On the day of an open argument essay, your classmates walk into your English class, not flipping through their book or reviewing notes, but strangely relaxed. Someone in second period had passed the prompt along, and by the time seventh period hit, everyone had already had hours to carefully pick each piece of their evidence and analysis. The assessment your classmates were taking was purely the quality of the essay that they had rehearsed during your lunch period.

At Stevenson, students face a dilemma. They’re told to value integrity in their academic pursuits, yet are continually placed in an environment where cutting corners seems like the only way to keep up with their peers. When grades carry more weight than learning, they no longer measure a student’s mastery; rather they serve as a benchmark that must be met in order to avoid falling behind.

Every time that guy in your class conveniently calls out sick on the morning of a Biology test and comes back asking what was on it, you give him the answers. Why wouldn’t you? It’s a routine—finishing your test, and handing off the answers to whoever asks in your next period; no one else takes these rules seriously, so why should you? These actions are labeled as camaraderie, a communal bond.

Statesman contends that cheating arises when students are held to values that the academic environment does little to enforce. Students know that learning matters, but they also know that college applications don’t ask you to explain how ethically you earned your GPA, so they prioritize the outcome rather than the experience. As long as they’re rewarded for their scores rather than their mastery, integrity in taking tests will remain unfavorable for students.

Stevenson’s academic policies unintentionally cause higher instances of cheating within classes; the school emphasizes rigid performance benchmarks, such as its system of earning a ‘meets’ on a high-stakes assessment, which makes one poor test feel disproportionately damaging to a student’s grade. The administration also relies heavily on surveillance and proctoring platforms, which focus more on catching dishonesty than addressing why it happens, and further normalizing it as an expected behavior.

Between AP courses, extracurriculars, sports, and jobs, academic dishonesty has become more of a practical decision that students take in order to stay on top of their workload. Students do not cheat solely because they have the opportunity to do so, but they cheat because the pressure to earn a “Meets” can make dishonesty feel like the only viable option. And while cheating is avoidable to some extent, constant exposure to shared answers and discussion makes resisting that pressure even more difficult.

In a study called “Cheating in College”, done by the International Center for Academic Integrity, it was found that more than 95 percent of students participated in some form of cheating, ranging from copying homework to getting help on a test. Statesman argues that if nearly every student is engaging in dishonest behavior in their academia, the solution cannot be to punish individuals; instead, schools should change the mindset at which they approach tests by implementing critical thinking projects over pure memorization assignments.

Some classes at Stevenson already utilize this, particularly in English with open argument essays and rhetorical analyses. These assessments prioritize assessing the skills that students learn in class by giving them more freedom with their responses, as well as choice in their evidence, structure, and interpretation. Because students are evaluated on their reasoning rather than predetermined answers, preparing in advance rarely offers advantage. In Math and Science classes, assessments also prioritize explanations and proofs, which ask students to explain methods rather than applying them.

When assessments vary between classes, or between students, the value of leaked answers also disappears. In this structure, preparation shifts away from memorizing answers, and towards mastery of concepts, because each student is asked to demonstrate their thinking uniquely. At Stevenson, this would mean moving away from uniform exams that circulate by period, and towards engagement with the material.

In an effort to minimize cheating in their classes, Stevenson has begun to implement platforms like Lockdown Browser and Formative.com, which lock students out of other tabs in order to ensure that they do not have access to external resources during their tests. Regardless of these measures, however, teachers have no control over what happens outside of their classroom. If a student wants to figure out the prompt for the essay and prepare for it beforehand, then there will always be a way to do so; students will find the path that guarantees the result; even if the method changes. Lockdown Browser might stop kids from accessing Google during their test, but it cannot prevent them from sharing the test material in advance, or writing formulas on the insides of their sleeves. Each new restriction only pushes students to find any new loophole or workaround.

With the public release of ChatGPT, the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has become commonplace around the world due to its efficiency, and its large-scale accessibility to anybody. To combat this, teachers have begun to use AI detectors like Turnitin to prohibit students from passing off the work as their own; however, the punishments for these offenses are inconsistent. Some teachers bring down the students’ score, while others ask them to rewrite the detected passage—all while many cases go unnoticed by the detectors.

According to Turnitin, false AI detections happen under one percent of the time when papers are submitted on the website; however, Washington Times ran an experiment where it found this data to be incorrect when practically applied– showing that 50% of human-written essays do get flagged for AI to some extent. Besides this, students are seeing a spike in false accounts of AI from AI detectors, meaning that they would have to rewrite the passage regardless of if they had written it or not. Ultimately, this creates a climate where students view the system of grading as arbitrary and unfair, leading them to doubt that their work will be evaluated with accuracy, and the cycle repeats itself.

Addressing dishonesty requires more than surveillance or policing; instead, Stevenson should recenter its academic system so that critical thinking and engagement matter more than memorization. Giving students the ability to be assessed based on their knowledge on the topic, rather than the narrow margin of multiple-choice will ultimately cause students to think critically and assess them more accurately.