Cheating is Becoming an Alarming Culture for Academia

The way people of a certain place do different things like dancing, singing, partying, living, eating, writing, learning or do anything is referred as culture. Even in one country, there could be a lot of different cultures. Each and every city could be following something different. Some of those could be controversial but still they have to perform that. Culture is not like genetics which could be transferred from one person to another but it could only be taught or support. While some people believe that cheating is also a culture, which I think is right up to some extent. As what we have heard the meaning of cheating is to act dishonestly or unfairly to get some advantage weather in an academic or other than academic purposes. As I said culture is not passed from one to another it is only those which are taught or supported. Nobody has ever taught someone how to cheat, but there are few people who had never taken any action against cheating. Is cheating really a culture? Yes? No? Maybe? I think it is partially a culture, which I would like to explain in the following scenarios.

“Cheating by International Students Rampant at British Universities, Says Newspaper”, by Brendan O’Malley in January, 2016. In that article he stated that international students are four times more likely to perform cheating in their daily academic activities. The students outside the Eurpoen Union were around 35% in total who did cheat. These numbers are still increasing on a daily basis, even though there are many practices to control, prevent and diminish cheating from roots, but nothing is working efficiently. The reason behind this is their previous schooling system and less obligation with cheating. For example, in India, the school majorly focus to prevent cheating in examination hall only. They have never checked any citations for the assignments, whether it is directly copied from wikipedia or from any other student. This leads to not showing enough effort to stop cheating. They were always taught that cheating is not ethical but their choice of words were only associated with copying in exams and tests, other than that they were not even concerned about the assignments, essays, projects and other co-curricular activities. This is one of my supporting scenario, in which it is simplified that it is not exactly the culture but still contains a part of it. Which is essential to be changed by the education board of India as we can’t change the culture or the definition of it, but still can control or at least try to control it, so that Indian share lesser volume in cheating as the international students.

Why many international students get a failing grade in academic integrity? After reading this article I can memorize my time back then in India. In this article, the person being interviewed said that ”Basically [the professor]said I didn't cite at all,' said Karan. 'Back home, we listen to our teachers, and basically mug everything they say. The more you write your answers exactly the way they say it, the better chance you have of getting an A”. Back in India, it was teachers clear statement that the more you write exact the more you achieve grades. They never taught us citation and they also never promoted cheating, but the thing is that there are some unaware factors which people don’t know why students are practicing. The major reason because of which a students cheats in international academic unions is because they have been doing that for almost 18 years of their lives without any restrictions, fear of getting plagiarism or losing their grades. They do the same thing here which costs them getting a zero grade and plagiarism along with that. This is exactly a reflection of culture as this was being taught as well as supported by teachers in their originating country, but the question now is were they supporting cheating exactly? No!. As I said earlier, different places have different ways of doing something. So this could be considered as cheating in one country but not in others. For others this could be one of the ways they perform activities.

In the end, I would like to conclude that, cheating could be whatever you want to see, but in reality it is nothing more than an unfair means of doing something. It might link with the culture as discussed above but it is not all culture. It is something way different but still similar. Nobody supports or promotes cheating, but still it is a major concern in every intuition. Some people cheat because they don't want to feel ashamed of their lower grades. They cheat knowingly and on purpose, which is wrong. That is something completely different than culture. Wrapping up things and finally saying that cheating is not a culture but have a few.