College of Business & Management
Department of Management, Marketing and Public Administration
Ethics & Islamic Values in Business
Section (53)
Course number (0302350)

Assignment 1

Written by
Araam Jamal
U00035221
To Dr.
Alaa-Aldin Abdul Rahim A. Al Athmay

For this assignment, you will carefully read the story below that summarizes the incident, behaviors associated with cheating using technology, and how you can relate this story to your own situation. You should incorporate answers to the following questions into your assignment, as they are related to issues of integrity, ethics, professionalism, and personal reflection:
- Why do students cheat? What can be done to address cheating in schools?
- What lessons have you learned from the case? Has learning about this case inspired you to make changes in your own life?
- How do you relate this behavior to ethics from the Islamic perspective?
Assignment Requirements:
Length: Minimum 750 words (Approximately 2.5 typed pages, 12 pt font, 1.5-spaced)
Style: This paper should be written in an academic style. The tone of your work should be thoughtful and respectful. Be sure to edit your work for grammatical and spelling errors.
Papers must be submitted to the instructor by 11:59 pm on the stated due date.

Reading Case: Cheating and Technology
Cheating in the classroom has been happening since the first schoolhouse was built; however, it has more than doubled in the last decade due to the emergence of new technologies that give students high tech alternatives to looking at their classmate's paper. "A 2002 survey by the Josephson Institute of Ethics of 12,000 high-school students found that 74 % of students had cheated on an exam at least once in the previous year. According to Donald McCabe, who conducted the Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, study, the Internet is partly to blame. The Internet makes plagiarism very simple. In-class cheating has also gone high technology. Experts say students who cheat are not just scribbling tiny crib sheets anymore. They are using their cell phones to instant message questions and answers or storing notes on their graphing calculators." ("Eye on Cheaters," 2004)
Over the past decade or so, we have seen a huge increase in cheating in our schools. The introduction of the Internet into most homes and schools and other technological advances are some of the main causes. Students are misusing the new technologies to find new and more high tech ways to cheat. During testing students are receiving answers via text messaging devices, they are downloading notes to iPods and graphing calculators, they are picture messaging exams with their mobile phones, and they are even hiring look-alike experts to take the exams for them. They can use the internet to easily plagiarize a paper; they can pay a company to write the paper for them, they can even pay to use a prewritten paper from a database. The internet and technology are making it easier and easier for students to cheat, and as technology continues to advance, we will continue to see a rapid rise in cheating.
Many self-respecting and honest students can be motivated to cheat in this day and age. Will the prevalence of computers, text messaging cell phones and even the ipod in the classroom students have technology at their fingertips and therefore the accessibility to cheat? The computer allows you to Google almost anything. The cell phones allow you to text another student or even someone sitting at a computer. The iPod allows you to listen to almost anything including the speech you may be writing about. We all want that edge over the person sitting next to us. "Competition, though, is the real culprit. As the work force becomes ever more crowded and the number of college grads skyrockets, top educational credentials are increasingly seen as the only sure vehicle to success." (Vencat, Overdorf, Adams, 2006) The previous statement is true. Cheating today, to get the edge over another is like steroids in athletes. Instead of using the strength of our minds and thoughts we find someone else who did and copy their thought. "In a recent poll of 25,000 high-schoolers by the California-based Josephson Institute of Ethics, nearly half agreed with the statement ‘A person has to lie or to cheat sometimes in order to succeed'". (Vencat, Overdorf, Adams, 2006). It seem that everyone is doing it. Multitudes of student believe the only way to make it through a class is to cheat. Don't read the book listen to then listen to the cliff notes while taking the test. You didn't really learn the book you just regurgitated someone else's work.
Not only is technology influencing us to cheat, but the fact that we all think we don't have enough time does. If we look at an average day then we find almost every minute is filled with things that really don't help us get things done. I have to be home to watch..., or I got to get with friends to do ..., or somebody needs me to do something. Emotionally those seem like valid activities, but that is putting someone else's needs over our own. If you schedule out your day and know that you have to have this done, then do it. Waiting till the last minute just influences you more to find an easier way to do something therefore cheating. If we scheduled time to complete our own tasks like we do for other people we could actually do a lot more.
There are many methods used to cheat. "Some of the ways students cheat are laborious and truly ingenious. In fact one can't help but wonder why these cheaters don't just put the same effort into studying." (Clabaugh & Rozycki, 2003)
The most common method to cheat is with cheat sheets, also known as "cliff notes". Some techniques of this type of cheating include writing on your hand and in between fingers. Some people graffiti the desk with notes and answers to tests. Others have even used a nail or a sharp point to inscribe answers on a pencil. People can even go as far as writing on the inside of the bill of a baseball cap. It is also not uncommon for students to leave some type of note or cheat sheet in bathrooms. "Snappling -- in this form of crib note fraud students carefully remove the label from a clear beverage, such as Snapple. They put their notes on the back of the label, then paste it back in place using transparent glue. During the exam the student takes slow "thoughtful" swigs out of the bottle." (Clabaugh & Rozycki, 2003). Although I do not excuse this, one of the cleverest things I read was people writing on the inside of a gum wrapper, or even inserting text on the gum package itself.
Other methods of cheating involve co-conspirators. These cheats can devise clever signals, such as hand signals, for the test or exam. They can also have people steal copies of the exam in which the answers were supplied in the review. Another technique of this style is outsourcing, in which term papers such as reports and essays are pre-written and sold to the students. "In China…police last year cracked one of the biggest qiangshou (hired gun) gangs. Web-based agencies where students can hire expert look-alikes to take any of a host of national exams for them." (Vencat, Overdorf, Adams, 2006).
The last method of cheating is with technology. Let's face it, with today's technology; cheating in school becomes so much easier. Students can use their phones for many techniques of cheating. They can text message the answers to fellow students, photocopies or even notes can be saved on their phones, or they can even use SparkMobile from Spark Notes (Barnes & Noble's version of "cliff notes") which can be sent to the phone. Students can also use their iPod or even graphing calculators to store notes for exams.
The effects of using technology to cheat, and the resulting countermeasures span the globe. Examples range from instructive to the militant extreme. For example, in the United Kingdom, the government has developed the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc), a committee that aids in raising plagiarism awareness among the academic community and provides funding for TurnItInUK. (Hibbert, 2005) Whereas countries such as China and South Korea have gone so far as to implement up to seven year prison sentences for those caught cheating. (Vencat, Overdorf, Adams, 2006). Educators have many new tools to add to their arsenal as well. Services such as TurnItIn.com and MyDropBox.com that check written works for plagiarism are becoming increasingly more commonplace. While the modern countermeasures to using technology to cheat continue to become increasingly innovative, the most effective countermeasure to cheating is for parents and educators to foster an environment for their children and/or students where cheating simply isn't acceptable.
In summary, today's technological advancements increase the average amount of students who cheat. Many can blame this dishonesty on peer pressure and the pressures to succeed. Either way it is immoral and is demoralizing today's society. With each technological advancement used to cheat, an effective countermeasure must be obtained in order to sustain the moral ethics of our future, the youth.
By Jeffrey R. Young

Introduction: Living in a competitive world, whereby every individual is under pressure to obtain a good future for each of their own, having the motivation to keep oneself motivated to perform and accomplish a certain task successfully is a normal phenomenon. In order to face a world filled with trials and challenge, students this generation have to work hard for their future career but before that, students are almost always required to sit for examinations that determine their level of education which will ensure the standard and the quality of the particular student in the subject they are majoring, before they proceed to a higher level of education. Because of that, students are always aiming to achieve excellent grades in their examinations but unfortunately, in order to do so, some students these days misuse this opportunity of testing themselves by using various unethical methods and dishonest acts to achieve their goals. This is known as cheating. The act of cheating is also described as fraud which has been accomplished by deception. In other words, cheating is a trick, imposition and as well as an imposture. Submitting work that is not of one’s own effort but of another person is considered to be an act of cheating. The case study discussed the issue of cheating in school using technology, and I will be then answering the three stated questions.

* Questions:

- Why do students cheat? What can be done to address cheating in schools? According to the reading case, cheating happening due to the emergence of new technologies that give students high tech alternatives to looking at their classmate's paper.
While there are many other factors that motivate students to cheat during an examination such as demands to obtain excellent grades in another way “getting high CGPA”, pressure from their parents, self-imposed stress to succeed, confidence level of the students, and so on. I personally think that students have higher tendency to cheat specifically when they have not been caught cheating in the past.
People might think that students with high CGPAs don’t ever cheat, because they are satisfied with their results and are afraid of getting caught when they cheat, but in my opinion this can be happen another way round, these students with high CGPAs may want to satisfy their need of high CGPAs and thus, they cheat in the exam. One another factor that encourage cheating is the environment. That is, students learn the cheating behavior through the observation on the people surrounded them. In general, most of the people copy answers from another person when they have not enough time to answer the rest of the questions asked in an examination. Parents and family have also a strong impact, while giving pressure to their children for instance by comparing them with another family member or a friend. Students here will feel down and tend to cheat in order to obtain their parents satisfaction. It is more probable that students having low moral judgment will cheat as opposed to students with high moral judgment.
Students are less likely to cheat if they believe that their school values real mastery of a subject. Cheating can be curbed if schools didn’t talk about it. To solve cheating issue, I think schools should open up and talk about it. In fact people think if they don’t talk about it then it won’t happen. But admitting cheating exists in your school is a big first step to solve this issue, and then it will be easier to look for solutions. Parents should be part of the solution as well. They can emphasize high standards for honesty; make it clear that cheating is unacceptable. They should also change the way they talk about grades with their children especially in the way parents compare their kids to how others do.
- What lessons have you learned from the case? Has learning about this case inspired you to make changes in your own life?
I’ve learned from this case that everyone might be cheated at least once in their lives. I’ve learned also that some people cheat because they have low self-esteem, and by cheating they will seek a way to boost their confidence. This is because an outward show of achievement and success is able to increase their self-esteem, although the means of attaining this success is by the wrong approach.
In my opinion, I think cheating should be allowed sometimes when the question asked were too difficult or when the exam was given without any notification to the students in advance, such as pop-quizzes and random tests. And by cheating here I meant getting help from the teachers, or a permission from them to solve such questions with a partner.
- How do you relate this behavior to ethics from the Islamic perspective?
Cheating in our Islamic religion is totally forbidden “Haram”. In the Qur’an, Allah has condemned cheating and the people who do it, and has warned them of bad consequences.

References:
-(McCabe, Trevino & Butterfield, 1999)
- (Jones, Taylor, Irvin & Faircloth, 2001)