Academic Dishonesty: Cheating

It has been said that many students are trapped in academic dishonesty, a dependence on cheating, cause of the lack of confidence in their abilities. When I think needed to write about it, I came to it without any particular of what I wanted to say. It goes without saying that cheating is one of the most important issues facing us today. Cheating is never, ever acceptable under any circumstances.

My personal experiences with cheating when I was an exam supervisor (cross supervisor outside My official school): students occasionally cheated in my classes during the national school exam, it baffled and frustrated me, and I was never sure how to react.

Let us take a look at why students cheating during the exam. First of all, it is worth considering mastery versus performance orientation. Focusing the attention of students' grades, and motivate them by promising them high grades or punishing them with low ones, thus should have the effect of increasing cheating and reducing learning. 

Secondly, it is about self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is the words that explain our belief we have in our own abilities. As far as I’m concerned, students who feel that they will not be able to learn something and do not well on the test thus should have the effect of increasing cheating and reducing learning. 

Weighing up those are the point above, I will argue that the cause of cheating is extrinsic motivation. In other words, in an environment characterized by extrinsic motivation, the learners care about what happens after the performance rather than relishing or enjoying the performance itself. In conclusion, the amount of cheating that takes place in an educational situation may very well depend on the structures of the learning environment. In order to reduce cheating and increasing learning, we should seek to construct learning environments in which students do not see grades as their primary motivators. They should be motivated, instead, by their interest and fascination with the subject matter or the challenge of the assessments, or by the perceived utility of the subject matter for their lives or futures, or by some other factor that drives them to learn the material more deeply from their own internal motives.

Ps: How to improve my poor academics writing? practice!

Foto: Dokumentasi saat PPL 2016 di SMP N 1 Seputih Surabaya, Lampung Tengah. Upaya menciptakan lingkungan dan suasana belajar yang menyenangkan dalam prosesnya.