Cheating can have far-reaching effects both for the cheater and for other students. When students regularly cheat, honest students are at a disadvantage. A classroom grading curve could be disrupted, or a professor might end up with inaccurate information about how much her students are learning. Students who cheat deprive themselves of the opportunity to master basic knowledge and might find that they are lacking important skills they need for future classes or for their careers.
Cheating is any attempt to use someone else's work or break classroom rules to improve performance. Sharing homework answers, collaborating to disrupt the grading curve and sharing test questions with students who have not yet taken an exam are examples of cheating. Cheating also includes plagiarism, which might be accidental or intentional, and can range from failing to cite a source to lifting an entire paper from another person. Covertly consulting books or notes during an exam and stealing answers off of another student's paper are also forms of cheating.
Every college and professor has the ability to establish policies for preventing cheating. Some professors, for example, run all papers through a plagiarism checker or require students to take exams in a closely monitored classroom. Some schools enact honor codes barring students from cheating, and students must sign these codes when they enter school or before they take each exam. Professors who have taught a class for many years are often particularly good at detecting cheating because they know the capabilities of their students and can detect a paper or project that is far outside of a student's abilities or that deviates wildly from her normal work.
The penalties for cheating are often partially dependent upon the type of cheating. Cheating on a minor assignment such as a homework worksheet, for example, might be punished less harshly than plagiarizing a paper or cheating on a final exam. Some schools punish first-time cheaters less harshly than frequent cheaters. Penalties might include failing the assignment on which the student has cheated, failing a class, suspension, expulsion or dropping a student from all of her classes for the semester. Many schools note incidents of cheating in a student's transcript, and this can affect his ability to transfer schools and even get a job.