Modern Cheating Techniques, Their Adverse Effects on Engineering Education and Preventions

Cheating is an immoral way of achieving higher grades in school by breaking rules and regulations and gaining an unfair advantage in a competitive environment. This dishonest behavior is becoming a more serious issue, particularly with all the technological developments, and it considerably threatens the educational systems in engineering, science, fine arts, law, nursing, medicine and pharmacy. Approximately 70% of school students in the U.S. admitted that they were involved in direct and/or indirect cheating actions during exams, homework, term projects, reports, papers and presentations using a variety of cheating techniques. These techniques include all kinds of cell phones, camera phones, earphones, MP3 players, graphing calculators, iPads, texting devices, monitoring devices, multifunctional watches, etc. Similar trends have been observed in many other developed or developing countries worldwide. These issues are more crucial for online courses, which have been gaining popularity for full-time employees who wish to further their education. In the present study, we have evaluated many of the high-tech cheating systems and devices that have been a major threat to engineering education, and we have reported the possible ways for improperly using these items in colleges. This study offers many opportunities for faculty members, teachers, lecturers and family members to become aware of the problem, take action, prevent such incidences and increase the quality of engineering education.

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