Cheating has always been an issue in schools. No longer does cheating involve stealing your teacher’s answer key, scanning it onto a small paper, sticking it to the bottom of your shoe, and looking at it when test time comes around. With the advancement of technology, students are now able to cheat easily and quickly, with few risks of getting caught.

Cheating has increased as technology has advanced. Now all answers, and sometimes even answer keys, are plastered online for the world to see and for students to cheat off of.

With the new age of smart phones, students now can hide their devices under their desk to look up the answers to each test question. According to U.S. News, “nearly 1 in 4 students thinks that accessing notes on a cellphone, texting friends with answers, or using a phone to search the Internet for answers during a test isn’t cheating.”

“Many young people don’t realize these behaviors are unethical because so many are immersed in the culture of free information available on the internet,” states ikeepsafe.org.

But there is some cheating that goes unnoticed, such as cheating on homework. This cheating happens in the privacy of one’s house, hidden away for no one to see. And teachers cannot always catch this cheating, because they assume the cheater just knew all the correct answers.

Technology can also help non-cheaters, though. Those students that study may have the intuition to film or take pictures of those that cheat, and then show the evidence to the teacher later. (Trust me, it works.) The reward for actually studying is the grade, but if someone cheats the system and doesn’t get caught, how is that fair to anyone?

Cheating has come to make many students lazy and unwilling to learn and/or study. Cheating is an easy access to making it look like you learned something. But it always comes back to bite you in the butt, because when you are eventually caught and forced to redo the assignment the knowledge will not be there.

In the end, cheaters will always be caught. If not caught by their teachers or peers, they will be caught by their guilty conscience. Remember: getting a zero from being caught on a test or assignment is worse than getting even twenty percent on a test or assignment you weren’t prepared for.