The Factors that Lead to Cheating in Exams and How to Avoid Them

Abstract

Cheating is one of the worst habitats that some
students use it to pass their exams, and the biggest challenge to
teachers and invigilators during tests to control the class and
prohibit cheating. Students always try to find and create new
methods of cheating and invigilators try to find solutions for this
phenomenon. Many Educators discussed this phenomenon and
investigated the reasons of cheating, but they couldn’t stop this
problem. In this research we investigated the reasons behind the
cheating, methods of cheating and we introduced some
suggestions to reduce cheating in exams.
As a part of this paper, we distributed a questionnaire
contained 19 questions among the students in Qatar University to
investigate the reasons behind cheating and introduce some
suggestions to reduce it in the exams. Questions were grouped in
6 categories and several study hypotheses were then analyzed by
using the Z-test. The study detected that the reasons of cheating
can be divided into Physiological factors such as fear of failure
and reprimand parents; and work related reasons such as large
class sizes, the teacher, and Invigilator leniency. In addition, we
introduced some recommendations to reduce cheating during the
exams.