Suhani Gupta

The competitive culture Harker students have established exacerbates the pressure they feel when overwhelmed. Often times, this leads to cheating on tests or quizzes.

Five minutes left on the clock. As the second hand ticks, a student racks their brain, attempting to remember how many carbon dioxide molecules are produced in cellular respiration. As they turn around to check the time, they catch sight of a classmate in the corner, glancing at the answers scrawled on their arm. A wave of frustration hits — all your hard work put into studying feels pointless when others can get ahead so easily by cheating.

According to a poll sent out on Dec. 4 of last year, 79.1% of 182 Harker students have witnessed cheating, and 94.6% of respondents believe it to be wrong. Head of Upper School Paul Barsky believes one of the most significant drivers of cheating, especially at a rigorous school like Harker, is academic stress. The competitive culture Harker students have established exacerbates the pressure they feel when overwhelmed. 

Barsky emphasizes that students focus too much on external sources of validation like grades and GPA, and this pressure can lead students to think cheating is their only available option. 

“We’re looking to external factors as ways of showing our self-worth and as proof of our own success too often,” Barsky said. “We think that we are our GPA, that we are how much money we make, that we are what our title is. These are all external factors of what people can see, and people use them to validate their self-worth.” 

Compounding this issue, many Harker students overload themselves with activities and extracurriculars, taking crucial time away from studying. Consequently, they may feel unprepared for assessments and feel compelled to resort to taking shortcuts.

“[Cheating] is poor decision-making in a moment where a student is stressed about an outcome and not confident in their own ability to handle what it might be,” Assistant Upper School Division Head Kelly Horan said. “If kids had realistically manageable loads, they’d be less likely to make poor decisions because they would be less likely to find themselves in a time crunch.”

The issue of cheating intensifies when this behavior becomes normalized. If students see their own classmates engaging in unethical behavior without any visible consequences, they feel less responsible for upholding academic integrity themselves.

“The biggest predictor of cheating is actually seeing another student cheating, or knowing that another student is cheating because they feel more ok with doing it,” Psychology Club President Alicia Ran (12) said. “Even if you know that cheating is wrong, you might not feel all the responsibility if you see another student or even your friend doing it.”

Although the definition of cheating might seem clear to some, many students might not think of actions like sharing homework answers or using ChatGPT for essay ideas as cheating. Current University of Maryland doctoral student and teacher Alina Maki conducted research on the motivations behind students cheating.

“In my study, I gave students the opportunity to define what a lie was, and then I gave them scenarios in which a lie might occur,” Maki said. “When we think about cheating, students might have different definitions of what cheating means. It’s important to think about what the school standards are or what teachers individually mean by cheating.”

Maki, who teaches courses in the field of education and human development, designs prompts that are more difficult to enter into AI programs to deter cheating in the undergraduate courses she teaches.

“The one strategy that I use a lot is I don’t ask students just to give me definitions or basic recall, I ask students to connect their assignments to topics in their own personal life and give me specific examples of how it relates to their lives,” Maki said. “If you ask them to be very specific about their personal life, it’s a lot harder to get any information from the Internet.”

If students shifted their mindset to think of school in the context of learning instead of attaining grades, there would be fewer incentives to cheat. If a student scores well on an exam they did not study for, the resulting grade carries no educational value.

“When you cheat, you’re telling yourself you’re not good enough,” junior Kimaya Mehta said. “There are definitely reasons people cheat, like academics or stress, but those are just excuses people use to make cheating feel more ethical. In reality, when you’re cheating, you’re just cheating yourself.”