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By Adrianne Loggins

Cheating has been an issue in the classroom for years, but its forms and faces have morphed and developed as technology has advanced. Gone are the days of copying a friend’s answers or writing the answers on your hand. Sneaking cell phones under the table – this is the new way to cheat. Internet service and camera phones make it too easy for students to cheat their way to the top.

Most academic institutions and testing facilities now have cell phone policies during school or testing hours. With a world’s worth of information at students’ fingertips, the Internet, a service many have available via their cell phones, is making the definition of cheating more difficult to define.

Teddi Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University in Clemson, S.C., says, “The thing about cheating with new technology is that it’s usually the kind of cheating we’ve seen before but just enabled by technology.”

Fishman says that students cheat for a number of reasons. One is when students feel the task is too hard. Another is time pressure – they have too much to do. Most interestingly, students are more likely to cheat when they think that the instructor doesn’t care. Cell phones, the proverbial easy buttons, only exacerbate the temptation.

With college admission getting more competitive, and high schools demanding more out of their students, the pressure is high.

Even the Educational Testing Service (ETS), based in Princeton, N.J., has set policies and practices during testing. According to Tom Ewing, director of press relations for ETS, the policy on cell phones is very specific and outlined in every bulletin the organization issues.

“It is something that we take very seriously and watch very closely. The bottom line is that cell phones are not allowed in the testing room. We have proctors that have been trained in what to look for to determine whether students are using cell phones or other communication devices,” Ewing says.

If a student is caught during an exam, the proctor will write the incident up in what is called a supervisor’s irregularity report, according to Ewing. It will be noted; the student’s scores will be investigated and may be cancelled. And those tests are not cheap.

Ewing says one such incident occurred at Trabuco High School in California. “There was considerable texting going on at this center, and scores were cancelled. The case ended in court with us being sued by the parents and students but the court ruled in ETS’s favor. Over 100 students had to retake the test.”

In this era of technological advances, teachers must be cell phone-savvy and educated in the multiple ways their students could cheat. By discouraging such behavior before students suffer consequences for their actions, teachers show that they do care. Teachers are starting to share their knowledge with their colleagues, forming a front line to squelch cheating.

Fishman of the Center for Academic Integrity, says, “The mechanisms of cheating are evolving – we share information about new ways of cheating. We try to help each other to improve the climate of academic integrity. There are videos of how to cheat in new ways on You-Tube even. It’s one way we try to keep up.”

So students, know that your teachers know way more than history and mathematics. Those cell phones won’t help you get into college – just into a whole lot of trouble.

Adrianne Loggins is a journalism graduate student at Northeastern University.