The Art of Cheating in the 21st Millennium: Innovative Mechanisms and Insidious Ploys in Academic Deceit

Abstract

Cheating is rampant throughout academia, with no hard evidence suggesting that such pedagogic deceit will wane. Cheating is most insidious on the college level, where such academic deceit has evolved from perhaps its basic pattern of merely peeking at another student's examination, to planned deceit employing sophisticated subterfuges and interplay between two or more co-conspirators. Importantly, cheating per se may not necessarily be student initiated, but fostered by college/university staff for purposes of institutional or personal financial gain. Statistical studies (e.g., demographics) in complement with sociological and psychological factors associated with cheating have been previously described. This review does not attempt to embellish the plethora of earlier reviews or research on the subject, but stands unique in that specific case reports and recent findings are presented describing techniques or mechanisms used in the performance of academic deceit to by-pass university codes of ethics. The purpose of this work is to acquaint adjunct staff, tenure track, and perhaps senior faculty in the biological sciences and other disciplines to those mechanistic approaches used by students and college staff as well, in the commission of academic fraud. Suggestions are proposed to help detect and reduce academic deceit.

AI, biometric analysis, and emerging cheating detection systems: The engineering of academic integrity?

“…These escalation patterns can be iterative and may not have an apparent conclusion (Oravec, 2015(Oravec, , 2022. Cheating and its detection can be considered as an arms race in which particular technological advances for detectors are often matched with advances by those who are under surveillance (Lipson & Karthikeyan, 2016). The crowdsourcings of subjects' reflections about some of the cheating-deception systems in place are already being used by students and employees to alter their behavior in various testing and evaluation contexts (as described in Rozario, 2020).…”

The Applications of APA styles in African Academic publications: An Evidence from Bahir Dar Journal of Education

“…A failure to acknowledge sources of citation properly cause plagiarisms, which can occur both intentionally and unintentionally, which less discouraged in developing countries (Balasubramanian, Bennett, & Pierce, 2017;Kauffman & Young, 2015). Particularly, academic plagiarism occurs extensively when the efforts to monitor a candidate reduced and opportunities to cheat increased (Etter, Cramer, & Finn, 2006;Lipson & Karthikeyan, 2016;Lucifora & Tonello, 2015;Onwuegbuzie, 2017). Hence, the lenience to stick strongly to APA style among the journal reviewers and editors can definitely cause the high level of plagiarism and improper use of APA style.…”