Most Kids Cheat, Study Says

A whopping 95 percent of highschool students say they’ve cheated during the course of their education, ranging from letting somebody copy their homework to cheating on tests, a Rutgers University professor reports.

“There’s a fair amount of cheating going on, and students aren’t all that concerned about it,” says Donald McCabe, a professor of management and global business at New Jersey-based Rutgers.

The professor has surveyed cheating practices among college kids for 18 years and high school students for six years. After analyzing 24,000 high school students in grades nine to 12 in 70,000 high schools, McCabe found that 64 percent of students report one or more instances of serious testing-cheating, which include copying from someone else, helping someone else cheat on a test, or using crib sheets or cheat notes.

Plagiarism is a practice students don’t consider serious, the researcher adds. Some 58 percent of those McCabe surveyed acknowledged “one or more instances” of plagiarism, ranging from downloading an entire paper to “cutting and pasting” online publications and not crediting the source. “They seem to know what [plagiarism] is,” McCabe says of his young respondents, “but they raise some questions about where that line is that actually crosses into cheating.”

Over the years, the incidence of cheating has been fairly steady among high school students, with a small increase only in plagiarism, McCabe says.