The Factors that Lead to Cheating in Exams and How to Avoid Them

Abstract

Cheating is one of the worst habitats that some students use it to pass their exams, and the biggest challenge to teachers and invigilators during tests to control the class and prohibit cheating. Students always try to find and create new methods of cheating and invigilators try to find solutions for this phenomenon. Many Educators discussed this phenomenon and investigated the reasons of cheating, but they couldn't stop this problem. In this research we investigated the reasons behind the cheating, methods of cheating and we introduced some suggestions to reduce cheating in exams. As a part of this paper, we distributed a questionnaire contained 19 questions among the students in Qatar University to investigate the reasons behind cheating and introduce some suggestions to reduce it in the exams. Questions were grouped in 6 categories and several study hypotheses were then analyzed by using the Z-test. The study detected that the reasons of cheating can be divided into Physiological factors such as fear of failure and reprimand parents; and work related reasons such as large class sizes, the teacher, and Invigilator leniency. In addition, we introduced some recommendations to reduce cheating during the exams. phenomenon during the early stages of a student's life before increasing the problem. Nonis and OwensSwift (1998) concluded that in-class deterrents are effective in reducing the levels of cheating on exams. West et. al (2004) found that in a simple regression the relationship between moral judgment scores and cheating behavior was insignificant. Also, when they tested whether including Utilizer scores affected the relationship of cheating and moral judgment, they found that Utilizer affected the relationship significantly. In this study, and through a questionnaire targeted Qatar University students, we tried to categorize and analyze such problems and introduce some possible solutions that may contribute to reduce cheating during exams. Doing such studies will assist educators to better understand the Psychology of the student and will be beneficial to propose solutions that will improve the work's environment. The organization of this paper is as follows: In Section 2, the study hypotheses are presented, analysis of the study and the results are given in Section 3, a real life example is considered in Section 4, and in section 5, a summary of the conclusions and recommendations is presented. Finally, Acknowledgment and references are introduced in Sections 6 and 7.