Cheating has a past, and cheating has a future. Educators might have once thought that college and university cheating would gradually wane as technology improved detection and ethics instruction improved student character. Today, after the pandemic unleashed a tsunami of distance-learning academic cheating, those dreams look remarkably naive. Both the past and the predictable future of academic cheating point to more college and university academic misconduct charges. If you face academic misconduct charges at your school, don't fool around. Don't let academic misconduct charges ruin everything for which you are working in your educational program. Instead, retain national academic administrative defense attorney-advisor Joseph D. Lento and the Lento Law Firm's college misconduct defense team. Get the skilled and experienced help you need to defend and defeat academic misconduct charges.

Cheating's Past

College and university cheating has a storied past. Look back at any decade of American higher education, and you can see new cheating trends, methods, and major scandals. A recent article on the top cheating scandals of the last thirty years includes 1992's Naval Academy cheating ring involving 134 students, 1999's University of Minnesota scandal in which an academic advisor admitted writing over four-hundred papers for student-athletes, 2007's sex for grades scandal at appropriately named Diablo Valley College, 2007's Indiana University School of Dentistry scandal catching half of the second year class, and 2012's Harvard University cheating scandal catching 125 students cheating on an exam in a single class. The article could have included 2021's Air Force Academy scandal expelling twenty-two cadets and putting hundreds more on cheating probation.

Pandemic Impacts

Cheating indeed has a storied ancient and recent past. It also has a sordid present. The pandemic and its go-home, stay-at-home, remote instruction spawned a cheating epidemic. One well-researched article reported halfway through the pandemic that cheating had risen by fifty percent, doubled, tripled, or otherwise soared at schools like Columbia University, Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Georgia, California State University Los Angeles, and Ohio State University. Those schools were certainly not alone in facing the cheating outbreak. Remote exam proctoring, new online instant-answer services like Chegg, and other challenges and technological temptations of studying on one's computer at home alone spurred the cheating epidemic on top of the virus's pandemic.

Beyond the Pandemic

If the pandemic taught educators anything about cheating, the lesson is surely that cheating is here to stay. Cheating will remain in the future. New surveillance technologies won't be a perfect or maybe even a solid solution to curb cheating. Students and the private services that support or tempt them will likely remain a step ahead of whatever new measures colleges and universities adopt to control, catch, and discourage cheating. But the corollary lesson for students is that cheaters still get caught. Every student going through every one of the above scandals, and any other cheating disciplinary proceeding, rues the day they decided to take the fatal shortcut. Don't succumb to the temptation.

If you face false, unfair, exaggerated, or other academic misconduct charges at your college or university, get the skilled and experienced attorney-advisor help you need to preserve your education. National academic administrative defense attorney-advisor Joseph D. Lento of the Lento Law Firm has helped hundreds of college and university students nationwide defend and defeat academic misconduct charges. Call 888.535.3686 or go online now to retain attorney Lento.