Dive Brief:

• According to a survey from McAfee, 29% of U.S. teenagers admit having cheated via tech devices and over twice as many say their peers have done so, eSchool News reports.
• The June survey of 3,902 students between the ages of 14 to 18 included 1,201 from the U.S. with the remainder coming from Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, and eSchool News reports that U.S. students made up the highest portion of students who said they had cheated or visited sites that were blocked.
• Additionally, the U.S. saw a higher percentage of students reporting that they have experienced cyberbullying (30%), and half said it began prior to high school.

Dive Insight:

While devices have greatly enhanced educational resources in classrooms nationwide, they've also raised concerns about academic honesty. If exams are delivered digitally, it conceivably becomes easier for students to cheat via the internet, messaging apps and so on — and the data would seem to back that up. However, a number of device management firms offer software to help mitigate these concerns, allowing an educator to lock students' screens or monitor what they're doing during testing time.

That said, the issue should also call attention to current assessment approaches. A student can easily cheat on items requiring rote memorization — like multiple choice or fill-in-the-blank — but doing so becomes much more difficult on an exam requiring more critical or creative thinking. If students are tasked with, say, writing a detailed essay using facts gained during a unit or throughout the school year to back up their point of view on a position, cheating becomes much more difficult. And, in that case, they can also be encouraged to utilize approved resources for reference purposes in crafting their answers, revisiting the information they should have learned while putting deeper thought into the context around it.