While the school is increasing in-person instruction after spring break, they are continuing to offer an online-only option to students. I certainly don’t disagree with this decision- there are many good reasons to stay home, with many students who are concerned about safety in schools or are worried about older parents or family members that they live with. What I do object to, however, are the real reasons people are choosing to opt out from in-person schooling.

I don’t know about you, but when I get put in breakout rooms with students in other AP classes, I generally hear two reasons for staying home for school- “I want to sleep in,” or, worse, something along the lines of “I want to keep cheating on tests.” The most common reasoning, however? Both of those, at the same time. I’ll admit, I don’t have any data to back this up, but I’ve heard it too many times to ignore, and I think it’d be a safe bet to say that you have too.

As a result, I was prompted to ask myself if cheating really is epidemic during this pandemic. Fortunately for me, one of my favorite podcasts, No Stupid Questions (from the Freakonomics Radio Network), recently released an episode titled “Is everyone cheating these days?” where Stephen Dubner and Angela Duckworth gave me the statistics I was curious about. While it is definitely worth your time to listen to the full episode, I figured it would be worthwhile to give you all a summary of some of the most interesting studies and statistics on cheating in schools.

One of the most shocking data points about cheating during the pandemic was reported on by Derek Newton in a Washington Post article published last August. In his article, he discussed a test proctoring service called ProctorU, which is designed to monitor students taking exams and prevent cheating. ProctorU shared data that in the 340,00 exams administered using their service January through March of 2020, cheating was caught on fewer than 1% of exams. How did this change during the COVID-19 lockdown? Of the 1.3 million exams supervised from April through June, cheating was found on 8% of exams. That’s over an 800% increase in cheating over the span of just a few months.

And you have to remember, that was when students knew full well that their every action was being watched. I imagine things certainly look different when people think they can get away with it. While I couldn’t find any data from the last year, Rutgers Business School Professor Donald McCabe conducted a survey for his 2012 book Cheating in College: Why Students Do It and What Educators Can Do about It that found that 39% of undergraduate students admitted to cheating on tests and 62% admitted to cheating on written assignments. First of all, this is survey data, when students are inclined to lie and say they have not cheated in order to feel better about themselves, and on top of that, imagine what those statistics look like now with an 800% increase in cheating! Dishonesty really does run rampant amongst the education system.

This certainly brings into question the reason cheating is so widespread. There are some obvious reasons. For one, it’s pretty easy to get away with it, especially when no one can see your house and everything that you are doing. It’s also very easy to rationalize, and tell yourself that everyone’s doing it so you’re still a good person. There is one more reason, however, that I think is quite interesting to explore.

The dictator game is a commonly cited study in which a student is given some amount of money, say $5, and is given the option of passing some amount of it on to an unknown stranger. It is often used to show that nearly all people are, on some level, altruistic. John List published a paper in 2007 titled “On the Interpretation of Giving in Dictator Games,” in which he conducted this experiment, and found that, on average, people in the control group gave $1.33 of their $5 to the mystery person. However, he experimented with several other groups, one of which was given the option to not only give, but take $5 from the other person. On average, members of this group took $2.48 from the stranger! So what does this tell us? People cheat when they have something to gain. While in the control group, the only incentive is to look like a good person, there is a new, much better incentive in List’s experimental group- more money. Just by giving them that option they lose all of the altruism they once had. And the reality is, the people in the control group were cheating as well- many of them likely only gave money because the incentive was there to look like a good person.

Why do I bring this up? What really bothers me is the conflict of interest I see in so many Naperville North seniors. The same people who are cheating presumably for the purpose of better grades are the same ones who claim to have senioritis and have no motivation to try hard in school, though, once again, I only have anecdotal evidence to back this up. I really don’t think there is that much of an incentive to cheat like those in the dictator game, so I really don’t get why you other seniors are so set on doing it.

What I am really encouraging you to do is to embrace senioritis, and come back to school after spring break. Give up on cheating to get perfect scores on your assignments if it means you come in and spend the few remaining days talking to your friends in person. Give your teachers someone to look forward to chatting with in class. The lasting memories of your friends will be much more valuable than the 10% you gained on a test because you Googled the answers. As Angela Duckworth puts it, let’s stop looking at things from a purely utilitarian standpoint to find the competitive advantage of staying home, and instead use some deontological reasoning, where we’ll find that the real best choice lies in seeing the people you can find at school.