Different Approaches to Punishment for Cheating in Schools

It is a well-known fact that the staff of every college or university cooperate in order to educate and bring up the students. Similarly, it is obvious that the students in all educational establishments are often involved in plagiarism. Therefore, there is a need for a new kind of activity for teachers and authorities, namely – the control of cheating in schools. The new task of university staff is to punish the cases of cheating in schools and prevent their occurrence in the future. Therefore, it is necessary for the students to know the basic approaches to punishing the instances of plagiarism in the leading universities of the world.

Cheating in Schools: Approaches to Treatment

Cheating in schools has reached its peak point during the last 5 years. The recent studies show, that there are almost no students left, who never tried plagiarizing in their writing tasks. What is more, cases of cheating in schools happen not only in writing essays, but also in writing course works, research, articles for publications, and even dissertations.

Such a boom in cheating in schools caused an increase in development of programs which help to detect instances of plagiarism. The main principle of such programs is to scan the document, identifying the phrases and sentences which coincide with some phrases and sentences from other sources. However, today the task of the authorities is not only to detect the cases of cheating in schools, but also punish the students for plagiarism. Thus, the different colleges and universities have different treatment of cheating in schools. Specifically:

University of Phoenix, USA punishes students accused of cheating in school by giving them additional tasks, which are obligatory to be done
Gwinnett College, USA treats the cases of cheating in school with warnings, three of which are enough for expulsion from the college
Hallmark College of Aeronautics, USA applies expulsion as the only option forstudents, who plagiarizeCentral Post College, USA gives a warning for the students who cheat, and report to the parents about the case
Missouri College, USA gives a warning to those involved in cheating in school, and strengthenscontrol over the students
University of Cambridge, UK expels the students, who have a plagiarism match index of more than 2% in their work (Note, this is after scanning by a human, since AI scores are not reliable)
University of Oxford, UK also sends down the students who were noticed to have plagiarized
Carleton University, Canada gives warnings and extra tasks for the students who prove to be involved in plagiarism
University of Bologna, Italy expels the students who are proved to be involved in cheating in school, and deprives them of the rights to enter another university

These are the approaches of only some of the higher educational establishments. Of course, there are many other universities in USA, Europe, and all over the world. In some educational establishments the students who plagiarize may get off with slight warnings or extra tasks. At the same time, other colleges prefer to expel such students. This is a traditional practice in all the most prominent universities of the world, such as Cambridge, Oxford, Bologna, etc. Therefore, the students, who go for cheating in school should be aware of the possible consequences.

Furthermore, cheating in school should be punished not only on the level of the educational establishment, but also on the level of state. However, there are no formal laws considering plagiarism at universities. This points to the need for the government to develop the regulation norms for this issue, especially taking into account the growing popularity of cheating in school.