burden of lofty expectations.

A Developmental Stage

When it comes to risk management, adolescent students are bullish. Research has found that teenagers are biologically predisposed to be more tolerant of unknown outcomes and less bothered by stated risks than their older peers.

“In high school, they’re risk takers developmentally, and can’t see the consequences of immediate actions,” Rettinger says. “Even delayed consequences are remote to them.”

While cheating may not be a thrill ride, students already inclined to rebel against curfews and dabble in illicit substances have a certain comfort level with being reckless. They’re willing to gamble when they think they can keep up the ruse—and more inclined to believe they can get away with it.

Cheating also appears to be almost contagious among young people—and may even serve as a kind of social adhesive, at least in environments where it is widely accepted.  A study of military academy students from 1959 to 2002 revealed that students in communities where cheating is tolerated easily cave in to peer pressure, finding it harder not to cheat out of fear of losing social status if they don’t.

Michael, a former student, explained that while he didn’t need to help classmates cheat, he felt “unable to say no.” Once he started, he couldn’t stop.

Technology Facilitates and Normalizes It

With smartphones and Alexa at their fingertips, today’s students have easy access to quick answers and content they can reproduce for exams and papers.  Studies show that technology has made cheating in school easier, more convenient, and harder to catch than ever before.

To Liz Ruff, an English teacher at Garfield High School in Los Angeles, students’ use of social media can erode their understanding of authenticity and intellectual property. Because students are used to reposting images, repurposing memes, and watching parody videos, they “see ownership as nebulous,” she said.

As a result, while they may want to avoid penalties for plagiarism, they may not see it as wrong or even know that they’re doing it.

This confirms what Donald McCabe, a Rutgers University Business School professor,  reported in his 2012 book ; he found that more than 60 percent of surveyed students who had cheated considered digital plagiarism to be “trivial”—effectively, students believed it was not actually cheating at all.

Strategies for Reducing Cheating

Even moral students need help acting morally, said  Dr. Jason M. Stephens , who researches academic motivation and moral development in adolescents at the University of Auckland’s School of Learning, Development, and Professional Practice. According to Stephens, teachers are uniquely positioned to infuse students with a sense of responsibility and help them overcome the rationalizations that enable them to think cheating is OK.

1. Turn down the pressure cooker. Students are less likely to cheat on work in which they feel invested. A multiple-choice assessment tempts would-be cheaters, while a unique, multiphase writing project measuring competencies can make cheating much harder and less enticing. Repetitive homework assignments are also a culprit, according to research , so teachers should look at creating take-home assignments that encourage students to think critically and expand on class discussions. Teachers could also give students one free pass on a homework assignment each quarter, for example, or let them drop their lowest score on an assignment.

2. Be thoughtful about your language.   Research indicates that using the language of fixed mindsets , like praising children for being smart as opposed to praising them for effort and progress , is both demotivating and increases cheating. When delivering feedback, researchers suggest using phrases focused on effort like, “You made really great progress on this paper” or “This is excellent work, but there are still a few areas where you can grow.”

3. Create student honor councils. Give students the opportunity to enforce honor codes or write their own classroom/school bylaws through honor councils so they can develop a full understanding of how cheating affects themselves and others. At Fredericksburg Academy, high school students elect two Honor Council members per grade. These students teach the Honor Code to fifth graders, who, in turn, explain it to younger elementary school students to help establish a student-driven culture of integrity. Students also write a pledge of authenticity on every assignment. And if there is an honor code transgression, the council gathers to discuss possible consequences. 

4. Use metacognition. Research shows that metacognition, a process sometimes described as “ thinking about thinking ,” can help students process their motivations, goals, and actions. With my ninth graders, I use a centuries-old resource to discuss moral quandaries: the play Macbeth . Before they meet the infamous Thane of Glamis, they role-play as medical school applicants, soccer players, and politicians, deciding if they’d cheat, injure, or lie to achieve goals. I push students to consider the steps they take to get the outcomes they desire. Why do we tend to act in the ways we do? What will we do to get what we want? And how will doing those things change who we are? Every tragedy is about us, I say, not just, as in Macbeth’s case, about a man who succumbs to “vaulting ambition.”

5. Bring honesty right into the curriculum. Teachers can weave a discussion of ethical behavior into curriculum. Ruff and many other teachers have been inspired to teach media literacy to help students understand digital plagiarism and navigate the widespread availability of secondary sources online, using guidance from organizations like Common Sense Media .

There are complicated psychological dynamics at play when students cheat, according to experts and researchers. While enforcing rules and consequences is important, knowing what’s really motivating students to cheat can help you foster integrity in the classroom instead of just penalizing the cheating.

Friday, September 13, 2024

When does getting help on an assignment turn into cheating?

Picture: Flickr

Published Jul 15, 2019

Students – whether at university or school – can get help from many places. They can go to a tutor, parent, teacher, a friend or consult a textbook.

But at which point does getting help cross the line into cheating?

Sometimes it’s clear. If you use a spy camera or smartwatch in an exam, you’re clearly cheating. And you’re cheating if you get a friend to sit an exam for you or write your assignment.

At other times the line is blurry. When it’s crossed, it constitutes academic misconduct. 

Learning, teaching or cheating?

There are a wide range of activities that constitute academic misconduct. These can include:

fabrication, which is just making things up. I could say “90 % of people admit to fabricating their assignments”, when this is not a fact but a statement I just invented

falsification, which is manipulating data to inaccurately portray results. This can occur by taking research results out of context and drawing conclusions not supported by data

misrepresentation, which is falsely representing yourself. Did you know I have a master’s degree from the University of Oxford on this topic? 

plagiarism, which is when you use other people’s ideas or words without appropriate attribution. For instance, this list came from other people’s research and it is important to reference the source.

Sometimes students and teachers have different ideas of academic misconduct. One study found around 45% of academics thought getting someone else to correct a draft could constitute academic misconduct. But only 32% of students thought the same thing.

In the same survey, most academics and students agreed having someone else like a parent or friend identify errors in a draft assignment, as opposed to correcting them, was fine.

Generally when a lecturer, teacher or another marker is assessing an assignment they need to establish the authenticity of the work. Authenticity means having confidence the work actually relates to the performance of the person being assessed, and not of another person.

The Australian government’s vocational education and training sector’s quality watchdog, for instance, considers authenticity as one of four so-called rules of evidence for an “effective assessment”.

The rules are:

validity, which is when the assessor is confident the student has the skills and knowledge required by the module or unit

sufficiency, which is when the quality, quantity and relevance of the assessment evidence is enough for the assessor to make a judgement

authenticity, where the assessor is confident the evidence presented for assessment is the learner’s own work

currency, where the assessor is confident the evidence relates to what the student can do now instead of some time in the past.

Generally speaking, if the assessor is confident the work is the product of a student’s thoughts and where help has been provided there is proper acknowledgement, it should be fine.

Why is cheating a problem?

It’s difficult to get a handle on how big the cheating problem is. Getting someone to help with your assignment might seem harmless but it can hinder the learning process. The teacher needs to understand where the student is at with their learning, and too much help from others can get in the way.

Some research describes formal education as a type of “signal”. This means educational attainment communicates important information about an individual to a third party such as an employer, a customer, or to an authority like a licensing body or government department. Academic misconduct interferes with that process.

How to deal with cheating

It appears fewer cheaters are getting away with it than before. Some of the world’s leading academic institutions have reported a 40% increase in academic misconduct cases over a three year period.

Technological advances mean online essay mills and “contract cheating” have become a bigger problem. This type of cheating involves outsourcing work to third parties and is concerning because it is difficult to detect.

But while technology has made cheating easier, it has also offered sophisticated systems for educators to verify the work is a person’s own. Software programs such as Turnitin can check if a student has plagiarised their assignment.

Institutions can also verify the evidence they are assessing relates to a student’s actual performance by using a range of assessment methods such as exams, oral presentations, and group assignments.

Academic misconduct can be a learning and cultural issue. Many students, particularly when they are new to higher education, are simply not aware what constitutes academic misconduct. Students can often be under enormous pressure that leads them to make poor decisions.

It is possible to deal with these issues in a constructive manner that help students learn and get the support they need. This can include providing training to students when they first enrol, offering support to assist students who may struggle, and when academic misconduct does occur, taking appropriate steps to ensure it does not happen again.

The Conversation

Related Topics:

Articles on Exam cheating

Displaying all articles.

The dawn of AI has come, and its implications for education couldn’t be more significant

Vitomir Kovanovic , University of South Australia

If unis stick with online assessment after COVID, they’ll have do more to stop cheating

Meena Jha , CQUniversity Australia

Online and in-person exams both have problems – that’s now clear. Unis have a window of opportunity to do better

Christopher Charles Deneen , University of South Australia

Online learning has changed the way students work — we need to change definitions of ‘cheating’ too

Linda Rowan , Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University and Fiona Murray , Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University

Motivation is a key factor in whether students cheat

Carlton J. Fong , Texas State University and Megan Krou , Teachers College, Columbia University

‘I cheated on a school exam and I feel terrible. How can I get past this?’

Lydia Woodyatt , Flinders University

When does getting help on an assignment turn into cheating?

Peter Hurley , Victoria University

Doing away with essays won’t necessarily stop students cheating

Julie Hare , The University of Melbourne

Don’t assume online students are more likely to cheat. The evidence is murky

Chris Pilgrim , Swinburne University of Technology and Christopher Scanlon , Swinburne University of Technology

How to stop cheating in universities

Thomas Lancaster , Staffordshire University

Assessment design won’t stop cheating, but our relationships with students might

Tracey Bretag , University of South Australia and Rowena Harper , University of South Australia

Everything you need to know about fake degrees and the ‘universities’ awarding them

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Thomas Lancaster, Imperial College London

Associate Director: Curriculum Development and Support, Teaching Innovation Unit, University of South Australia

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Researcher in Information Communications Technology, CQUniversity Australia

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Professor of Psychology, Flinders University

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Contract Cheating & Academic Integrity

What is contract cheating.

Contract cheating is an umbrella term that describes all forms of outsourced academic work, whether text-based or non-text-based, and multiple providers (eg, Chegg, Course Hero, various essay mills) of outsourced academic work. Coined by Robert Clarke and Thomas Lancaster in their 2007 study "Assessing Contract Cheating Through Auction Sites – A Computing Perspective” contract cheating includes the following actions:

• unpaid help from friends, casual note sharers, peers in campus organizations, or family members who are asked to complete the task in the student’s place;
• work downloaded from a free website or or other digital resource to be submitted as student’s own work; and
• paying for an academic assignment or other academic material that will be or has been written by third-party services such as Chegg, Course Hero, and scores of other for-profit tutoring services that allow students to upload and download course materials.

For further insights regarding contract cheating, review the article of the article of “ Contract Cheating: Reasons Behind It and Ways To Stop It ” and a parallel slide deck “ Contract Cheating: What is it and What can we do about it? ” The authors showcase the multiple sites selling contract cheating services, and offer strategies for combating or countering their impacts on teaching and learning.

Setting a base for developing a proactive integrity plan begins with two key questions: What is originality (in realms of content, design, and method)? What pathways might we follow in implementing integrity practices and selecting appropriate technology tools (trust, verification, and observation)? Thomas Tobin addresses each of these questions in “ The Online Administrator’s Semi-Painless Guide to Institution-Wide Academic Integrity .”

What is Academic Integrity?

Equally important work for us as instructors is to frame academic integrity clearly, positively, and proactively; in this, we make room for clarifying discussions with students about principles and practices, difficulties and strategies. To aid in this framing we offer three resources:

• clear, actionable definitions of academic integrity, 
• resources for students experiencing stress and uncertainty that can prompt acts of academic dishonesty,
• links to academic integrity offices on each UMN campus.   
• The first module in the short course focuses on the broad idea of academic integrity and applies it to real-life situations. 
• The second module focuses on how to use sources through attribution and citation. After completing both modules, learners have the opportunity to take a quiz in Canvas for a certificate of completion.
• While the short course is designed for early-undergraduate students, it is also a good resource for students who may not be familiar with academic integrity in the North American context or as a refresher for instructors. 
• An instructor guide includes both instructions on how to integrate the modules into courses as well as offering lesson plans and discussion questions to support talking with students about academic integrity within a discipline.
• Instructors might also opt to leverage the system-supported TurnItIn tool to teach students how to analyze their text for originality and possible plagiarism. 6 Principles to Guide Use of Plagiarism Detection Software and Tools  outlines the ways instructors can use detection software to support students in creating scholarly work in line with principles of academic integrity.
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What is contract cheating? What does it have to do with academic integrity?

Essentials series

At Turnitin, we’re hearing the following academic integrity concerns when it comes to remote learning in recent days:

• When allowing students to write essays at home with open book essays, how do you know the student wrote the essay?
• When assignments are completed in non-regulated, unsupervised circumstances, how do you know if parents, friends, and other family members are “helping?”
• As summer approaches and exams are being moved online, will students think “I can get someone else to take my exam for me now?”

Here are some suggestions to prevent contract cheating in remote learning classrooms.

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Contract cheating occurs when students engage a third party to complete an assignment, which they then represent as their own work ( Lancaster & Clarke, 2016 ). It can occur when someone other than the student—whether an essay mill, friend, or even a family member— completes an assignment on their behalf. Downloading a paper from a “free” essay site is also contract cheating.

Contract cheating can be done as a “favor” with no exchange of money. Or it can involve trade-in-kind, like when a student swaps papers with another student.

Contract cheating is generally defined as a more purposeful act of academic misconduct, because, most egregiously, students can contact essay mills to write an essay on their behalf in exchange for money.

Like many forms of academic misconduct, stressed students without a deep understanding of academic integrity are vulnerable to contract cheating. When students fall behind in school work, they may ask for help from a friend or family member who, with the intention of helping, may write the paper for the student. While powered by good intentions, this is a form of academic misconduct.

Essay mills market themselves to students on social media and other venues via “bots” by offering “help” at the eleventh hour. Essay mill marketing tactics leverage such ambiguity in ostentatious ways. “Our essays are plagiarism-free,” they often tout. While technically true (they are, after all, often written from scratch and not plagiarized), the mills don’t make clear that even if the essay is void of plagiarism, contract cheating itself is academic dishonesty.

Essays written by essay mills likely do not “sound” like the student’s work, or may show a marked difference in tone or voice. They may also contain florid language without much in the way of deep content or analysis. Additionally, they may not even answer the provided question or prompt.

When students aren’t doing their own work and instead have someone else complete their assignments, they’re not learning the material. Students who turn to contract cheating because they’re struggling and stressed aren’t closing learning gaps; in turn, educators aren’t enabling accurate feedback loops to support learning outcomes.

Contract cheating is, simply put, a dismissal of the learning process. Not only does it undermine learning, contract cheating erodes learning environments, damages student-teacher relationships, jeopardizes the academic reputations of students, faculty, and institutions , and indicates future workplace dishonesty (ICAI, 2021 ).

Institutions and faculty can play a critical role in preventing contract cheating from occurring .

Build awareness and an understanding of contract cheating. When there is silence around contract cheating, the cost of contract cheating may appear low to students. Research has shown that “more than 50% of students would outsource their work if the reward, perhaps in the form of higher marks or passing an assessment they would otherwise have failed, was relatively high and the cost relatively low” ( Lancaster, 2020 ).

Bottom line: building a deep understanding of academic integrity and helping students understand contract cheating as a form of dishonesty prevents future misconduct

When students have a sophisticated understanding of academic integrity, plagiarism, and contract cheating and how they relate to each other, they are also less apt to fall prey to essay mills that normalize contract cheating and position their services as “help.”

Assign formative low-stakes assessments and enable feedback loops , so students feel seen and supported throughout the learning process. In-class assignments provide a baseline assessment against which to compare future assessments. Additionally, making the writing process more transparent mitigates third-party interference—or makes it more obvious. Accelerate feedback loops with Feedback Studio and Gradescope to allow for more visibility and data insights throughout the student learning process.

What about detection when prevention tactics fail? Turnitin Originality surfaces contract cheating insights and evidence for instructors and administrators. Forensics linguistics, too, can be utilized by individual instructors to check for contract cheating. “Training and decision support are key to determine contract cheating,” according to Olumide Popoola in his International Center for Academic Integrity panel entitled Detecting Contract Cheating Using Investigative Linguistics .

Popoola showed that forensic linguistics can help identify contract cheating, but concluded by saying that assessment design is the best way to mitigate contract cheating and enable later detection . Assessments that focus on unique classroom discussion and course content deter contract cheating because third parties do not have access to that information.

Contract cheating is real and occurring throughout the world and in many classrooms of many institutions; to that end, countries are enacting legislation to ban essay mills and make contract cheating illegal .

For instance, contract cheating scandalized sixteen Australian universities in 2014 when it became known that up to one thousand students utilized MyMaster to ghostwrite essays . As a result, Australia passed legislation to make contract cheating illegal in 2019 . Contract cheating in New Zealand is illegal, too.

After more than 20,000 UK university students were found buying essays in 2017 , the House of Lords called for a ban on contract cheating. Essay mills are now outlawed in the UK .

The United States has yet to enact a federal law “[forbidding] the purchase or sale of academic papers,” according to a 2019 New York Times article on contract cheating that further states, “Contract cheating is illegal in 17 states.”

There is a lot of work to be done and also being done—within classrooms and in government. The first step, as always, is building awareness.

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Contract Cheating: Understanding and Responding to Academic Dishonesty

Audrey Wick is an English professor and Cengage Faculty Partner

The paper didn’t pass the “smell test.” I had a student in class whose work and writing voice I knew, but his last paper of the semester didn’t seem like his own. The digital originality report didn’t detect any plagiarism, though.

Still, language was different, research techniques were unconventional, assignment requirements were stilted, and the general vibe of the paper told me that the student had help in writing it.

What is Contract Cheating?

Instructors who assign writing assignments have long dealt with plagiarism, but contract cheating is a separate area of concern. It involves a student seeking a third party for assistance with completing an assignment. The student “contracts” with someone else—a friend, a paid acquaintance, a homework site, a third-party internet service—to complete work that the student then submits to the instructor.

Because the work is unique and written by someone, it generally passes plagiarism detection sites. It’s not plagiarism in the traditional sense but instead allows a student to submit something akin to an individualized assignment. The problem is the student didn’t actually complete the work.

How is Contract Cheating Detected?

Contract cheating can be difficult to pinpoint, especially in writing assignments. Instructors need to be vigilant and responsive. Evidence of contract cheating include:

• Skewed or clipped response to the assignment
• Catch-all type submission that seems more universal than expected
• Unconventional digital source use (often open source and fully online only)
• Diction that doesn’t match the voice of the student
• Formatting that doesn’t match previous submissions
• Digital breadcrumbs that are suspect (like odd file names or incongruent dates of file creation)

Other examples of contract cheating are if a student “hires” another student to take an online exam or complete digital coursework on their behalf.

How Should Contract Cheating Be Addressed?

This can be complicated. First, it’s important for instructors to know their institution’s honor code as well as any academic dishonesty policies to which they must adhere. There is likely already a provision against contract cheating that may be listed as “collusion.” Students who do not complete their own work in class are subject to collegiate policies to maintain academic integrity.

Can I take proactive measures in class to prevent contract cheating?

Yes, this is possible! Here are a few techniques for writing assignments.

• Change assignments on a regular basis to prevent students from sharing older content online
• Mandate certain assignment parameters , like the use of collegiate library resources and credentialed databases for research
• Require students to submit an essay in stages: topic selection, outline submission, rough draft, final draft, reflection journal, etc.
• Have students complete some portion of the writing process in class

Stay the Course!

Recognizing and responding to contract cheating involves staying one step ahead of students and technology where possible. Stay the course! There is more help on the horizon . Holding students accountable can be challenging with the rise of online resources, but it’s important to maintain academic honesty.

If you suspect plagiarism on a student submission, you may benefit from reading   Proactive Approaches to Stop Cheating and Plagiarism.

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Is it cheating to use solutions to identical problems from other universities to do my homework?

Is it unethical to refer to solutions to assignment questions that have been asked at other universities before? The questions are the same word for word.

A lot many answers are very helpful. Most of them revolve around introspection and the classical definition of plagiarism. I agree with that. I know I am digressing from the original topic and may seem to justify copying but at the end of the day I have to pass the course. I spend hours trying to learn all the background concepts and then try to apply them to the assignment questions. Thats what I have done till now. Not all the times I get them correct. Many of my classmates get the solutions online, rephrase the wordings and then submit it. Its a no brainer, they end up getting more marks than me. Sometimes(many a times) it feels really bad. Am I just being stupid in that case? should i follow their approach when I am not able to get some questions or to verify just to be sure?

• 13 If you do that you're probably cheating yourself. Homework isn't set because people enjoy marking. –  Jessica B Commented Nov 14, 2014 at 7:26
• 20 The question you should ask yourself is: are you enrolled to learn or to get a diploma? The answer follows. –  Raphael Commented Nov 14, 2014 at 9:20
• 7 The department may likely have a license for the material — What the... Since when do departments need licenses for questions ? –  JeffE Commented Nov 14, 2014 at 11:54
• 23 But the teacher isnt writing those questions off the top of her head. doesnt that amount to plagiarism too? — NO. The point of homework is for students to demonstrate their mastery of the material. Any question that reads "Solve X" is really asking "Demonstrate that you can solve X." When you submit solutions, you are claiming to demonstrate your understanding. On the other hand, the point of teaching is not for the instructor to demonstrate their mastery of the material. There is absolutely no implicit claim or expectation that instructors pose original questions. –  JeffE Commented Nov 14, 2014 at 12:01
• 5 "Many of my classmates get the solutions online, rephrase the wordings and then submit it. Its a no brainer, they end up getting more marks than me" - No one in the real world cares about marks (as long as you didn't outright flunk). The world does care very very much about what you know and if you can learn things you don't know. Your cheating classmates will struggle later in life despite their marks. –  Jay Commented Nov 14, 2014 at 19:44

8 Answers 8

I do not view it as generally unethical to refer to these solutions. This situation is more complex than I think some other answers have admitted. Here is a list of claims:

In an ideal world, the point of homework is for the student to learn the material.

In a perfectly ideal world, we would not need to grade homework, because students would do it on their own to master the material. They might refer to other people's solutions to see if theirs are correct, and that would be fine.

Experience shows this world is not perfect. Students will often skip ungraded homework, and their learning and exam grades will suffer.

So instructors assign homework for a grade. But this isn't because the grade is really important: it's because we want the students to do the homework and learn the material!

Some students then get the idea that the grade is the real goal of the homework, and simply copy their assignment from others. Professors often find this unacceptable.

One important point that others have answered is that, if you are going to turn in the homework, what you turn in should reflect your own understanding of the assignment. But, equally importantly, it is important to let yourself struggle with problems for a while before looking up the answer. That is the only way to really learn how to solve problems.

Most professors accept that the internet exists - we know you can look up other people's answers. It used to be that fraternities had giant files of old homework and exam answers for this purpose (maybe they still do). And students study in groups all the time - research shows study groups can dramatically increase learning. So getting help is not a bad thing.

But you don't want to get help too quickly. Make a genuine effort to answer the problems yourself first. If you find that you are looking up the answers to all the problems (even the easiest ones), then something is off - try going for more tutoring, or studying more before doing the homework.

If you find that you occasionally need to look up one of the most difficult problems, that's perfectly normal (but it still wouldn't excuse directly copying the solution into your homework, of course).

Of course, the usual caveats apply: some professors may specifically tell you not to collaborate with anyone or use any other resources. But most professors know that students usually collaborate with each other on homework (e.g. study groups) and know that students can look up answers using other resources. We have no problem with that, as long as each student's submission reflects their own understanding in the end.

• thanks for the reply. This seems to be the most realistic option to me. –  Works On Mine Commented Nov 14, 2014 at 15:09
• 4 For example, in my classes I allow students to consult each other and online materials, but I insist that the final write-up must be their own and they must understand what they turn in. –  Jim Conant Commented Nov 14, 2014 at 18:59

Yes, it is unethical. Copying the answer from a solutions manual is considered plagiarism, even if it's from another university's website. The question bank and solutions are likely part of a question bank belonging to either an educational group or the textbook.

Additionally, there is also no guarantee the answer key is right. For example, one answerer to another plagiarism related question said this .

Then I went to Yahoo Answers, made a bunch of fake accounts, and posted tantalizingly wrong answers to all of my own HW questions. I have told all subsequent students not to google the HW answers because there are wrong solutions out there.

I'm not too sure about whether or not checking your answers once you've done the work yourself is unethical, however. That's a gray area for me that someone with more experience in academic misconduct might be able to help cover.

• 1 @BobBrown just for comparing the results? –  Davidmh Commented Nov 14, 2014 at 14:29
• 2 @Davidmh: For copying from the solutions manual, Internet page, or whatever. (It is often easy to prove because many solutions manuals have a few errors obvious to professors but subtle to students.) –  Bob Brown Commented Nov 14, 2014 at 14:32
• 3 Is it ethical to post fake answers? What if someone (not a student in the course) comes across this fake solution and is misled into believing it? –  Jim Conant Commented Nov 14, 2014 at 19:02
• 2 @JimConant It's not ethical to post fake answers. See my comment in the linked answer. That doesn't mean that people don't do it, as the answer indicates. I definitely don't advocate going out and posting fake answers, but if someone has, there is a possibility that someone is your professor. –  Compass Commented Nov 14, 2014 at 19:17
• 1 Well that would explain why Yahoo Answers is full of people asking questions with obviously wrong answers (which the asker then accepts and thanks the answerer for!) –  Michael Commented Nov 16, 2014 at 2:47

If you get a solution from another school (or a previous year, as questions are often reused on problem sets), it's no different than getting a solution from another student in the same section who happened to finish the problem first. In other words, it is unequivocally cheating, unless there is an explicit policy to the contrary.

• 1 I am not sure that it is unequivocally cheating - I can think of several situations where it would not be cheating at all to refer to solutions to homework problems. The easiest example is when the homework is ungraded. –  Oswald Veblen Commented Nov 14, 2014 at 12:34

Ask yourself: would you be comfortable telling to your Professor that you got the answers from a website? Do you think she or he would think you did a good job with your homework if you copied it from a website?

The problem is much less about whether there are rules (and there are, no doubt) than about what is the intended purpose of homework, that is to help students learn. If you don't learn from your homework, you're not doing it right.

If you copied it from another classmate, is it cheating?

Of course it is ..

Some other student wrote the code and you're copying it, so you are also cheating.

If you are unable to solve it yourself, you need to seek help from the professor.

A personal case in point:

My CompSci teacher gave me an F once, for allowing someone else to copy MY code.

He simply wrote on my printout: "Did copying from X help you learn anything?"

I explained to my teacher the circumstances. She had missed classes due to a death in the family. I tried to explain the assignment to her, but it didn't sink in. So, I shared a hard copy of my code, as I had expected her to read my code, and try to understand how it worked. Instead she typed it back in verbatim. So, she learned nothing beyond how to also get an F on a coding lab assignment.

My F did not get changed, and I agreed with him on his decision.

It certainly taught me a worthwhile lesson. Hopefully it will help you too, without an F.

Ideally, your professor should have a policy about this. For example, here is mine. (It get's adapted a bit for each course, based on things like whether or not there is a textbook, or whether the course has TA's.)

Homework Policy: You are welcome to consult each other provided (1) you list all people and sources who aided you, or whom you aided and (2) you write-up the solutions independently, in your own language. If you seek help from mathematicians/math students outside the course, you should be seeking general advice, not specific solutions, and must disclose this help. I am, of course, glad to provide help! I don't intend for you to need to consult sources (books, papers, websites) outside your notes and textbook. If you do consult such, you should be looking for better/other understanding of the definitions and concepts, not solutions to the problems. You MAY NOT post homework problems to internet fora seeking solutions. Although I participate in some such fora, I feel that they have a major tendency to be too explicit in their help; you can read further thoughts of mine here . You may post questions asking for clarifications and alternate perspectives on concepts and results we have covered.

If your professor does not have a policy, your university probably has a default one.

The value of university is the learning. So the point of homework is not to solve the task but to learn how to solve the task. If you take a shortcut not only is it unethical but you cheated yourself out of your actual goal!

What your classmates do is irrelevant, they won't be there with you in your career when you need to call upon these skills.

So the question becomes more obvious. Did this additional material help my understanding where there was some lacking or did it make the question substantially easier where I will lose the benefit of working out how to solve the problem myself? You know the honest answer to that.

Either the policy is, "Do your homework however you like, and the teacher will grade it to let you know if you got the right answer," or the policy is "Homework is a graded assessment that is used as part of your overall course grade. Your homework is subject to the honor code / academic integrity rules / ... just as if it were an exam."

If the former, it's up to you to decide what helps you learn. If it's the later, you're cheating.

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Choose Integrity

Cheating: the arch nemesis of integrity.

Acts that compromise academic honesty can be referred to as cheating, academic misconduct, academic dishonesty, or academic integrity violations. Cheating takes place when a student attempts to attain academic credit through dishonest, disrespectful, irresponsible, untrustworthy, or unfair means. This not only misrepresents a student's knowledge and abilities but also undermines the instructor's capacity to assess them honestly and fairly. Moreover, cheating erodes the university's ability to genuinely and impartially certify a student's knowledge and abilities. Instructors have the authority to define cheating in their classes because expectations for academic conduct are tied directly to learning objectives. Consequently, rules and expectations may vary for each class and even for different assignments within the same class. To guide you, here are some general principles to follow unless otherwise specified by your instructor:

• Complete all academic assignments independently.
• Refrain from using any aids during exams.
• Acknowledge and cite source material in papers or assignments.
• Avoid altering a graded exam and submitting it for regrade.
• Do not copy another student's assignment, either in part or entirely, and present it as your own work.
• Do no purchase help or assignment completion from external sources; paying for it does not make it your own.
• Abstain from copying online quiz or assignment answers from the internet or others.
• Do not use GenAI Tools (like ChatGPT, Grammarly) if prohibited by the Instructor OR if to generate content that you then submit as your own.

When in doubt about academic integrity, default to the following position: produce independent work unless instructed otherwise. Always seek guidance from your instructor if you have uncertainties! For further clarification on what constitutes cheating, refer to our frequently asked questions . Explore the Sanctioning Guidelines for defined examples of academic integrity violations, and, most importantly, consult your instructor for specific rules in their class.

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Why Students Cheat on Homework and How to Prevent It

One of the most frustrating aspects of teaching in today’s world is the cheating epidemic. There’s nothing more irritating than getting halfway through grading a large stack of papers only to realize some students cheated on the assignment. There’s really not much point in teachers grading work that has a high likelihood of having been copied or otherwise unethically completed. So. What is a teacher to do? We need to be able to assess students. Why do students cheat on homework, and how can we address it?

Like most new teachers, I learned the hard way over the course of many years of teaching that it is possible to reduce cheating on homework, if not completely prevent it. Here are six suggestions to keep your students honest and to keep yourself sane.

ASSIGN LESS HOMEWORK

One of the reasons students cheat on homework is because they are overwhelmed. I remember vividly what it felt like to be a high school student in honors classes with multiple extracurricular activities on my plate. Other teens have after school jobs to help support their families, and some don’t have a home environment that is conducive to studying.

While cheating is  never excusable under any circumstances, it does help to walk a mile in our students’ shoes. If they are consistently making the decision to cheat, it might be time to reduce the amount of homework we are assigning.

I used to give homework every night – especially to my advanced students. I wanted to push them. Instead, I stressed them out. They wanted so badly to be in the Top 10 at graduation that they would do whatever they needed to do in order to complete their assignments on time – even if that meant cheating.

When assigning homework, consider the at-home support, maturity, and outside-of-school commitments involved. Think about the kind of school and home balance you would want for your own children. Go with that.

PROVIDE CLASS TIME

Allowing students time in class to get started on their assignments seems to curb cheating to some extent. When students have class time, they are able to knock out part of the assignment, which leaves less to fret over later. Additionally, it gives them an opportunity to ask questions.

When students are confused while completing assignments at home, they often seek “help” from a friend instead of going in early the next morning to request guidance from the teacher. Often, completing a portion of a homework assignment in class gives students the confidence that they can do it successfully on their own. Plus, it provides the social aspect of learning that many students crave. Instead of fighting cheating outside of class , we can allow students to work in pairs or small groups  in class to learn from each other.

Plus, to prevent students from wanting to cheat on homework, we can extend the time we allow them to complete it. Maybe students would work better if they have multiple nights to choose among options on a choice board. Home schedules can be busy, so building in some flexibility to the timeline can help reduce pressure to finish work in a hurry.

GIVE MEANINGFUL WORK

If you find students cheat on homework, they probably lack the vision for how the work is beneficial. It’s important to consider the meaningfulness and valuable of the assignment from students’ perspectives. They need to see how it is relevant to them.

In my class, I’ve learned to assign work that cannot be copied. I’ve never had luck assigning worksheets as homework because even though worksheets have value, it’s generally not obvious to teenagers. It’s nearly impossible to catch cheating on worksheets that have “right or wrong” answers. That’s not to say I don’t use worksheets. I do! But. I use them as in-class station, competition, and practice activities, not homework.

So what are examples of more effective and meaningful types of homework to assign?

• Ask students to complete a reading assignment and respond in writing .
• Have students watch a video clip and answer an oral entrance question.
• Require that students contribute to an online discussion post.
• Assign them a reflection on the day’s lesson in the form of a short project, like a one-pager or a mind map.

As you can see, these options require unique, valuable responses, thereby reducing the opportunity for students to cheat on them. The more open-ended an assignment is, the more invested students need to be to complete it well.

DIFFERENTIATE

Part of giving meaningful work involves accounting for readiness levels. Whenever we can tier assignments or build in choice, the better. A huge cause of cheating is when work is either too easy (and students are bored) or too hard (and they are frustrated). Getting to know our students as learners can help us to provide meaningful differentiation options. Plus, we can ask them!

This is what you need to be able to demonstrate the ability to do. How would you like to show me you can do it?

REDUCE THE POINT VALUE

If you’re sincerely concerned about students cheating on assignments, consider reducing the point value. Reflect on your grading system.

Are homework grades carrying so much weight that students feel the need to cheat in order to maintain an A? In a standards-based system, will the assignment be a key determining factor in whether or not students are proficient with a skill?

Each teacher has to do what works for him or her. In my classroom, homework is worth the least amount out of any category. If I assign something for which I plan on giving completion credit, the point value is even less than it typically would be. Projects, essays, and formal assessments count for much more.

CREATE AN ETHICAL CULTURE

To some extent, this part is out of educators’ hands. Much of the ethical and moral training a student receives comes from home. Still, we can do our best to create a classroom culture in which we continually talk about integrity, responsibility, honor, and the benefits of working hard. What are some specific ways can we do this?

Building Community and Honestly

• Talk to students about what it means to cheat on homework. Explain to them that there are different kinds. Many students are unaware, for instance, that the “divide and conquer (you do the first half, I’ll do the second half, and then we will trade answers)” is cheating.
• As a class, develop expectations and consequences for students who decide to take short cuts.
• Decorate your room with motivational quotes that relate to honesty and doing the right thing.
• Discuss how making a poor decision doesn’t make you a bad person. It is an opportunity to grow.
• Share with students that you care about them and their futures. The assignments you give them are intended to prepare them for success.
• Offer them many different ways to seek help from you if and when they are confused.
• Provide revision opportunities for homework assignments.
• Explain that you partner with their parents and that guardians will be notified if cheating occurs.
• Explore hypothetical situations.  What if you have a late night? Let’s pretend you don’t get home until after orchestra and Lego practices. You have three hours of homework to do. You know you can call your friend, Bob, who always has his homework done. How do you handle this situation?

EDUCATE ABOUT PLAGIARISM

Many students don’t realize that plagiarism applies to more than just essays. At the beginning of the school year, teachers have an energized group of students, fresh off of summer break. I’ve always found it’s easiest to motivate my students at this time. I capitalize on this opportunity by beginning with a plagiarism mini unit .

While much of the information we discuss is about writing, I always make sure my students know that homework can be plagiarized. Speeches can be plagiarized. Videos can be plagiarized. Anything can be plagiarized, and the repercussions for stealing someone else’s ideas (even in the form of a simple worksheet) are never worth the time saved by doing so.

In an ideal world, no one would cheat. However, teaching and learning in the 21st century is much different than it was fifty years ago. Cheating? It’s increased. Maybe because of the digital age… the differences in morals and values of our culture…  people are busier. Maybe because students don’t see how the school work they are completing relates to their lives.

No matter what the root cause, teachers need to be proactive. We need to know why students feel compelled to cheat on homework and what we can do to help them make learning for beneficial. Personally, I don’t advocate for completely eliminating homework with older students. To me, it has the potential to teach students many lessons both related to school and life. Still, the “right” answer to this issue will be different for each teacher, depending on her community, students, and culture.

STRATEGIES FOR ADDRESSING CHALLENGING BEHAVIORS IN SECONDARY

You are so right about communicating the purpose of the assignment and giving students time in class to do homework. I also use an article of the week on plagiarism. I give students points for the learning – not the doing. It makes all the difference. I tell my students why they need to learn how to do “—” for high school or college or even in life experiences. Since, they get an A or F for the effort, my students are more motivated to give it a try. No effort and they sit in my class to work with me on the assignment. Showing me the effort to learn it — asking me questions about the assignment, getting help from a peer or me, helping a peer are all ways to get full credit for the homework- even if it’s not complete. I also choose one thing from each assignment for the test which is a motivator for learning the material – not just “doing it.” Also, no one is permitted to earn a D or F on a test. Any student earning an F or D on a test is then required to do a project over the weekend or at lunch or after school with me. All of this reinforces the idea – learning is what is the goal. Giving students options to show their learning is also important. Cheating is greatly reduced when the goal is to learn and not simply earn the grade.

Thanks for sharing your unique approaches, Sandra! Learning is definitely the goal, and getting students to own their learning is key.

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