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Research: Spread of smart phones leads to rampant cheating

[1]
Only 3 percent of parents said their children use phones to cheat, while 35 percent of students admitted doing so.

Higher education soon will absorb a generation of high school students who frequently use smart phones to store cheat sheets, share test answers with classmates, and scroll through Google search results during exams, according to researchers who examined student cheating habits.

Studies published by academics at the University of British Columbia (UBC) [2] and by education technology website Common Sense Media [3] showed that constant sharing between friends – pictures, videos, and text messages – didn’t stop during class.

And even after using web-accessible smart phones to share tips and answers with friends during tests and quizzes, one in four students said they didn’t consider it cheating.

The research findings were compiled and published in an infographic by Online-Education.net [4], a California-based marketing company.

Twenty-six percent of high school students [4] saved information from their notes and textbooks in their phone and accessed those digital files during exams, and more than half of student respondents said their classmates did the same.

Seventeen percent of students said they had used their smart phones to take pictures of test questions and answers and sent those images to classmates. One in five students said they had used their phones to search the internet for test answers.

Overall, 35 percent of students said they had used their phones to cheat during school.

“Cheating has always occurred, it’s just so much easier now. It was always harder to go get the encyclopedia from the library, and now it’s so much easier with 3G and 4G phones,” said Aaron Tooley, director of online media for Online-Education.net.  “Some of these students are going to be in for a very rude awakening, because cheating is taken so seriously in higher education.”

Convincing incoming freshmen that using their iPhones, Androids, and Blackberrys during exams violates basic academic integrity policies will be a new challenge for higher-education officials and professors, said Seth Restaino, who also works with Online-Education.net’s online media.

“The definition of cheating to the teenage generation has been so blurred, no one is quite sure what it means,” Restaino said. “There’s no messing around in colleges when it comes to cheating. … Will that be enough of a disincentive to cheat? We don’t really know that yet.”

The widespread use of smart phones to break basic school rules hasn’t led parents to point an accusatory finger at their daughters and sons, according to research.

Three percent of parents said they believed their children had used a phone to cheat in school, whereas 76 percent of parents said cheating via smart phone happens at their child’s school.

“And parents say this knowing full well their kids have their cell phones on them at all times,” Restaino said.

The UBC researchers published their findings last December, charging that people – not just high school or college students – are far more likely to lie when texting, or to use phones while lying.

Ninety-five percent of respondents to the UBC survey said they felt more deceived in text messages than in video chats, while three in 10 said they were more likely to be deceived through text rather than face to face.

“Our results confirm that the more anonymous the technology allows a person to be in a communications exchange, the more likely they are to become morally lax,” said Karl Aquino, a UBC professor and a coauthor of the research.