In our advanced world today, having outstanding grades is everything for a student. Receiving low grades such as C or D may prove disastrous to a student’s perception of his future achievement, and for some, even receiving a B or A- may cause panic. Some may study for the subjects to attain high grades. Others, though, may feel that their efforts in learning are not enough, consequently resorting to cheating in order to raise their grades.

The good news regarding cheating is that there has been a few years recently that has had a decline in academic disintegrity. According to two surveys conducted by the Josephson Institute of Ethics, a non-profit organization based in Los Angeles, the number of people who admitted to cheating dropped from fifty-nine to fifty-one percent from the years 2010 to 2012. Some people may believe that this change is natural, but given the fact that this change is still only a small fraction of what needs to be changed, and that these years marked the first decrease in the past decade, I beg to differ. I believe that the cheating in high schools can be decreased even further in a shorter period of time with three steps:

The first is to create an environment where cheating is almost impossible to do. Many teachers in the school are actually fulfilling this step by using methods such as using folders as “walls” to prevent students from unconsciously looking at another’s test answers, separating desks to distance the students, or collecting all tests by hand instead of turning them in a pile. However, I feel that we could do better by using more effective methods like having two different variants of the test or assignment. Of course, this method does not count for the assignments that the students do after school, but this method will be effective for work that is completed in class.

For assignments that are done outside of class, teachers could assign different variants of the same worksheet. For work that always have to be the same (such as history assignments), try focusing on assignments that require answers in sentences or phrases instead of multiple choices. These questions are generally harder to cheat on because of the variety of sentence structures that can be used to answer the same question, whereas multiple choices and fill-in-the-blacks require only one letter or word to fill in.

Lastly, educate the students about the severity about cheating. This may sound cliche, but reminding other students about academic integrity will help significantly. Repeating your policy regarding cheating may help students realize the severity of cheating more than when they are taking a test months after listening to the same thing.

These methods, however, are only three out of numerous methods that exist to prevent students from cheating. Therefore I encourage everyone to find and revise their own methods to stop academic disintegrity.