Academic dishonesty is not new but with the increase in competition for jobs, most students have resorted to cheating to increase their chances of attending a competitive university using a higher GPA. With the advances of modern technology, students are given more opportunities to cheat and plagiarize assignments and exams hurting the future working generation.

With the advancement of technology today, there is an app made for everything which leads to the first issue. Students have access to websites that will completely do the work for them without typing a sentence, which is the spark of the cheating habit.

Writer Karen Gallagher of Rampant online cheating is the dark side of remote learning, “Companies such as Grade Bees and Edu Birdie will even write your five-page reflective paper or 25-page essay, as original work, for varied prices”.

Students having access to these sites gives them an advantage on test material, quick access to A.I written essays and homework answers compared to the other students that depend on their notes and studying to achieve success in their classes. An opposing side views these sites as not necessarily a way to cheat but seen as an online service to help with students education.

Using technology, the correct way, can be used as an alternate learning source and help student when they bump into a problem or don’t understand certain material.

There are many reasons why a student might start the toxic habit of cheating, but most of them could be very avoidable. Writer Anton Skshidlevsky list possible sparks that could lead a student to start cheating as “Lack of time or poor time management, Fear of failure, Anxiety about grades, Desire to help classmates, Academic overload, Stress”. With all of reasons gave by Skshidlevsky, many of these can easily be avoidable starting by instilling students with good habits and to decrease the stress of school.

Many students are given the mentality that if their grades fall a little bit, that is equivalent to the world ending regarding their future. With the stress of trying to do well in school can lead students to have testing anxiety and put too much on their plate to look good for colleges. That might be one reason, but the other reason is students getting into bad habits or just being lazy.

Students might just not want to put the work in to do well and might get addicted to cheating for it requiring less studying and still showing that they are doing well. Stated by writer Jasmyn Sanchez from a study used in her article elaborates, “Statistics provided by Fordham University show that dishonest students have a Grade Point Average (GPA) of about 3.41, while non-cheaters can boast of only 2.85”.

I can see how that can make a student continue to cheat because they don’t have to do much work and still gain the benefits of it. This issue leads to the next problem, what do future careers look like?

Stated by Gallagher, “Fields such as engineering, science and nursing will lose in the long run if newly minted students cheat their way into the professions”. With these being such crucial jobs that the community depend on, future generations could be in jeopardy.

If students find ways to cheat into those professions, that can bring up many problems including them not knowing how to fully do their job or mistakes that could be very dangerous.

There is many solutions schools can use to try and decrease the use of cheating. Two big ones include test proctoring, which can be used for important assignments being done at school under teacher supervision. That would make it harder for students to cheat and might force students to work on it themselves.

Another option is to promote healthy study habits to students at a young age. This will gear them up for when classes get harder, and as they grow up. This will give them nothing, but beneficial habits.