Why Do Students Cheat?

Not to dampen anyone's Christmas spirit, but this is a serious question. Why do students cheat? Is it because they procrastinate so horribly that it's impossible to do their own, original work? Is it because they see college classes and merely a means to an end, and anything they can do to reach that end is okay as long as it gets them there (i.e. "the end justifies the means")? Is it because they are so desperate for a grade or for their scholarships that they will go to any lengths, even compromising their integrity, to get them. Or is it because they have no integrity and are seriously lying, cheating, plagiarizing pond scum? No, no, no....forgive me. That is absolutely not it. I promise!

I'm just a little frustrated. Hardly anything angers me more than intentional plagiarism. Especially from students at a school with an Honor Code that demands total and complete honesty. I have tremendous patience with accidental plagiarism. Of course I do. My students are learning. In many cases, this is their first experience writing essays with research, citations, and APA-style documentation. It's hard. It really is. Whoever dreamed up APA style was not a sane person. He or she had severe OCD, I'm pretty sure. The system couldn't be any less intuitive. So yeah, I get that students will struggle to remember every single in-text citation. They might miss some quotation marks along the way, thinking they are paraphrasing when their text is far too close to the original not to be a direct quote. They might forget to italicize magazine titles on their reference page or, heaven forbid (!), they might capitalize the words in their articles' titles. Yes, I get it. APA is hard.

However, when students go online and purchase term papers and then copy/paste huge sections of those papers into their essays, with no in-text citations and no mention of the source on their reference page, THIS IS NOT AN ACCIDENT! This is blatant cheating. It disrespects me as the teacher, it disrespects the course, and it disrespects the entire college. It makes me both sad and furious, simultaneously. I had one such incident this past week. I knew instantly that the writing had to be plagiarized, but it took me a full hour to get to the bottom of it, time that I do not have at this point in the semester when I have dozens of honestly-written essays to read and grade. Ugh! Because my college has a firewall blocking these stupid sites that sell term papers, I had to call Gerald and ask him to search for the source at home and then email it to me. Not that he has time for such things, but I had no choice.

Okay, venting over. It's done. And I will not let it ruin one more second of this glorious season. But it has left me pondering the question: Why do students cheat?