Habit of cheating in exam among children

Following are the major reasons behind why a child have a habit of cheating in exams:

1. competition with peers
2. lack of confidence
3. poor value system
   Have you wondered what cheating really comprises of ? Does it include the copying that happens during exams ? Does it involve the kind of sleight-of-hand kind of tricks that children use during games ? Or the illicit shortcuts applied during home-works and projects like copying from the internet ?
   The sad reality is that cheating includes all the aforementioned incidents and more! Unfortunately, sometimes even toppers of the class indulge in cheating.

Here are some ways one can adopt in order to prevent cheating among children.

Tips for teachers:

1. Find out the reason behind their intention to cheat. Make a genuine effort to understand them politely, rather than rudely.
2. Explain to them the long-term impact of cheating and why this habit is so bad in their future endeavors. Dedicated seminars and workshops are usually quite helpful in doing this.
3. Try to explain to them that failing in an exam is a part and parcel of life, not the end of it and cheating one’s way out of it is not the solution.
4. Eliminate the need for the child to cheat by understanding the academic pressure on them and making arrangement for them to manage the same.
5. Giving in to peer pressure and sharing one’s homework for others to copy from is quite a common thing children do. The teacher needs to be aware of the participants in this act and educate each one about the bad impacts of cheating.

Tips for parents:

1. Upon learning that the child has cheated, instead of punishing and scolding them for the same, deal with the situation patiently. This moment can be used to teach them important lessons about the harms of cheating.
2. Try to understand the cause of the intention/need to cheat.
3. Refrain from cheating and also ensure that the child doesn’t cheat while playing games with them at home.
4. Motivate the child to learn more by incentivizing the process of learning using rewards. Such kind of motivation ensures that the child naturally find cheating unfavorable.
5. Express your desire to the child that you wouldn’t want them to cheat and would like them to be honest towards their work.
6. Explain to them the virtues of working honestly using anecdotes so that they are naturally driven to get good grades via genuine learning and application and not cheating.
7. Be a role model for the child to emulate.
8. Appreciate every tiny effort of the child instead of scolding them in case of unfavorable results. Use phrases like ‘great job’, ‘great effort’, ‘you worked so hard to achieve this’ etc.
9. Ensure that the child is sufficiently disciplined to execute his school work with integrity but make sure to not become overly strict with them. This can cause them to resort to illicit means to achieve the hard-set goals that you would have hav set for them.