The purpose of this paper is to explore the tendency of student on cheating phenomena. It will explain some factors that have strong possibilities for student to cheat, such as their lack-confidence, their fear in facing the examination, and also some motive that encourage them to get higher score in short-cut. Through this paper, the factor of student cheating will be showed and discussed in order to get the clearer information of student’s tendency on cheating.
Cheating among students can be one of the controversial issues today. Some people said that it is not a big deal since everybody does it, while the others keep saying that cheating it is a kind of dishonesty academic. Every year, television and newspaper tell us a number of students who are involved in cheating on examination. The case is happened from time to time and seems to be a new culture among the students, teachers, and the citizen. Even though we cannot judge that all students do cheating, but it does not mean that we can find only a small number of cheating happen in our educational system. Those who are involved on cheating must have several reasons why they keep doing cheating while examination, and the reasons are actually needs a very full of attention in order to reduce the number of cheating on student examination. In this paper, the reasons/ factors of student cheating on examination will be explored. The suggestion for the better way of studying will also be discussed.
The first reason why students do cheating is because of their lack-confidence. Hearter said that cheating on exam is basically we aren’t prepared enough, which would cause a lack of confidence and then we have to cheat. The idea of a lack-confidence is not only a new idea but it is a completely new look into the problem of academic dishonesty (Hearter : 2006). When a student feels this way, it may be caused of their afraid of making mistakes. This is the responsibility of the teacher to always pump student’s power so that they can find themselves so ready facing the test without feeling afraid of themselves. This lack-confidence also poses many drawbacks for the student itself. They will tend to believe their friends more than believe in their own skill. As a result, they will always think that their friend’s answer is so much better and make them depend on others unconsciously.
The second reasons why student involved on cheating is because of their fear in facing the examination itself. According to Evans and Craig, many studies have documented the reasons why students cheat, including: fear of failure, desire for a better grade, and being graded on a curve (Evans & Craig : 1990). There are a lot of things that cause the student’s fear. And again, the role of a teacher is absolutely important in this case. When the teachers ignored this cases, most of the student will have tendency to be unmotivated, whereas if it really happen they will find it getting hard to set aside their fear on examination. As a result, they will prefer to play more to relieve their feeling. The difficulties of the subject can also be a reason why they feel afraid of the test. Here, there will be a possibility of having gaps in their learning skill between the smart one and the not-really smart one. Another thing that may be caused the fear itself is because they have poor exam preparation techniques. The students should be very creative to develop themselves or to find out the best way of studying for their own while if they cannot, they should ask the teacher for help and solution.
And then the last reason why student keep cheating on exam is because of their purposes of having a higher score than before. According to Baird, there are external and internal factors that make students do cheating. The external factors are seating order, the importance of the test, level of test-difficulty, and unfair test while the internal factors are laziness, awareness of performance of fellow students, low grades, failure, and a certain expectation of success( Baird : 1980). Having a better and higher score is a dream for every student, children, teenager, or even adult and they may do everything to make it come true even they have to involve on cheating. It may be caused by their pressure from parents to get the best score while he/ she feels unable to catch the lesson and ends up with cheating on friends. Another possibility comes when they want to make a good progress by taking short-cut or probably they want to get present from their parent if they have a good score. This is terribly bad and do not show the identity of a student. Those reasons are fully real and happened around us every day.
In summary, cheating among students is caused by many factors. First, they are lack of confident, second, they feeling the fearing on facing the examination itself and last, they want to get a higher score by taking on the short-cut way. Those problems really need full attention in order to make a better student generation. If we are aware of this problem, student cheating will not be happened in the future.
References
Baird, J.S. Jr. (1980). Current trends in college cheating. Psychology in the Schools, 17, s. 515-522.
Webb, Hearter. 2006. Academic Dishonesty and the International Student. US : Purdue University Thesis
Chiesel, Newell2007. Pragmatic Methods to Reduce Dishonesty in Web-Based Course. Research that Guide Practice. Vol. 8, pp. 204
http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/on-education/2008/12/02/cheating-on-the-rise-among-high-school-students (Januari 2012)
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