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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.

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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Trending Post : 12 Powerful Discussion Strategies to Engage Students

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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New Data Reveal How Many Students Are Using AI to Cheat

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AI-fueled cheating—and how to stop students from doing it—has become a major concern for educators.

But how prevalent is it? Newly released data from a popular plagiarism-detection company is shedding some light on the problem.

And it may not be as bad as educators think it is.

Of the more than 200 million writing assignments reviewed by Turnitin’s AI detection tool over the past year, some AI use was detected in about 1 out of 10 assignments, while only 3 out of every 100 assignments were generated mostly by AI.

These numbers have not changed much from when Turnitin released data in August of 2023 about the first three months of the use of its detection tool, said the company’s chief product officer, Annie Chechitelli.

“We hit a steady state, and it hasn’t changed dramatically since then,” she said. “There are students who are leaning on AI too much. But it’s not pervasive. It wasn’t this, ‘the sky is falling.’”

The fact that the number of students using AI to complete their schoolwork hasn’t skyrocketed in the past year dovetails with survey findings from Stanford University that were released in December. Researchers there polled students in 40 different high schools and found that the percentage of students who admitted to cheating has remained flat since the advent of ChatGPT and other readily available generative AI tools. For years before the release of ChatGPT, between 60 and 70 percent of students admitted to cheating, and that remained the same in the 2023 surveys, the researchers said.

Turnitin’s latest data release shows that in 11 percent of assignments run through its AI detection tool that at least 20 percent of each assignment had evidence of AI use in the writing. In 3 percent of the assignments, each assignment was made up of 80 percent or more of AI writing, which tracks closely with what the company was seeing just 3 months after it launched its AI detection tool .

Experts warn against fixating on cheating and plagiarism

However, a separate survey of educators has found that AI detection tools are becoming more popular with teachers, a trend that worries some experts.

The survey of middle and high school teachers by the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit focused on technology policy and consumer rights, found that 68 percent have used an AI detection tool, up substantially from the previous year. Teachers also reported in the same survey that students are increasingly getting in trouble for using AI to complete assignments. In the 2023-24 school year, 63 percent of teachers said students had gotten in trouble for being accused of using generative AI in their schoolwork, up from 48 percent last school year.

Despite scant evidence that AI is fueling a wave in cheating, half of teachers reported in the Center for Democracy and Technology survey that generative AI has made them more distrustful that their students are turning in original work.

Some experts warn that fixating on plagiarism and cheating is the wrong focus.

This creates an environment where students are afraid to talk with their teachers about AI tools because they might get in trouble, said Tara Nattrass, the managing director of innovation and strategy at ISTE+ASCD, a nonprofit that offers content and professional development on educational technology and curriculum.

“We need to reframe the conversation and engage with students around the ways in which AI can support them in their learning and the ways in which it may be detrimental to their learning,” she said in an email to Education Week. “We want students to know that activities like using AI to write essays and pass them off as their own is harmful to their learning while using AI to break down difficult topics to strengthen understanding can help them in their learning.”

Shift the focus to teaching AI literacy, crafting better policies

Students said in the Stanford survey that is generally how they think AI should be used: as an aid to understanding concepts rather than a fancy plagiarism tool.

Nattrass said schools should be teaching AI literacy while including students in drafting clear AI guidelines.

Nattrass also recommends against schools using AI detection tools. They are too unreliable to authenticate students’ work, she said, and false positives can be devastating to individual students and breed a larger environment of mistrust. Some research has found that AI detection tools are especially weak at identifying the original writing of English learners from AI-driven prose.

“Students are using AI and will continue to do so with or without educator guidance,” Nattrass said. “Teaching students about safe and ethical AI use is a part of our responsibility to help them become contributing digital citizens.”

AI detection software actually uses AI to function: these tools are trained on large amounts of machine- and human-created writing so that the software can ideally recognize differences between the two.

Turnitin claims that its AI detector is 99 percent accurate at determining whether a document was written with AI, specifically ChatGPT, as long as the document was composed with at least 20 percent of AI writing, according to the company’s website.

Chechitelli pointed out that no detector or test—whether it’s a fire alarm or medical test—is 100 percent accurate.

While she said teachers should not rely solely on AI detectors to determine if a student is using AI to cheat, she makes the case that detection tools can provide teachers with valuable data.

“It is not definitive proof,” she said. “It’s a signal that taken with other signals can be used to start a conversation with a student.”

As educators become more comfortable with generative AI, Chechitelli said she predicts the focus will shift from detection to transparency: how should students cite or communicate the ways they’ve used AI? When should educators encourage students to use AI in assignments? And do schools have clear policies around AI use and what, exactly, constitutes plagiarism or cheating?

“What the feedback we’re hearing now from students is: ‘I’m gonna use it. I would love a little bit more guidance on how and when so I don’t get in trouble,” but still use it to learn, Chechitelli said.

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• Free Speech

Shades of Gray on Student Cheating

By  Melissa Ezarik

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How acceptable is it to use study websites, or Google, to find answers to test or homework questions? What about using unapproved technology or tools to assist in an online exam? And would it be OK to give credit to another team member on a group project even if that person did not participate?

These are a few ways the latest Student Voice survey , conducted in mid- to late October by Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse with support from Kaplan, explored the nuances of academic integrity and what students view as unethical.

Kathy Baron, an education journalist and host of The Score , a podcast about cheating in higher education that launched in October, recalls an Obama-era Department of Education leader remarking that one either has academic integrity or doesn’t, with no middle ground. But when she interviews students, she finds, “It’s not that clear to them. They do see gradations.”

For example, more than half of the Student Voice respondents see googling during homework as at least somewhat acceptable. And nearly half say it’s at least somewhat acceptable to use study websites. “People will talk about chegging like they do about googling,” says Karen Symms Gallagher, who spent 20 years as dean of the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education and is now a senior research faculty member there.

When David Rettinger, president emeritus of the International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI), looked over the Student Voice data, he was drawn to the numbers that showed how much students realize certain actions would be considered cheating. “Some of [the unacceptable responses] are a little lighter for sure, but students generally would describe these behaviors as unacceptable,” says Rettinger, a professor of psychological science and director of academic integrity programs at the University of Mary Washington. “Their institutions talk about these things, and students know what they’re supposed to do, yet students cheat a fair bit.”

He can imagine a stressed-out student saying, “I know it’s unacceptable, mostly I don’t do it, but in this situation I’m going to do something I generally don’t believe in.”

“That poses a problem for us as administrators,” he adds.

What’s acceptable to students may be seen differently by professors and administrators. When Warren Frisina, dean of the Rabinowitz Honors College at Hofstra University, was working on development of the institution’s Academic Honor Code (affirmed by faculty, student government and the president in 2012 and announced the following year), students and faculty members were asked similar questions as in the Student Voice survey.

“We found that students and faculty lined up on just about everything except for students helping one another do homework,” he says. “That was an interesting divergence. In students’ minds, if you’re in your dorm working on homework and your roommate is, too, it seemed not only appropriate but a good idea to allow the other person to help you or to help the person. It’s not about sending in the same work, but faculty tended to assume that students knew they weren’t allowed to consult with anybody.”

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One Oregon public university respondent to the Student Voice survey noted that professors’ expectations aren’t always clear or fair. “On the homework, I feel like it doesn’t matter as much. If you don’t know how to do it, and knowing the answer helps you figure out the process and learn, then I think you should be able to [look it up]. It’s not like we spend time in class going over the homework, and the tutoring centers aren’t always helpful,” the student wrote.

Besides specifics about what constitutes cheating, the survey asked about how fairly students believe their institutions handle cheating, with more than eight in 10 of the full sample agreeing at least somewhat that it’s fair. With this student perspective on academic integrity, campus leaders can be better equipped to develop policy and practice around reporting suspected cheating, managing those accusations and determining consequences.

Searching for Answers

Student perceptions of the most basic online tool, the search engine, are split pretty evenly by those who think it’s ethically acceptable to use to get answers and those who don’t. Filtered to include only students who say their college officials often or very often communicate about academic integrity and cheating in some way (n=600), only 10 percent more students think googling on homework is unacceptable. When looking only at students who say their institution has very clear policies around academic integrity and cheating (n=1,100), the percentage finding it unacceptable is just slightly higher.

Both these findings suggest that perhaps messaging should include expectations about the use of search engines. Or, maybe education helps, but it does not move the needle on ethical behaviors very much.

One respondent, from a private college in New York, wrote that “learning should not be about memorization, so it should be okay on … assignments to discuss with others, use notes and use the internet. Rarely does one need to know information in a vacuum.” (The student goes on to note that “cheating is only considered cheating because it is explicitly not allowed, not because it is actually an unethical behavior.”)

Renee Pfeifer-Luckett, director of learning technology development for the University of Wisconsin system’s Office of Learning and Information Technology Services, points out that googling is an important workplace soft skill, particularly because of the need to confirm the accuracy of information. Pfeifer-Luckett, who has presented on learning tech tools used to ensure academic honesty, adds, “That’s a skill I use thousands of times a week.”

Students are also split on the use of study websites to find answers for homework or test questions—although such websites have gotten a lot of criticism from higher ed professionals. The responses about whether they are OK to use don’t vary much by those whose colleges address academic integrity frequently or by those who say their institution’s policies around cheating are very clear.

Baron recently interviewed a journalism student struggling with calculus who used study websites but also went to the tutoring center almost daily. “She just wanted to do well and understand it,” Baron says.

“Chegg has become really popular recently for problem solving,” says Pamela Vallejos, a biochemistry major at Hofstra who serves with six other undergraduates (plus faculty and staff) on the institution’s Honor Board. “I have friends who use it if they don’t understand something and need help. But it’s really up to the student how they use it. A lot of students don’t even realize it’s an easy way to catch a student cheating.”

Online exams appear to be seen as more sacred by students, with the majority of survey respondents saying that using unapproved technology or tools in exams is very unacceptable and only 17 percent seeing it as somewhat or very acceptable. “I think what you’re seeing is that the vast majority of students don’t cheat on exams most of the time,” says Rettinger.

Pulling Their Weight

As Vallejos says she has experienced firsthand , some students will get away with doing less or even no work on a group project.

There are certainly those “free riders,” says Alexander Matros, a professor of economics at the University of South Carolina who conducted research on cheating in the early part of the pandemic . And then there are those “who try to be perfect so they have finished the task and don’t care about contributions from everybody.”

When Pfeifer-Luckett used to teach marketing, figuring out how to design group work was challenging. One strategy involved splitting up all the marketing majors and dividing others by major, keeping general business, accounting and human resources program students in different groups. “I’d put one of each of those flavored students together,” she says. Other strategies included lots of check-ins and having the group members rate each other at the end. “But I never found a real effective way to make groups run efficiently,” she admits.

Getting Accused

The percentage of Student Voice respondents who say they have turned in a fellow student for cheating can be shown on one hand, and just a few others say they’ve been accused of either cheating or plagiarism. (A September survey by Online Plagiarism Checker , representing English-speaking students worldwide, showed similar findings in how many students have ever reported cheating.)

Vallejos found herself on the receiving end of an informal accusation early in the pandemic when she was back home in South America—trying to continue her studies while in quarantine in a farm area without Wi-Fi. “The only connection I had was through my phone,” she says, and that became a big problem when she was asked to take a quiz over Zoom. “The cellular only lasted five to 10 minutes, and it wasn’t strong enough to not look choppy. In my professor’s eyes, it was an intention of trying to cheat. He didn’t understand, and I ended up dropping the class.”

Experts focused on academic integrity cite a number of reasons for the low numbers of those reported for cheating. Professors may underreport because they don’t trust the systems the institution has in place to manage an accusation, or they may worry the institution will be too hard on students, Rettinger explains. Others feel that nothing will be done and they don’t want to be undermined, or waste their time.

Professors may also not want to admit students are cheating in their classes because “they see it as a reflection on them,” says Symms Gallagher.

Sitting on the Hofstra Honor Board, Vallejos has seen just how much goes into making an accusation and has come to believe some professors are afraid to report. Then there are professors who are “tired of students cheating” and will seemingly “do anything to find something to report,” she says.

When Hofstra put its Honor Code in place, one goal was to increase the number of reports, Frisina says, adding that the goal was realized early on. Still, many professors want to manage the situation themselves. “They just want to do the right thing for the kid in front of them,” he explains.

What’s the most common reason for reluctance to report? In Rettinger’s experience, it’s simply not having enough evidence.

Eren Bilen, a professor in the department of data analytics at Dickinson College who worked with Matros on the study about cheating in the pandemic, says it must be “undeniable that a student cheated. And the only way to get such evidence when an exam is given online is to be there with the student. If using a Zoom call and something is fishy, that’s not clear evidence.” Without proof, students can’t be issued consequences.

Yet not reporting creates inequities. “If faculty handle cheating in their own way, it’s not fair to students,” says Rettinger. “An institutional system protects students’ rights if done well.”

When Christopher Small, an academic resources and technology operations specialist at Southern New Hampshire University, used to teach at another institution, plagiarism was particularly challenging because an institutionwide system did not exist. “I just had to deal with it all and write a letter to the dean, explaining the severity level,” he says. “It was on the instructor to decide punitive measures.”

Being Heard

At Hofstra, the Honor Board’s job is “the care and feeding of the Honor Code,” says Frisina. That includes forming a committee of board members to hear incidents.

“I’ve attended one, and it was an interesting experience,” says Vallejos. “It was good to hear both sides, the professor and the student. It opens your eyes.”

Flowcharts posted on Hofstra’s Honor Code website visualize the academic dishonesty procedures for undergraduate and graduate students, which Frisina says helps both students and professors to have a clear understanding of the steps.

Rettinger, who sits in on many of the student-run hearings at Mary Washington, says “emotions run the gamut.” Some students feel disappointed in themselves, and “some students are defiant—it’s the everybody-else’s-fault-but-mine approach,” he adds. Rettinger sees a lot of students who fear for the future, too. “Those of us who run these processes want to take that part out, building a process that’s not punitive but educational.”

Students are still held accountable, though, Rettinger adds. “It’s important to think of the student that didn’t cheat on an assignment. When a student cheats, their actions have implications for everyone in the class.”

Systems where students run the entire process, including appeals, are very rare, to his knowledge. “No one knows the answer to this question, but there are probably fewer than 100 student-run systems in the U.S.—probably far fewer, but I’m being safe,” he says. Students have a substantive voice at additional colleges. But in terms of institutions like that outside the United States, Rettinger says, “there are probably close to zero, or a handful at most.”

At Mary Washington, the council includes five representatives from each of the four undergraduate classes, plus graduate school members and a president elected by the entire student body.

Facing the Consequences

At most colleges and universities, accusations of cheating either get ignored or result in punitive consequences, says Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the academic integrity office at the University of California, San Diego, and a former board member of ICAI.

Some have implemented restorative justice approaches to formally get the accused and the accuser talking, and healing. Others, like SNHU, says Small, “try to turn the language and culture away from punitive charges to what academic integrity does for you.”

More coverage on the Student Voice academic integrity survey: How Students See Cheating, and How Colleges Can Contain It

At UCSD, it’s all about that teachable moment. “The reaction to cheating doesn’t need to be punitive, especially the first time,” says Bertram Gallant.

Students must reflect on the experience, talking about contributing factors. Then most complete an academic integrity seminar and learn how to make better ethical decisions.

Those facing suspension for cheating get an additional quarter during which an integrity peer mentor helps them work on whatever might be causing issues. Provided no more violations come up, the suspension gets canceled. The idea for students, says Bertram Gallant, is “to prove you want to be a member of this community that upholds academic integrity.”

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Why Do Students Cheat? One Student’s Perspective

Sarah Gido is a Marketing and Communications major at Anglo-American University in Prague, Czech Republic

Cheating has always been an issue in school. When I asked my friends if they had ever cheated in school, the response was almost always yes. Some said that in high school they wrote answers on water bottle wrappers or even on their legs to be seen through the holes of their jeans. Another said they took an online public speaking course and had their script written above their computer. But if we all know it’s morally wrong, why do students cheat? And why are more students cheating now in 2023 than ever before?

Online learning makes cheating easier

The shift to online learning in 2020 drastically changed the relationship between students and learning. From a student perspective, it is much easier to cheat on virtual tests and homework assignments. With any answer at their fingertips on the internet, students turn to search engines for help on exams. Digital learning puts a barrier between students and professors, but also between students and learning content.

It’s difficult to feel connected and interested in information through independent learning that arises from digital assignments. When students don’t have an emotional stake in the learning process, they retain less of what they learn and cheating is an easy solution. From splitting screens between tabs and studying websites, technology has made student cheating easier—and harder for instructors to detect—than ever before. When it’s that easy, students often find that it doesn’t feel as wrong. Furthermore, it’s easier on the conscience to cheat without a professor or your peers looking at you.

Students are losing motivation

Students’ plates are fuller than ever before. The switch back to fully in-person learning was jarring but a welcome change for many! However, many students fell into a cycle of choosing convenience over studying during virtual and hybrid learning courses. Being back in the classroom meant the return of intense schedules, public speaking, and rising stress levels. Staying motivated in class is much more difficult when balancing the stress of a job, relationships, sickness, or hunting for an internship. According to a survey completed by the American Addiction Centers, 88 percent of students reported their school life to be stressful. Dwindling levels of motivation can lead to procrastination and resistance to do assignments that weigh on students’ minds. Homework, essays, and exams turn into dreaded obligations completed with haste by cheating rather than opportunities for enhancement.

Students are focused on passing courses

In the minds of many students, there’s more emphasis on passing classes than there is on learning. In the stress of coursework, focus on exam scores can be overwhelming. Finishing a degree is difficult and there has been a distinct shift in the perception of college courses and the end goal. The COVID-19 pandemic put an abrupt halt to the “normal” progression of school life, and many students now are just looking to finish.

Curb your students’ desire to cheat

The students of today are unique and are looking to regain motivation. Making content relatable is the best way to tap into the minds of students and have them invest time and energy into the course. This is as simple as using relevant real-world resources and references. I look forward to courses that challenge me in a fun way as a learner and individual. As a Marketing student, my favorite college course I have taken utilized nontraditional assignments, including oral exams and examining current advertisements. Fostering a classroom that welcomes opportunities for career and personal development may energize your students and make them less likely to cheat.

Want to learn more about how and why students cheat, plus strategies for preventing and detecting cheating? Download our free eBook, “Cheating and Academic Dishonesty: How to Spot it — and What to Do About It.”

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How Do I Stop Students From Copying Each Other’s Homework Assignments?

Five steps that worked for me.

My students, like students everywhere, are smart and funny and creative and wonderful in so many ways. Also like students everywhere, they constantly seem to be looking for shortcuts on their homework. One of the bus drivers told me last year that the kids openly ask her to turn the interior lights on so they can finish copying homework before they get to school! Sigh. At least they’re motivated enough to copy, right?

This year, I made it a major goal to stop students from cheating. I put this five-step process in place, and it really cut down on the homework copying in my classroom. Here it is. 

Step 1: Check the quality of your assignments.

First of all, it’s worth taking a close look at the kind of homework you assign. If you do a lot of worksheets, you might find those work better for in-class activities. Instead, try focusing homework on in-depth writing assignments and individual written responses.

If you’re a math teacher, having kids respond in writing about how they solved a problem always works, as does having them write their own problems or exemplars for what they’ve been learning. Anything that requires student-generated content is automatically going to be harder to copy.

Step 2: Check the quantity.

Of course, this creates a lot more grading than worksheets, which led me to reflect on the amount of homework I assigned. At first, I found myself overwhelmed. I had to wonder if this was how my students felt when they looked at a night’s homework load. If there had been someone whose grading I could have copied, I probably would have done it!

The result? I assigned a lot less homework as the year went on. Put your homework to this test: If it’s not worth your time to grade carefully, it’s not worth the students’ time to do it.

Step 3: Explain the changes.

Once you’ve started assigning less homework, you’ll want to make your reasons explicit to your students. “I’m assigning less homework because I don’t want to waste your time. That means that anything I do assign is really important, and it’s important for you to actually do it on your own.” This speech went a long way with many of my students, but I had another trick up my sleeve.

Step 4: Allow time to learn and make mistakes.

You might also want to try a few get-out-of-jail-free cards when it comes to homework. My middle schoolers are still in the process of learning how to budget their time and stay organized, and sometimes they make mistakes. I gave each kid three one-day extensions that they could use over the course of the year to avoid a penalty for late homework.

There were certain assignments on which these could not be used, like rough drafts we needed to edit or group projects. It lowered the general stress level and set a culture of respect and accountability that encouraged my kids to plan ahead. For the naysayers who say, “The real world won’t give them extensions,” I would respectfully offer my disagreement. What? You’ve never posted your grades after the deadline?

Step 5: Bring the pain.

Although this cut down on copying substantially, kids will always test your limits. That’s when you move on to the final step. It works like this: Read every word of every assignment. Make sure you grade an entire class at once so you’ll know if a phrase or a creatively spelled word seems familiar, and then hunt back through 35 other papers until you find the one it’s copied from. It is important that you identify when students cheat and that your justice is swift and merciless.

I had an escalating system of consequences for cheating. First time, you split the grade. If the assignment gets a 90, each person gets a 45. Second time, each person gets a zero and a lunch detention. Third time, it’s a phone call home in addition to a zero and an after-school detention. Not a single kid made it to the third offense. They have to believe that you’re documenting this and you’ll follow through. Let them see you putting their names in your file so they know you know what offense they’re on. It is a logistical pain, but it’s effective.

So did my kids ace the standardized test because they had done their homework all year? Not to brag, but their writing scores were pretty high. And I don’t think they missed out on many valuable educational experiences when I stopped assigning worksheets. After all, they’d have just copied them anyway!

How do you stop students from cheating? Come and share  in our WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group  on Facebook. 

Plus, check out  how to give meaningful homework, even when it’s not graded ..

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EdTech Goes Undercover: An Insider’s View of What Students Post on Contract Cheating Sites

Amelia Pang is a journalist and an editor at EdTech: Focus on Higher Education. Her work has appeared in the New Republic, Mother Jones, and  The New York Times Sunday Review, among other publications.

Editor’s Note: This is part 1 of a 2-part investigation. Part 2 covers how IT departments can detect and prevent contract cheating in higher education.

“Please complete my assignment,” a student posts on a microtutoring website that universities say  facilitates contract cheating . The assignment is on the history of public health. APA format. Three sources. At least 750 words. In less than 15 minutes,  EdTech  sees a university ghostwriter accepting the assignment for $20.

There are hundreds of “homework help” websites that have seen an  exponential increase in customers  since the start of the pandemic. The services offered on sites like these typically run the gamut of legitimate tutoring to selling exam documents and answers. Some flat out offer to take an entire online course or exam for students.

The shadow industry of contract cheating falls into a legal gray area. When students and tutors make an account on a homework help site, they must sign a terms-of-service agreement and honor code that forbids academic cheating. But an undercover  EdTech  investigation found this agreement appears to be rarely enforced.

“I have definitely seen an increase in customers since the pandemic began,” Alex, an academic ghostwriter who currently works for a homework help site, tells  EdTech.  “Specifically, there has been an increase in the number of students posting that they want full online classes done for them. Most of the time, students have no problem finding a contractor.”

What Is Contract Cheating, and How Does It Work?

To avoid legal liability, some homework help sites are using automation tools to edit the language of posts. Whenever students submit a post, the first line always says something like “I need help understanding the assignment,” or “Help me learn.”

But  EdTech  saw this as mostly a cursory statement. Many students will also directly say, “Please complete my assignment.” Some even go so far as to request that the “tutor” be available at a certain date and time to take an online exam for them.

“I would say that 30 percent of the requests are for ‘help’ versus completing assignments,”  a tutor for one of these sites told BRIGHT Magazine in 2016.  “It is largely a place for students to cheat.”

When  EdTech  created a tutor account at a homework help site earlier this year, we found that not much has changed since the BRIGHT Magazine article came out five years ago.

An insider's view of what students post on contract cheating sites.

Although students are blatantly asking for “tutors” to complete assignments and exams for them,  EdTech  saw academic ghostwriters making bids and accepting the work — often within minutes.

Students Hire Academic Ghostwriters to Take Online Courses for Them

Former and current academic ghostwriters also say that taking an entire online course for students is a common practice in the industry — a practice that has existed since the inception of online education. “That was always standard operating procedure,” says Dave Tomar, a former academic ghostwriter who started his decade-long career in contract cheating in 2000. He is currently the managing editor of  Academic Influence , where he  shares his insights  on how educators can counter the surge of contract cheating during the pandemic.

“When I started doing this, I would frequently get these full online modules at the beginning of a rolling semester," Tomar says. “I got the full syllabus, and everything that I was expected to do over the next couple of months. Now, with countless students forced into remote learning, you have a whole new customer pool that is growing.”

As for how much students are willing to pay, the contractors charge “anywhere from $300 to $700 for a full class depending on the student, the subject and the difficulty,” says Alex, who currently works for a homework help site.

INSIDER EXCLUSIVE:   Read Part 2 – What can universities do about contract cheating?

Fake Tutors Entice Unknowing Students to Engage in Contract Cheating

Academic cheating sites also strongly encourage students to sell their coursework— an act that may be illegal in 17 states.

“Distributing any post-secondary assignment for a profit with reasonable knowledge that it will be submitted by another person for academic credit is a crime in many US states,” Citron Research, an investment research firm that investigates overvalued fraudulent companies, stated in  a report.

It’s a big problem for many institutions. According to Douglas Harrison, vice president and dean of the school of cybersecurity and information technology at the  University of Maryland Global Campus , some of these contract cheating websites are “facilitating massive transfers of institutional proprietary material into their file-sharing systems.”

Harrison says many students may not even realize they are cheating when they download a university’s copyrighted classroom assessment materials because these websites reframe downloading answers to tests as a form of studying or tutoring. “They reframe file-sharing as educational, even though these are behaviors that conventional norms of academic integrity would consider misconduct,” he says.

Dave Tomar former academic ghostwriter.

To make matters worse, these websites have mastered sophisticated techniques to lure unsuspecting students. Several of these prominent homework tutoring sites will offer to give students a discount if they let their academic ghostwriter have access to the online course. This often results in the contract cheater stealing other students’ personal information.

“So the contract cheater then reaches out to other students and says, ‘I’m a tutor in your course. And I’ve helped another student in your class with their assignments. Would you like a little help?’” Harrison says, describing how the contract cheater pitches cheating “services” to other students.

This can be especially confusing for students, who may not know how to tell the difference between a contract cheater and a legitimate tutor who is affiliated with the university.

“Most of the students who we find in academic misconduct settings after inappropriately using materials on these sites, they did not set out to be malicious cheaters. Now that doesn’t mean we don’t hold them accountable, but we have to hold them accountable in proportion to the root cause of the situation,” Harrison says.

Who Is Using Academic Ghostwriters?

According to the ghostwriters who are contracted to help students cheat, their customers are usually underserved students who need access to remedial courses, and nontraditional students who struggle to balance coursework with full-time employment.

“I would argue that what is facilitating the surge of contract cheating is the fact that students are increasingly desperate and lacking support,” says Tomar.

During Tomar’s time as an academic ghostwriter, he caught glimpses into their personal circumstances. “Some would tell you they are a parent working full time. And they just can’t deal with this challenge right now. Some say, ‘I’ve invested X number of dollars into this education, and I cannot afford to fail this class. But I don’t know how to do this assignment.’”

Alex mentions that many are also English language learners. “As I noted, some students are asking for whole classes to be done, and a lot of those are English or writing-intensive courses,” he says. “That does not mean that they are ESL, but [my sense is] most of them are.”

To fundamentally address the cheating pandemic, universities and colleges may need to invest in more resources for vulnerable student populations.

“It begins with figuring out who’s struggling, why they’re struggling and what we can do to help them before they end up as contract cheating customers,” Tomar says.

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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.

Remote Learning and Cheating: Professors and Students Weigh In

Lengthy time differences, technical difficulties, and Zoom fatigue: These are just three challenges of pandemic-era higher education. And another problem surfaced in a big way during the 2020 AP exams : the ease of cheating from home, when answers to tests and homework problems are often just a click away. 

Roughly a year after college campuses were evacuated due to the COVID-19 pandemic, academic integrity remains an issue for students and professors alike. With professors struggling to curb rampant cheating during online exams and students wrestling with the often confusing and stressful realities of online learning, the college classroom has never been more tense. 

Websites like Chegg and Slader have been cited in cheating scandals across the country, including at Georgia Tech , Boston University , Texas A&M , North Carolina State , and Princeton University . These websites provide homework help and study tools, but many professors and academic integrity directors believe these services are inadvertently undermining honest learning. 

Teen Vogue has spoken with academics and students to learn more about what kind of cheating is happening during remote learning, and what they think should be done about it.

University battles with help sites have peaked during the COVID-19 crisis, but the root of the problem has been years in the making. “I call it a game of whack-a-mole,” says David Rettinger, president emeritus of the International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI) and director of academic integrity at the University of Mary Washington. New sites are constantly rising in popularity, he explains, making it harder for professors to prevent students from seeking answers online, especially now. 

Institutions like the ICAI do not maintain school-by-school records of cheating cases, but the current president of the ICAI, Camilla Roberts, says the organization has seen an uptick in violations that deal with online tutoring sites. “We have seen a drastic increase of violations dealing with these types of ‘help sites,’” says Roberts, who also serves as the director of honor and integrity at Kansas State University.  

She says the switch to online learning has helped administrators identify how widespread academic integrity violations are at K-State. In spring 2019, the college recorded 97 cases for the entire spring semester; during the online half of spring 2020, it saw a stunning 238 cases. 

This trend has also been noticeable at smaller schools like Florida’s Jacksonville University, which has around 4,100 total graduate and undergraduate students . Relative to the spring and fall semesters in 2019, cases rose by 65% and 38%, respectively, in 2020, according to director of academic integrity Lee Ann Clements. “The faculty had this perception that online students are more likely to cheat than students in face-to-face classes,” she says. “And it's just not true.”

The problem lies in the pedagogy, Clements explains. In traditionally online programs, cheating cases did not increase — it was only the classes that transitioned from in-person to online learning that experienced the issue.

Rettinger’s colleagues who typically work at online-only universities are “laughing at us,” he says. “They’re saying, ‘What you’re trying to do in 20 minutes is what we took 10 years to build.’ It’s like trying to win a bike race without a bike.”

When teaching and learning shifted to Zoom last spring, Tyler Johnson, a lecturer at North Carolina State’s department of statistics, found himself filing an unusually high number of academic integrity reports. 

Through the latter half of the spring semester, Johnson found exam questions from his introductory statistics course posted to Chegg. He eventually identified some 200 violations in the course of 800 students, he says. In response, students launched a petition claiming that the professor had neglected to clearly explain what was and was not permitted during the testing period. (Johnson says he was explicit that only course materials and personal notes were allowed.)

For the final exam, Johnson monitored the site during the exam window (which he typically extended to 48 hours to accommodate students’ unique living situations) to quickly identify and remove test questions, but says it was more difficult than expected. He tried to contact Chegg to report the posts but didn’t get traction.

In a statement to Teen Vogue , Candace Sue, Chegg’s director of academic relations, says that faculty need to provide signed letters from deans or student conduct officials to initiate honor code violation investigations. This is required to protect student privacy, she says.

“Students need help, and the vast majority of Chegg users are honest and use our platform to supplement their learning,” Sue's statement continues. “However, we take extremely seriously any attempts to cheat by those who abuse our offerings and invest heavily to prevent misuse of our learning platform.”

“In addition, we understand the enormous strain both faculty and students are under during this pandemic,” says Sue's statement. “Leading academic integrity experts regularly cite stress and anxiety as key reasons students cheat. Reducing student stressors and evolving traditional assessment mechanisms is the best path to mitigating academic misconduct.”

After filing reports through the university’s office of student conduct channels, Johnson was able to access information about student activity on the site and remove test questions. Other professors who spoke with Teen Vogue say that Chegg provides information on request from academic integrity offices. Rife with details like IP addresses, names of email accounts, and the exact time stamps for when accounts accessed site information, these reports allow professors to identify which students posted and accessed test answers during exams. Johnson says he was shocked to find that 250 to 300 unique accounts had their digital fingerprints on official exam questions. 

At Purdue University in Indiana, Chuck Krousgrill and his colleagues in the School of Mechanical Engineering have written roughly 800 original homework problems for their courses. It was “unnerving,” he says, to find the bulk of those questions on Chegg.

These sites make cheating simple for students, Krousgrill argues. “It is drop-dead easy to get a solution for your homework assignment back in less than one hour and for $15 a month,” he says. “Students might say, 'Okay, I'm busy,' or, 'I don't really have time to do this one set, so I'll go to Chegg and see if I can get an answer.' And then it gets worse. It snowballs, and then they find themselves too busy, ever. So they continue to do it.”

But it may not be the pandemic and its related stressors that are driving an increase in reports of academic dishonesty. After all, students have been taking advantage of the plethora of available online help sites since they first appeared. The difference, Johnson posits, is that dishonesty is a lot easier to detect now that schooling is mostly online. “Now I actually have a concrete record of access,” he says. “It's harder to gather data in an in-person proctored exam on to what extent cheating is occurring.”

Students have found innovative ways to circumvent the watchful eyes of administrators while professors attempt to patch up leaks in the system. As Teen Vogue has reported , some schools are also using remote proctoring tools that students say are distracting, overly invasive, and have mistakenly accused them of cheating. It’s a complex game of cat and mouse, where the tech-savvy players often win the prize. 

Rettinger mentions a new application that is being developed for professors, which automatically posts their exams online. When students Google the question, they are directed to a fake page, and then if they click on the question, anticipating an answer, the software records their IP address for the professor’s records. 

Some professors have attempted to stamp copyright symbols on exam and homework questions, as sites will more regularly remove explicitly copyrighted material, explains Krousgrill. Students, however, always seem to find a way — even if it includes photoshopping over symbols and watermarks pixel-by-pixel before posting the material online. 

“The problem is that it only takes one person to post it,” says Krousgrill. “And then hundreds can cheat.” 

As remote learning continues, the use of online help sites will continue to blur the lines between what is “fair” for students, professors, and university administrators. 

Last May, the Daily Princetonian reported an incident in which a teacher’s assistant (TA) in the math department posted a purposefully incorrect solution to a homework question on Slader, a popular website promising “step-by-step textbook solutions.” The TA used the pseudonym “Arthur Dent,” a reference to the protagonist in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The course, MAT202: Linear Algebra, is commonly taken by first- and second-year students pursuing degrees in majors like economics, engineering, or the sciences. Students who turned in problem sets containing evident similarities with the posted answer were reported to the Committee on Discipline for violating the explicit ban on the use of sites like Slader, as the newspaper reported. Accused students underwent an investigation process, with appointments scheduled in the spring, during the university’s grueling finals period. 

Princeton students are required to abide by the university honor code, a pledge that binds them to reporting incidents of cheating they are privy to as well as embracing the tenets of academic integrity in their own work. If found guilty, students can face charges ranging from warnings to suspension or expulsion. The stakes are high — and student anxieties are even higher. 

All students interviewed for this story have spoken on the condition of anonymity, and faculty members involved with the investigation have declined to comment.  Teen Vogue has reached out to Slader for comment but has not received a response.

Accused students express anger and disappointment with the course instructors’ decision to pursue cheaters through Slader. “Most of my family had been affected by the coronavirus and it was just a really stressful time.…" one student tells Teen Vogue . "I remember, I was using [Slader] to get an idea of how to do some of the problems, but I didn’t expect it to escalate into all of this.” 

Another accused student describes what they feel is an “unsympathetic” lack of leniency when it comes to requests for extensions on assignments and other accommodations. While battling a low grade in the course, she recalls asking her TA for advice on whether or not she should take the class “pass,” “fail,” or accept a D grade, options that were made available to all students during the latter half of the semester. Her TA brushed off her request, she says, stating that the grade shouldn’t be her focus. 

“It seems especially insensitive to tell a student who’s concerned about whether they are going to pass the course, ‘don’t worry about your grade,’” she says. 

Several students resorted to posting on Tiger Confessions, a Facebook page where current and former Princeton students submit anonymous “confessions” on subjects including mental health and academics. 

“The unique conditions of quarantine and this pandemic placed a lot of new challenges when it came to work,” wrote one poster. “Sickness, housing instability, mental health issues, technological limits, and different time zones: All of these issues required teachers to become more flexible. In most of my classes, this happened.… MAT202, instead, seemed to offer even more restrictive policies.” 

Back in May, Princeton’s Undergraduate Student Government Survey found that 63.3% of students were “somewhat more stressed” or “substantially more stressed” about academics after transitioning to remote learning, and nearly 70% of students experienced self-reported “somewhat worse” or “significantly worse” mental health. 

The academics Teen Vogue has spoken with say they empathize with students’ stressful circumstances during the pandemic, but they argue that academic integrity is a crucial pillar of higher learning.

In an interview with Teen Vogue this past summer, Jill Dolan, dean of the College at Princeton, emphasized the university’s commitment to the honor code. “Don’t misunderstand me — I’m not saying that faculty don't care," she said. “I just think we have to be clear that the honor code is about academic integrity, not about the context in which people are learning.” 

Noting the university’s spring 2020 adjustments — expanding grading options, changing transcript notation, additional resources for students struggling academically — and the unforeseen challenges that have arisen with COVID-era schooling, deputy university spokesperson Michael Hotchkiss states definitively that “cheating is never acceptable at Princeton.” 

Some of the professors who have spoken to Teen Vogue suggest a need for structural changes in what coursework and exams look like to account for a new, virtual learning environment. Rettinger advocates for modifying exam questions and class assignments to formats that are more reliant on a student's ability to learn, rather than to Google. 

Meanwhile, Johnson of North Carolina State acknowledges that students are struggling, but believes they’re still responsible for adhering to an honor code. “Academic integrity is a big enough deal that the responsibility to behave in a manner consistent with academic integrity standards in the course is independent of any issues they were having with their instructors,” he says. “I don't like to hear that the student is not feeling supported by their instructor. That's an issue. But the remedy to that isn't to go and look up the answer to the exam question or a homework question or something like that elsewhere.”

Dina Kuttab, a Princeton senior and former chair of the Student Honor Committee, says trust has to go both ways: Professors shouldn’t assume that students are trying to cheat, and students shouldn’t take advantage of their teachers. “While every person being in their own home deepens the need for that trust and pushes it further than it has in the past,” she says, “it’s based on the same principles that we have on campus.”

Want more from Teen Vogue ? Check this out: Student Debt Relief and Joe Biden: What to Expect From His Administration

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7 Apps That Can Do Your Homework Much Faster Than You

In the field of educational technology, some apps might be getting too smart.

More and more apps are delivering on-demand homework help to students, who can easily re-purpose the learning tools to obtain not just assistance, but also answers. Whether or not that’s cheating—and how to stop it—is one of the concerns surrounding a new app that can solve math equations with the snap of a camera . While the software has inspired teachers to create real-world homework problems that can’t be automatically solved , that strategy doesn’t hold up to other apps that tap into real-life brains for solutions.

Here’s a look at 7 apps that can do your homework for you, and what they have to say about cheating:

Price : Free Availability : iOS, Android app coming in early 2015

The new, seemingly magic app allows users to take pictures of typed equations, and then outputs a step-by-step solution. As of Wednesday, the app is the number one free app on the App Store. But the biggest issue, one teacher argues , isn’t if students will use the app to cheat, because many will. Rather, it’s about how teachers will adapt. A PhotoMath spokeswoman said educators have welcomed the app with positive reviews, but the software remains “quite controversial.”

“We didn’t develop PhotoMath as a cheating tool. We really wanted kids to learn,” said Tijana Zganec, a sales and marketing associate at tech company MicroBlink, which created PhotoMath. “If you want to cheat, you will find a way to cheat. But if you want to learn, you can use PhotoMath for that.”

Whether you’re a high schooler with eight periods of classes or a college student tackling dozens of credits, there’s one thing you’ve got for sure: a mess of assignments. iHomework can help you keep track of all your work, slicing and dicing it in a variety of ways. Sorting it by due date, week, month, or by course, the app is more organized than a Trapper Keeper. And in integrating data from Questia, you can link your reading material to your assignments so you don’t have to dig through a pile of papers to find the right information.

A scheduling feature can help you keep track of those random bi-weekly Thursday labs, and you can even mark the location of your courses on a map so you don’t end up on the wrong side of campus. And finally, with iCloud syncing, you can access all this information on whatever Apple-compatible device you’re using at the moment — no need to dig for your iPad.

Google Apps for Education

Taking the search giant’s suite of free browser-based apps and sandboxing them so they are safe for school use, Google Apps for Education is an excellent alternative to the mainstream installable productivity software, but this one has a perk that almost school board will love—it’s free. Packaging together favorites like Gmail, Hangouts, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Drive with Classroom, a digital hub for organizing assignments and sending feedback, the goal of this collection is to make learning a more collaborative process.

Though Google Apps for Education is cloud-hosted, the programs can be used offline, ideal for when your student needs to escape the internet and work distraction-free. And since it works on any device, it also helps students avoid buying overly expensive hardware. That means more money for extracurricular activities.

Price: Free, but some homework services require payment Availability: iOS and Android

HwPic is a tutoring service that allows students to take send pictures of their homework to tutors, who will then respond within minutes to your questions with a step-by-step solution. There’s even an option to expedite the answers if a student is in a hurry. HwPic Co-Founder Tiklat Issa said that the app was initially rejected by Apple’s App Store, which believed it would promote cheating, but he successfully argued that just because someone uses the app in a way that it’s not meant to be used doesn’t mean the app should be punished.

Issa added that HwPic prohibits cheating in its terms and conditions. Tutors don’t solve homework that has words like “Quiz” or “Exam,” and they often know if a student is sending a photo during a test if they’ve paid for expedited answers, and if the photo is dim, blurry and taken under a desk. “We’ve minimized cheating,” said Issa. “We haven’t eliminated it. That’s kind of unrealistic.”

Wolfram Alpha

Price : $2.99 Availability : iOS and Android

Wolfram Alpha is similar to PhotoMath, only that it targets older students studying high levels of math and doesn’t support photos. The service also outputs step-by-step solutions to topics as advanced as vector calculus and differential equations, making it a popular tool for college students.

“It’s cheating not doing computer-based math, because we’re cheating students out of real conceptual understanding and an ability to drive much further forward in the math they can do, to cover much more conceptual ground. And in turn, that’s cheating our economies,” said Conrad Wolfram, Wolfram Research’s Director of Strategic Development, in a TEDx Talk . “People talk about the knowledge economy. I think we’re moving forward to what we’re calling the computational knowledge economy.”

Homework Helper

Price: Free Availability: iOS and Android

Chinese Internet search company Baidu launched an app called Homework Helper this year with which students can crowdsource help or answers to homework. Users post a picture or type their homework questions onto online forums, and those who answer the questions can win e-coins that can be used to buy electronics like iPhones and laptops.

The app has logged 5 million downloads, much to the dismay of many some parents who argue that the students spend less time thinking about challenging problems. A Homework Helper staffer admitted to Quartz , “I think this is a kind of cheating.”

Price: Free, but some homework services require payment Availability: iOS

Slader is a crowdsourcing app for high school and college students to post and answer questions in math and science. While students can post original homework for help, many questions in popular textbooks have already been answered on the app, according to Fast Company . An Illinois high school said earlier this year that it suspected students were using the service to cheat on their math homework.

Slader argues that it’s “challenging traditional ideas about math and education,” and said that the ideas behind its app “aren’t a write-off to teachers,” according to its blog . Slader told San Francisco media outlet KQED that it shouldn’t be dismissed as a cheating tool, but rather considered a way for students to access real-time help.

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Insights into How & Why Students Cheat at High Performing Schools

“ A LOT of people cheat and I feel like it would ruin my character and personal standards if I also took part in cheating, but everyone tells me there’s no way I can finish the school year with straight As without cheating. It really makes me upset but I’m honestly contemplating it because colleges can’t see who does and doesn’t cheat. ” – High school student

“Academic dishonesty is any deceitful or unfair act intended to produce a more desirable outcome on an exam, paper, homework assignment, or other assessment of learning.” (Miller, Murdock & Grotwiel, 2017).

Cheating has been a hot topic in the news lately with the unfolding of the college admissions scandal involving affluent parents allegedly using bribery and forgery to help their kids get into selective colleges. Unfortunately, we also see that cheating is common among students in middle schools through graduate schools (Miller, Murdock & Grotwiel, 2017), including the high-performing middle and high schools that Challenge Success has surveyed. To better understand who is cheating in these high schools, how they are cheating, and what is driving this behavior, we looked at recent data from the Challenge Success Student Survey completed in Fall 2018—including 16,054 students from 15 high-performing U.S. high schools (73% public, 27% private). We asked students to self-report their engagement in 12 cheating behaviors during the past month. On each of the items, adapted from a scale developed by McCabe (1999), students could select one of four options: never; once; two to three times; four or more times. We found that 79% of students cheated in some way in the past month.

How Students Cheat & Who Does It

There are two types of cheating that the students we surveyed engage in: (1) cheating collectively and (2) cheating independently. Overall rates of cheating collectively were higher than rates of cheating individually. Examples of cheating collectively include, working on an assignment with others when the instructor asked for individual work, helping someone else cheat on an assessment, and copying from another student during an assessment with that person’s knowledge. Examples of independent cheating include using unpermitted cheat sheets during an assessment, copying from another student during an assessment without their knowledge, or copying material word for word without citing it and turning it in as your own work.

When we looked more closely at who is cheating according to our survey data, we found that 9 th graders were less likely than 10 th , 11 th , and 12 th graders to cheat individually and collectively. This is consistent with other research in the field that shows that cheating tends to increase with grade level (Murdock, Stephens, & Grotewiel, 2016). We also found that male students were more likely to cheat individually than female students. Broader research from the field about cheating by gender has yielded mixed results. Some find that rates for boys are higher than for girls, while others find no difference (McCabe, Treviño & Butterfield, 2001; Murdock, Hale & Weber, 2001; Anderman & Midgley, 2004).

Why Students Cheat

“I think what causes us stress during the school year is the amount of cheating going on around school…Some of my friends and classmates who have siblings or friends that took the classes before in a way have a copy of what the tests will look like. It makes them have a competitive advantage over other people who have no siblings or known friends that took the class before. To have people who have access to these past tests, it creates more stress on students because we have to study more and push ourselves harder.” – High School Student

Why are students cheating at such high rates? Previous research on cheating suggests students may be inclined to cheat and rationalize their behaviors because of various factors including:

• Performance over Mastery: Students may cheat because of the risk of low grades due to worry, pressure on academic performance, or a fixed mindset ( Miller, Murdock & Grotewiel, 2017). School environments perceived by students to be focused on performance goals like grades and test scores over mastery have been associated with behaviors such as cheating (Anderman & Midgley, 2004).
• Peer Relationships/Social Comparison: The increase of social comparisons and competition that many children and adolescents experience in high performing schools or classrooms or the desire to help a friend ( Miller, Murdock & Grotewiel, 2017) may be another factor of choosing to cheat. Students in high-achieving cultures, furthermore, tend to cheat more when they see or perceive their peers cheating (Galloway, 2012).
• Overloaded : Another factor in students cheating is the pressure in high-performing schools to “do it all” which can be influenced by heavy workloads and/or multiple tests on the same day ( Miller, Murdock & Grotewiel, 2017)
• “Cheat or be cheated” rationale: Students may rationalize cheating by blaming the teachers or situation. This often occurs when students see the teacher as uncaring or focused on performance over mastery ( Miller, Murdock & Grotewiel, 2017). Students may rationalize and normalize cheating as the way to succeed in a challenging environment where achievement is paramount (Galloway, 2012).
• Pressure: Students may also cheat because they feel pressure to maintain their status in a success focused community where they see the situation as “cheat or be cheated” ( Miller, Murdock & Grotewiel, 2017).

We see many of these factors reflected in our survey data. Students listed their major sources of stress as grades, tests, finals, or assessments (80% of students) and overall workload and homework (71% of students). We also found that 59% of students feel they have “too much homework,” 75% of students feel “often” or “always” stressed by their schoolwork , 31% of students feel that “many” or “all” of their classes assign homework that helps them learn the material, and 74% worry “quite a bit” or “a lot” about taking assessments while 70% worry the same amount about school assignments.

Reflecting high pressure from within their community, only 51% of students feel they can meet their parents expectations “often” or “always,” 52% of students worry at least a little that if they do not do well in school their friends will not accept them, and 80% of students feel “quite a bit” or “a lot” of pressure to do well in school. Meanwhile, only 33% of students feel “quite” or “very” confident in their ability to cope with stress . Open-ended responses reported by students on our survey reinforce the quantitative data:    

“It is hard to do well in classes and become well rounded for applying to college without something giving way… in some cases students cheat. ”

“ I don’t think anyone is having a great time here, when all they’re focusing on is cheating and getting the grade that they want in order to ‘succeed’ in life after high school by going to a great college or university.”

“ Teachers often give very challenging tests that require very large curves to present even reasonable grades and this creates a very stressful atmosphere. Students are often caught cheating because that is often times the only route to getting a decent grade. ”

Quotes like these suggest that there may be a relationship between heavy amounts of homework on top of busy extracurriculars and students feeling that cheating is the only way to get everything done.

What Can Schools Do About It  

Schools may find the prevalence of the cheating culture overwhelming—potentially daunted by counteracting the normalization and prevalence of achievement at-all-costs and cheating behaviors. Students themselves, in our survey and in previous research, call for a learning environment where cheating is not an expectation or everyday behavior for getting ahead, and students are held responsible for their behavior (McCabe, 2001).

“ The administration needs to punish students who cheat. The school does not crack down on these kids, and it makes it harder for others to succeed. ”

“ Since I was in 9th grade it feels like our counselors only really care about our class rank and GPA. I am a hard worker but I don’t have the best GPA. Our school focuses too much on grades. This creates pressure on students to cheat just to get a good grade to boost their GPA. Learning has been compromised by a desire for a number that we have been told defines us as people. ”

Schools can work with students to change the prevailing culture of cheating through listening to students about their experiences and perceptions, acknowledging the issue and predominant culture, and collaborating with students to clarify and redefine how and why students learn. Some areas we (and other researchers) recommend that schools can address underlying causes of cheating include:

• Strive for school-wide buy-in for honest academic practices including defining what constitutes cheating and academic dishonesty for students and providing clear consequences for cheating (Galloway, 2012). Further providing open dialogue and discussions with students, parents, and teachers may help students feel that teachers are treating then with respect and fairness (Murdock et al., 2004).
• Educate students on what cheating means in their school community so that cheating is viewed as unacceptable ( Miller, Murdock & Grotewiel, 2017)
• Establish a climate of care and a classroom where it is evident that the teacher cares about student progress, learning, and understanding.
• Emphasize mastery and learning over performance . One strategy is through using formative assessments such as practice exams that can be reviewed in class and homework that can be corrected until students achieve mastery on the concepts ( Miller, Murdock & Grotewiel, 2017).
• Revise assessments and grading policies to allow for redemption and revision.
• Ensure that students are met with “reasonable demands” such as spacing assignments and assessments across days and reduce workload without reducing rigor ( Miller, Murdock & Grotewiel, 2017)
• Teach students time management strategies (e.g. using a planner, breaking tasks into manageable pieces, and how to use resources or ask for help). Schools may even teach parents how to help students organize and manage their work rather than providing them with answers. ( Miller, Murdock & Grotewiel, 2017)

Overall, schools should aim to change student attitudes around integrity through “clear, fair, and consistent” assessments, valuing learning over mastery, reducing comparisons and competition between students, teaching students management and organization skills, and demonstrating care and empathy for students and the pressures that face ( Miller, Murdock & Grotewiel, 2017) .

Anderman, E.M. & Midgley, C. (2004). Changes in self-reported academic cheating across the transition from middle school to high school. Contemporary Educational Psychology , 29(4), 499-517.

Galloway, M. K. (2012). Cheating in advantaged high schools: Prevalence, justifications, and possibilities for change. Ethics & Behavior, 22(5), 378-399.

McCabe, D. (1999). Academic dishonesty among high school students. Adolescence, 34 (136), 681- 687.

McCabe, D. (2001) Cheating: Why students do it and how we can help them stop. American Educator , Winter, 38-43.

McCabe, D. L., Treviño, L. K., & Butterfield, K. D. (2001). Cheating in academic institutions: A decade of research. Ethics & Behavior , 11, 219-232.

Miller, A. D., Murdock, T. B., & Grotewiel, M. M. (2017). Addressing Academic Dishonesty Among the Highest Achievers. Theory Into Practice , 56 (2), 121-128.

Murdock, T., Hale, N., & Weber, M. (2001). Predictors of cheating among early adolescents: Academic and social motivations. Contemporary Educational Psychology , 26, 96-115.

Murdock, T. B., Miller, A., & Kohlhardt, J. (2004). Effects of Classroom Context Variables on High School Students’ Judgments of the Acceptability and Likelihood of Cheating. Journal of Educational Psychology , 96 (4), 765-777.

Murdock, T., Stephens, J., & Grotewiel, M. (2016). Student dishonesty in the face of assessment. In G. Brown and L. Harris (Eds.), Handbook of Human and Social Conditions in Assessment (pp. 186-203). London, England: Routledge.

Wangaard, D. B. & J. M. Stephens (2011). Academic integrity: A critical challenge for schools. Excellence & Ethics , Winter 2011.

Interested in learning more about your students’ perceptions of their school experiences? Learn more about the Challenge Success Student Survey here .

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The 5 Best Homework Help Websites (Free and Paid!)

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Listen: we know homework isn’t fun, but it is a good way to reinforce the ideas and concepts you’ve learned in class. But what if you’re really struggling with your homework assignments?

If you’ve looked online for a little extra help with your take-home assignments, you’ve probably stumbled across websites claiming to provide the homework help and answers students need to succeed . But can homework help sites really make a difference? And if so, which are the best homework help websites you can use? 

Below, we answer these questions and more about homework help websites–free and paid. We’ll go over: 

• The basics of homework help websites
• The cost of homework help websites 
• The five best homework websites out there 
• The pros and cons of using these websites for homework help 
• The line between “learning” and “cheating” when using online homework help 
• Tips for getting the most out of a homework help website

So let’s get started! 

The Basics About Homework Help Websites–Free and Paid

Homework help websites are designed to help you complete your homework assignments, plain and simple. 

What Makes a Homework Help Site Worth Using

Most of the best sites allow users to ask questions and then provide an answer (or multiple possible answers) and explanation in seconds. In some instances, you can even send a photo of a particular assignment or problem instead of typing the whole thing out! 

Homework help sites also offer more than just help answering homework questions. Common services provided are Q&A with experts, educational videos, lectures, practice tests and quizzes, learning modules, math solving tools, and proofreading help. Homework help sites can also provide textbook solutions (i.e. answers to problems in tons of different textbooks your school might be using), one-on-one tutoring, and peer-to-peer platforms that allow you to discuss subjects you’re learning about with your fellow students. 

And best of all, nearly all of them offer their services 24/7, including tutoring! 

What You Should Should Look Out For

When it comes to homework help, there are lots–and we mean lots –of scam sites out there willing to prey on desperate students. Before you sign up for any service, make sure you read reviews to ensure you’re working with a legitimate company. 

A word to the wise: the more a company advertises help that veers into the territory of cheating, the more likely it is to be a scam. The best homework help websites are going to help you learn the concepts you’ll need to successfully complete your homework on your own. (We’ll go over the difference between “homework help” and “cheating” a little later!) 

You don't need a golden piggy bank to use homework help websites. Some provide low or no cost help for students like you!

How Expensive Are the Best Homework Help Websites?

First of all, just because a homework help site costs money doesn’t mean it’s a good service. Likewise, just because a homework help website is free doesn’t mean the help isn’t high quality. To find the best websites, you have to take a close look at the quality and types of information they provide! 

When it comes to paid homework help services, the prices vary pretty widely depending on the amount of services you want to subscribe to. Subscriptions can cost anywhere from $2 to $150 dollars per month, with the most expensive services offering several hours of one-on-one tutoring with a subject expert per month.

The 5 Best Homework Help Websites 

So, what is the best homework help website you can use? The answer is that it depends on what you need help with. 

The best homework help websites are the ones that are reliable and help you learn the material. They don’t just provide answers to homework questions–they actually help you learn the material. 

That’s why we’ve broken down our favorite websites into categories based on who they’re best for . For instance, the best website for people struggling with math might not work for someone who needs a little extra help with science, and vice versa. 

Keep reading to find the best homework help website for you! 

Best Free Homework Help Site: Khan Academy

• Price: Free!
• Best for: Practicing tough material 

Not only is Khan Academy free, but it’s full of information and can be personalized to suit your needs. When you set up your account , you choose which courses you need to study, and Khan Academy sets up a personal dashboard of instructional videos, practice exercises, and quizzes –with both correct and incorrect answer explanations–so you can learn at your own pace. 

As an added bonus, it covers more course topics than many other homework help sites, including several AP classes.

Runner Up: Brainly.com offers a free service that allows you to type in questions and get answers and explanations from experts. The downside is that you’re limited to two answers per question and have to watch ads. 

Best Paid Homework Help Site: Chegg

• Price: $14.95 to $19.95 per month
• Best for: 24/7 homework assistance  

This service has three main parts . The first is Chegg Study, which includes textbook solutions, Q&A with subject experts, flashcards, video explanations, a math solver, and writing help. The resources are thorough, and reviewers state that Chegg answers homework questions quickly and accurately no matter when you submit them.  

Chegg also offers textbook rentals for students who need access to textbooks outside of their classroom. Finally, Chegg offers Internship and Career Advice for students who are preparing to graduate and may need a little extra help with the transition out of high school. 

Another great feature Chegg provides is a selection of free articles geared towards helping with general life skills, like coping with stress and saving money. Chegg’s learning modules are comprehensive, and they feature solutions to the problems in tons of different textbooks in a wide variety of subjects. 

Runner Up: Bartleby offers basically the same services as Chegg for $14.99 per month. The reason it didn’t rank as the best is based on customer reviews that say user questions aren’t answered quite as quickly on this site as on Chegg. Otherwise, this is also a solid choice!

Best Site for Math Homework Help: Photomath

• Price: Free (or $59.99 per year for premium services) 
• Best for: Explaining solutions to math problems

This site allows you to t ake a picture of a math problem, and instantly pulls up a step-by-step solution, as well as a detailed explanation of the concept. Photomath also includes animated videos that break down mathematical concepts to help you better understand and remember them. 

The basic service is free, but for an additional fee you can get extra study tools and learn additional strategies for solving common math problems.

Runner Up: KhanAcademy offers in-depth tutorials that cover complex math topics for free, but you won’t get the same tailored help (and answers!) that Photomath offers. 

Best Site for English Homework Help: Princeton Review Academic Tutoring

• Price: $40 to $153 per month, depending on how many hours of tutoring you want 
• Best for: Comprehensive and personalized reading and writing help 

While sites like Grammarly and Sparknotes help you by either proofreading what you write via an algorithm or providing book summaries, Princeton Review’s tutors provide in-depth help with vocabulary, literature, essay writing and development, proofreading, and reading comprehension. And unlike other services, you’ll have the chance to work with a real person to get help. 

The best part is that you can get on-demand English (and ESL) tutoring from experts 24/7. That means you can get help whenever you need it, even if you’re pulling an all-nighter! 

This is by far the most expensive homework site on this list, so you’ll need to really think about what you need out of a homework help website before you commit. One added benefit is that the subscription covers over 80 other subjects, including AP classes, which can make it a good value if you need lots of help!  

Best Site for STEM Homework Help: Studypool

• Best for: Science homework help
• Price: Varies; you’ll pay for each question you submit

When it comes to science homework help, there aren’t a ton of great resources out there. The best of the bunch is Studypool, and while it has great reviews, there are some downsides as well. 

Let’s start with the good stuff. Studypool offers an interesting twist on the homework help formula. After you create a free account, you can submit your homework help questions, and tutors will submit bids to answer your questions. You’ll be able to select the tutor–and price point–that works for you, then you’ll pay to have your homework question answered. You can also pay a small fee to access notes, lectures, and other documents that top tutors have uploaded. 

The downside to Studypool is that the pricing is not transparent . There’s no way to plan for how much your homework help will cost, especially if you have lots of questions! Additionally, it’s not clear how tutors are selected, so you’ll need to be cautious when you choose who you’d like to answer your homework questions.  

What Are the Pros and Cons of Using Homework Help Sites?

Homework help websites can be a great resource if you’re struggling in a subject, or even if you just want to make sure that you’re really learning and understanding topics and ideas that you’re interested in. But, there are some possible drawbacks if you don’t use these sites responsibly. 

We’ll go over the good–and the not-so-good–aspects of getting online homework help below. 

3 Pros of Using Homework Help Websites 

First, let’s take a look at the benefits. 

#1: Better Grades Beyond Homework

This is a big one! Getting outside help with your studies can improve your understanding of concepts that you’re learning, which translates into better grades when you take tests or write essays. 

Remember: homework is designed to help reinforce the concepts you learned in class. If you just get easy answers without learning the material behind the problems, you may not have the tools you need to be successful on your class exams…or even standardized tests you’ll need to take for college. 

#2: Convenience

One of the main reasons that online homework help is appealing is because it’s flexible and convenient. You don’t have to go to a specific tutoring center while they’re open or stay after school to speak with your teacher. Instead, you can access helpful resources wherever you can access the internet, whenever you need them.

This is especially true if you tend to study at off hours because of your extracurriculars, work schedule, or family obligations. Sites that offer 24/7 tutoring can give you the extra help you need if you can’t access the free resources that are available at your school. 

#3: Variety

Not everyone learns the same way. Maybe you’re more of a visual learner, but your teacher mostly does lectures. Or maybe you learn best by listening and taking notes, but you’re expected to learn something just from reading the textbook . 

One of the best things about online homework help is that it comes in a variety of forms. The best homework help sites offer resources for all types of learners, including videos, practice activities, and even one-on-one discussions with real-life experts. 

This variety can also be a good thing if you just don’t really resonate with the way a concept is being explained (looking at you, math textbooks!).

Not so fast. There are cons to homework help websites, too. Get to know them below!

3 Cons of Using Homework Help Websites 

Now, let’s take a look at the drawbacks of online homework help. 

#1: Unreliable Info

This can be a real problem. In addition to all the really good homework help sites, there are a whole lot of disreputable or unreliable sites out there. The fact of the matter is that some homework help sites don’t necessarily hire people who are experts in the subjects they’re talking about. In those cases, you may not be getting the accurate, up-to-date, and thorough information you need.

Additionally, even the great sites may not be able to answer all of your homework questions. This is especially true if the site uses an algorithm or chatbot to help students…or if you’re enrolled in an advanced or college-level course. In these cases, working with your teacher or school-provided tutors are probably your best option. 

#2: No Clarification

This depends on the service you use, of course. But the majority of them provide free or low-cost help through pre-recorded videos. Watching videos or reading info online can definitely help you with your homework… but you can’t ask questions or get immediate feedback if you need it .

#3: Potential For Scamming 

Like we mentioned earlier, there are a lot of homework help websites out there, and lots of them are scams. The review comments we read covered everything from outdated or wrong information, to misleading claims about the help provided, to not allowing people to cancel their service after signing up. 

No matter which site you choose to use, make sure you research and read reviews before you sign up–especially if it’s a paid service! 

When Does “Help” Become “Cheating”?

Admittedly, whether using homework help websites constitutes cheating is a bit of a grey area. For instance, is it “help” when a friend reads your essay for history class and corrects your grammar, or is it “cheating”? The truth is, not everyone agrees on when “help” crosses the line into “cheating .” When in doubt, it can be a good idea to check with your teacher to see what they think about a particular type of help you want to get. 

That said, a general rule of thumb to keep in mind is to make sure that the assignment you turn in for credit is authentically yours . It needs to demonstrate your own thoughts and your own current abilities. Remember: the point of every homework assignment is to 1) help you learn something, and 2) show what you’ve learned. 

So if a service answers questions or writes essays for you, there’s a good chance using it constitutes cheating. 

Here’s an example that might help clarify the difference for you. Brainstorming essay ideas with others or looking online for inspiration is “help” as long as you write the essay yourself. Having someone read it and give you feedback about what you need to change is also help, provided you’re the one that makes the changes later. 

But copying all or part of an essay you find online or having someone write (or rewrite) the whole thing for you would be “cheating.” The same is true for other subjects. Ultimately, if you’re not generating your own work or your own answers, it’s probably cheating.

5 Tips for Finding the Best Homework Help Websites for You

Now that you know some of our favorite homework help websites, free and paid, you can start doing some additional research on your own to decide which services might work best for you! Here are some top tips for choosing a homework help website. 

Tip 1: Decide How You Learn Best 

Before you decide which site or sites you’re going to use for homework help, y ou should figure out what kind of learning style works for you the most. Are you a visual learner? Then choose a site that uses lots of videos to help explain concepts. If you know you learn best by actually doing tasks, choose a site that provides lots of practice exercises.

Tip 2: Determine Which Subjects You Need Help With

Just because a homework help site is good overall doesn’t mean that it’s equally good for every subject. If you only need help in math, choose a site that specializes in that area. But if history is where you’re struggling, a site that specializes in math won’t be much help. So make sure to choose a site that you know provides high-quality help in the areas you need it most. 

Tip 3: Decide How Much One-On-One Help You Need 

This is really about cost-effectiveness. If you learn well on your own by reading and watching videos, a free site like Khan Academy is a good choice. But if you need actual tutoring, or to be able to ask questions and get personalized answers from experts, a paid site that provides that kind of service may be a better option.

Tip 4: Set a Budget

If you decide you want to go with a paid homework help website, set a budget first . The prices for sites vary wildly, and the cost to use them can add up quick. 

Tip 5: Read the Reviews

Finally, it’s always a good idea to read actual reviews written by the people using these homework sites. You’ll learn the good, the bad, and the ugly of what the users’ experiences have been. This is especially true if you intend to subscribe to a paid service. You’ll want to make sure that users think it’s worth the price overall!

What’s Next?

If you want to get good grades on your homework, it’s a good idea to learn how to tackle it strategically. Our expert tips will help you get the most out of each assignment…and boost your grades in the process.

Doing well on homework assignments is just one part of getting good grades. We’ll teach you everything you need to know about getting great grades in high school in this article.

Of course, test grades can make or break your GPA, too. Here are 17 expert tips that’ll help you get the most out of your study prep before you take an exam.

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10 Top Homework Apps and Websites (Purpose, FAQs)

• by Righteous Godwin
• May 31, 2023

When faced with challenging homework assignments, students often seek additional resources to help them find answers or complete their tasks. 

In today’s digital age, numerous websites cater to this demand by providing homework cheat solutions. 

These websites offer various services, including pre-written essays, solving math problems, and comprehensive study guides. 

In this article, we will explore some of the top homework cheat websites and their features and discuss the implications of using them as a student.

Table of Contents

• What is the Purpose of Homework For Students?

The purpose of homework is to teach students how to study independently outside of class and to provide them with practice with the skills they need to succeed in the classroom.

Problem-solving skills are honed through homework. Having homework provides students with an additional chance to go over their notes.

Parents might gain insight into their children’s educational progress through homework. Students learn to take ownership of their education by participating in homework.

10 Top Homework Cheat Apps and Websites

1. course hero.

Course Hero has established itself as a leading homework cheat website since its inception in 2006. 

It has gained immense popularity among students seeking study aids, homework answers, and course notes. 

The website’s user-friendly interface and direct access to answers make it a preferred choice for many students. 

Additionally, Course Hero’s provision of comprehensive course notes sets it apart from other websites, attracting a large user base. 

2. EduBirdie

With a focus on confidentiality and credibility, EduBirdie provides students with a convenient platform to seek help and improve their university or college grades. 

Their team of professional writers ensures the delivery of high-quality and customized essays tailored to each student’s specific requirements. 

3. EssayPro

EssayPro is a leading academic platform that provides reliable homework answers to students worldwide. 

With a vast network of professional writers and tutors, EssayPro offers expertise in various academic assignments. 

Whether you need help with coursework, case studies, essays, or dissertations, their experienced professionals are ready to assist you. 

What sets EssayPro apart is its rigorous writer rating system, based on feedback and reviews from previous customers. 

This ensures that you receive high-quality work from trusted experts. 

4. DoMyCoding.com 

This is a prominent website in the realm of homework cheats, offering a wide array of subjects, mainly focusing on science, technology, engineering, and math ( STEM ). It is one of the top homework cheat apps and websites.

It is trendy among IT students who strive to excel in their exams. 

This platform is a comprehensive resource for finding answers to coding-related assignments and provides instruction tailored to the student’s proficiency level. 

5. Yahoo! Answers

Yahoo! Answers, a popular platform, can be considered a homework cheat website due to its question-and-answer format. 

Students can post questions across various topics, from computer and internet-related queries to business, finance, mathematics, science, and more. 

The website relies on its community of members who provide answers to these questions. 

Once a response is received, it can be edited and organized to ensure user satisfaction. 

Yahoo! Answers aims to provide organized solutions so students find the necessary information and return to the site. 

6. Answer.com

Answer.com, also known as Answer.com LLC or Answer Corporation, is a popular website that offers students a quick solution for researching various topics and accessing additional content. 

With its vast database, students can search for answers to their homework questions and find solutions with just a few clicks. 

Answer.com attracts over 2 million daily views, indicating its popularity among students seeking quick assistance. 

7. Photomath

Photomath is a popular and influential homework cheat app that has gained recognition for its advanced mathematical problem-solving capabilities. 

With a simple snap of a photo, Photomath uses cutting-edge technology to recognize and solve math equations, providing step-by-step solutions instantly. 

This app supports various math subjects, including arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, and calculus. 

Mathway is a renowned and highly effective homework cheat app that caters to math-related assignments. It is one of the top homework cheat apps and websites.

With its user-friendly interface and robust algorithm, Mathway provides step-by-step solutions to various math problems, including algebra, calculus, geometry, and more. 

Students can enter their equations or problems into the app, and Mathway instantly generates detailed solutions, making it an appealing choice for those seeking quick answers. 

However, it’s essential to exercise caution and use Mathway responsibly, ensuring that the app is used as a learning tool rather than a means to cheat. 

Brainly is a popular online platform that provides homework help and is sometimes seen as a homework cheat app due to its collaborative nature. 

With a vast community of students and educators, Brainly allows users to ask and answer questions across various subjects. 

While it can be a valuable resource for understanding complex concepts and receiving guidance, it’s essential to approach it with caution. 

10. Quizlet

Quizlet is a highly regarded learning platform, but it’s essential to distinguish its legitimate use for studying from its potential misuse as a homework cheat app. 

It is one of the top homework cheat apps and websites.

With a vast database of study materials, flashcards, and practice quizzes, Quizlet is a valuable tool for reviewing and reinforcing concepts. 

Why Students Shouldn’t Use Cheat Homework Websites

1. academic integrity.

Cheating on homework goes against the principles of academic integrity . It undermines the purpose of education, which is to learn and develop essential skills. 

Engaging in cheating behaviors not only compromises your personal integrity but also devalues the educational system.

2. Lack of Learning

The primary goal of homework is to reinforce what you have learned in class. 

By using cheat websites, you bypass the opportunity to engage with the material, think critically, and develop problem-solving skills. 

Ultimately, you cheat yourself out of the valuable learning experience.

3. Negative Consequences

If you are caught using cheat websites, the consequences can be severe. 

Academic penalties can range from receiving a failing grade on the assignment to disciplinary actions such as suspension or expulsion. 

Additionally, it can damage your reputation and future academic and professional prospects.

4. Skill Development

Homework assignments help you develop essential skills such as research, critical thinking, and time management. 

By relying on cheat websites, you miss out on the opportunity to improve these skills, which are crucial for academic success and beyond.

5. Long-Term Impact

Cheating on homework may provide temporary relief or better grades in the short term, but it hinders your long-term growth and development. 

The knowledge and skills gained through genuine effort and hard work are more valuable and sustainable in the long run.

• The Role of Cheating Websites and AI in Education

Cheating websites and AI-powered platforms have become prevalent in education, offering students opportunities and ethical challenges. 

It’s essential to recognize that the label of “cheating” is attributed to these websites based on the students’ intentions and actions.

AI websites, in particular, have immense potential to enhance learning. 

They can provide personalized study materials, interactive tutorials, and intelligent feedback, fostering a deeper understanding of the subject. 

However, these same AI platforms can be misused by students seeking shortcuts or engaging in academic dishonesty.

Ultimately, the responsibility lies with the students to utilize these tools and websites ethically. 

Instead of relying on cheating websites, students should leverage AI platforms as valuable learning resources and engage in honest academic practices. 

By embracing a genuine desire to learn, grow, and excel, students can harness the full potential of technology while upholding integrity in their educational journey.

• FAQs on Top Homework Cheat Websites

Cheating websites are online platforms that offer solutions and resources for students to cheat on their homework or assignments. These websites provide pre-written essays, answers to exam questions, and other forms of academic dishonesty.

Students can avoid using cheating websites by adopting good study habits, managing their time effectively, seeking help from teachers or tutors when needed, and utilizing legitimate educational resources. Students can resist cheating websites by focusing on genuine learning, personal growth, and academic integrity.

Using cheating websites can have severe consequences for students. It undermines their learning and academic development and violates academic integrity policies and ethical standards. Students caught using cheating websites may face disciplinary actions, damage their academic reputation, and compromise their long-term educational goals.

Instead of resorting to cheating websites, students can explore alternative options. These include seeking help from teachers, joining study groups, utilizing online educational platforms that promote active learning, conducting thorough research, and practicing effective study techniques. These alternatives encourage genuine understanding, critical thinking, and the development of valuable skills.

Conclusion  

While homework cheat websites may appear tempting with their promises of quick solutions and ready-made answers, it’s crucial to consider the potential consequences before relying on them. 

Academic honesty and personal growth should always be prioritized over short-term gains. 

Instead of resorting to cheating, students are encouraged to seek legitimate resources such as online tutorials, study groups, and academic support services to enhance their understanding and skills. 

Remember, the ultimate goal of education is not just to complete assignments but to learn and grow as individuals.

Awesome one; I hope this article answers your question.

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• 10 Top Homework Cheat Apps and Websites Why students shouldn't use cheat homework websites
• Course Hero
• DoMyCoding.com
• Homework Cheat Apps and Websites
• Why Students Shouldn't Use Cheat Homework Websites
• Yahoo! Answers

Righteous Godwin

Righteous Godwin, a graduate of Mass Communication, is a content and creative writer. Her passion for writing compels her to give her all to every project she undertakes.

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How to Cheat on Homework

Last Updated: January 4, 2024

wikiHow is a “wiki,” similar to Wikipedia, which means that many of our articles are co-written by multiple authors. To create this article, 65 people, some anonymous, worked to edit and improve it over time. This article has been viewed 140,549 times. Learn more...

Sometimes it's just easier to not do the work. According to a recent study, 42% of freshmen at Harvard admitted to cheating on homework assignments, putting you in good company if you often feel like you've got better things to do than another worksheet. [1] X Research source Instead of going about it foolishly and copying off your friend right before class starts, get smart about your cheating. You can learn the best ways to finish off your math homework, your reading, and even cut some serious corners on your essays.

Cheating on Math or Short-Answer Homework

• First, you've got to make friends with the smartest kids in class, who always do the work correctly. It helps if you can share in the workload sometimes, alternating who does the homework and who copies, night to night. Don't be totally useless.
• The best times to copy homework are on the bus on the way home, or on the way to school. It's usually better to do it on the way home, so you can still try to actually do the homework if you need to. Never copy homework in class before class starts. Never talk about copying the answers in public, to your parents, or to other students. Keep it quiet.
• If you use this method, paraphrase. It does cause a little suspicion when two students have the exact same answer.

• To make the homework go faster, split up all the answers among the group. Have one person do the first five, another do the next five, and so on. You should be able to finish before the bus ride is over. Try to keep the group as small as possible.
• Don't make the group too big. If everyone names the first president of the United States as "George Washington Carver" on the homework, your teacher might be suspicious that something strange was happening. After you copy it, go back over it once by yourself to fix any obvious mistakes and make little changes to make it your own.

• Even just fixing the order of words in short answers can throw a teacher off the scent, if the answer is correct. Change "John Glenn was the first American in space" to "The first American in space was John Glenn."
• To stay extra covert, try to copy off of someone that your teacher doesn't think you're friends with. The teacher may be more likely to look more closely at the homework for signs of cheating if you're neighbors with someone, or if you're sitting next to someone.

• If you find your answers off the internet, make sure to paraphrase it so your teachers don't find out. Teachers are smart these days, so if you copy it directly, they could definitely find out.

• Online tutoring even exists in some places. Some college students will sometimes answer homework questions or offer assistance online, sometimes for a price. [2] X Research source If you can send copies of the questions, you might at least get some help figuring out the answer for yourself.

Reading Fast

• Skip everything but the vocab words in a textbook. The skipping-around method tends to work better with textbooks, in which the actual explanations aren't that important, but the names and the vocab words are. You can read the textbook very fast this way, and not miss much information.
• Alternatively, depending on the kind of class, it might be better to read the first and last chapter of a novel, or focus all your attention on a single small part of the book and bring it up in class, to look as if you've read the whole thing and are prepared for discussion.

• It's also easy to find a long plot synopsis online, so you can at least get a good list of the characters and the style of the novel.

• Ask your friends to summarize their 50 assigned pages (or however many it works out to be) and take good notes on the section, then copy out the notes for everyone in the group. After that, each person's work will be done. It's like reading a whole book by only reading 1/3 or a 1/2.

• It's still a good idea to do some research and figure out whether or not the movie is accurate. Lots of movies take serious liberties with the plot lines of books, and you'll likely miss the names of characters and other minor plot points that might get cut out of the movie but be important for the book.
• Good movies based on books commonly assigned for school include: Grapes of Wrath , Romeo & Juliet , Lord of the Flies,' Pride & Prejudice , Wuthering Heights , Of Mice and Men , and To Kill a Mockingbird .
• Bad movies to watch instead of reading the book include The Iliad ('don't watch 'Troy , starring Brad Pitt), Fahrenheit 451 , Catcher in the Rye , Beowulf , Romeo & Juliet , and The Great Gatsby . These are good ways to prove you haven't read the book.

• It's also a good idea to look for possible talking-points online before you even do the reading, so you can know what to look for and have a good idea of something to say in class. Participation points with no actual work.

Cheating on Essays

• Many older teachers will assign the same papers year after year, and won't keep copies of them, making it very difficult for them to remember one students paper after a year or two. Never do this if your teacher collects essays online, or saves digital copies. This makes it very easy to do a quick file search and find copied passages.
• Buying essays online is basically a scam for chumps, so don't get schemed out of your hard-earned lunch money by some enterprising con artist. If you don't know the person you're getting the essay from, write it yourself. In general, paying to cheat is a bad idea, friend, sibling, or otherwise.

• Make sure the response to the topic is still up-to-date and not incriminating. If you see opportunities to expand and make more current references, do it to bring everything together.
• Never copy-paste from online and turn it in without revising. If you do, go over the font and the size to make sure everything is uniform.
• Copying passages or whole chunks of text from online is always easy to find quickly. If you try this, you risk lots of trouble.

• Read the assignment sheet closely as you go over the copied essay, making sure that it does everything that it needs to for you to get a good grade. If it doesn't, you need to add that in. Hey, at least you didn't have to start from scratch.

Did You Know? In countries such as Bangladesh and Singapore, this is criminalized and carries severe penalties.

Expert Q&A

• Copy down friend's work the day its assigned because most people do it in class. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• If your homework questions are straight from a textbook, the internet will most likely have answers for them. If you are lucky, you can find a PDF of the teacher’s textbook, which has all the answers. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

Tips from our Readers

• If your homework questions come straight from a textbook, you can often find the answers online or in a PDF version of the teacher's book. But just copying the textbook's answers word-for-word is dishonest. Use any answers you find as a guide, but explain things in your own words.
• If an assignment's got you stumped, get help ASAP instead of waiting until the last minute. Talk to your teacher, go to tutoring, or study with friends who get the material. Being proactive will leave you truly prepared, not desperately seeking shortcuts.
• With group projects, make sure everyone pulls their weight. Don't let some kids copy your work while they slack off. Set ground rules for dividing up the work and keeping each other accountable.
• If you get busted copying someone's work, don't make excuses or blame others. Own up to your mistake, take the consequences, and learn from it. Your character matters more than one assignment.
• Prioritize homework by due dates and percentage of each one's worth. It is better to fully complete a big project than rush through busy work just to check it off. Use your time wisely.
• Break up long readings into 30-45 minute chunks. Take short breaks between sessions to stay focused and absorb more than just cramming it all in one mega study blast.

• Be discreet. Don't suddenly start getting top marks, ensure you make a slow and steady transition or everyone will know you are cheating. Thanks Helpful 4 Not Helpful 0
• Some teachers understand that there isn't much they can do to prevent students from copying solutions either from friends or off the internet. Instead, well-written exams will enforce the no copying solutions policy better than the teacher can. Homework will be worth only a small portion of the grade while exams will be the main grade determiner. If you have been copying homework solutions, you may be in trouble when it comes to the exams. Thanks Helpful 2 Not Helpful 1
• Just because you aren't caught directly cheating doesn't mean that people don't know that you're cheating. News about who cheats gets around the school fast. Don't be surprised if people seem to not want to trust you anymore. Thanks Helpful 2 Not Helpful 2

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