In high school, who cheats? Slackers, jocks, socialites? All stereotypes aside, a scarier question emerges: Who doesn’t cheat?
Dr. Donald McCabe of Rutgers follows the cheating trend, surveying high schoolers on their tendency to cheat since the mid-1990s. McCabe’s most recent national survey polled 25,000 high school students from 2001 to 2008 and found that more than 90 percent said they had cheated in one way or another.
With only a tiny minority not cheating, it’s official: Cheating is an epidemic.
Why Cheat? Find out what students think motivates cheating:
- Is is the workload?
- The demand of extra-curriculars?
- The ease at which cheating is accomplished?
There will be inevitable difficulty — even impossibility — in getting students to admit to cheating, but theorizing on the motivations of cheating may prove useful in understanding such a far-reaching problem.
