Unintentional Cheating

It's Still Cheating!

Educators are showing serious concern about cheating in high schools, and for good reason. Cheating has become commonplace in high schools, largely because students are using technology to gather and share information in rather innovation ways. Since students are a little more tech-savvy than many adults, grownups are always playing catch-up when it comes to finding out what students are up to.

But this technology-centered cat-and-mouse activity can be fatal to your educational future. Students start to blur the ethical boundaries and think it's OK to do many things, simply because they've gotten away with them in the past.

There's a big catch to blurring the line when it comes to cheating. While parents and high school teachers might be less savvy than their students about using cell phones and calculators to share work, and too overworked to catch cheaters, college professors are a little different. They have graduate assistants, college honor courts, and cheat-detecting software that they can tap into.

The bottom line is that students can develop habits in high school that will get them expelled when they use them in college, and sometimes students won't even realize their "habits" are illegal.

Unintentional Cheating

Since students use tools and techniques that have not been used before, they might not always know what really constitutes cheating. For your information, the following activities constitute cheating. They can get you kicked out of college.

Buying a paper from an Internet site

Sharing homework answers via IMs, email, text messaging, or any other device

Using a whiteboard to share answers

Having another student write a paper for you

Cutting and pasting text from the Internet without citing it

Using sample essays from the Internet

Using text messaging to tell somebody else an answer

Programming notes into your calculator

Taking and/or sending a cell phone picture