Five Tips to Prevent Your Student From Cheating

I found an interesting article written by Aisha Sultan in stltoday.com.

We spend so much time talking about how teachers or schools should be preventing cheating, but this article is really written for parents. It's my hope that parents and educators will work together to end this discouraging trend.

As the article states: 

Cheating among students is rampant. Nine out of 10 middle schoolers admit to copying someone else's homework and 74 percent of high school students admit to cheating on an exam. Technology makes it even easier, with homework assignments sent via mass e-mail and test answers showing up as text messages.

Educator and author Dr. Michael Hartnett shares five useful tips on how to make sure your child is not a chronic cheater:

1. Check your child's homework every night. ... A good sign that a teenager is cheating is the absence of substantive work.

2. Create a device-free zone of at least an hour a day for studying. ...Yes, students can multitask, but can they unitask with the intense concentration that is often required to do an assignment well? Any hour a day by themselves without connections to cyberspace or to their friends is an hour of studying and learning they have devoid of cheating.

3. Give your teenagers practice tests the day before an exam. ...Know what they are studying and ... if their materials are sparse and generated from websites, then you know they are either cheating or performing poorly.

4. Talk to your teenagers honestly and realistically about cheating. ...Acknowledge that cheating is prevalent, and understand that you are asking for your teenagers to be exceptional instead of conforming to a pervasive cheating culture.

5. Avoid clichés. ... I wouldn't try "Cheaters never prosper." The truth is they do prosper...

Dr. Michael Hartnett has been a high school English teacher, college professor, and SAT instructor/tutor for more than 20 years, He is the author of The Great SAT Swindle.

(Please click HERE to read the story in its entirety and to better understand the author's rationale behind his major points.)