Cheating is unfair and unjust to others. Be it a quiz a major examination or to cheat on someone meaning to be sexually unfaithful.  You can’t imagine what students the world over to do cheat, pass school, get a degree, and even graduate with honors.  At the far end of low technology, students learn sign language to send hand messages to fellow testers.  Certainly, the ancient art of codigo-making or writing down dates and formulas on a small piece of folder paper still holds water in this age of high technology.

Cheating, like lying, involves deception and dishonesty.  The difference lies in the fact that lying is basically verbal whereas cheating is nonverbal.  For example, if someone copies the answers from your test for which you have studied hard, that is cheating.  If you tell him to stop cheating and he says he is not, that is lying.  We do something evil only because we see it from the perspective of goodness.  The means, however, does not justify the end.

There are several arguments for cheating one of these is surviving and winning.  Students cheat to get high grades, or to get on the good side of peers, who see cheating as something in or cool.  An old expression says it all, “Better to cheat than to repeat” other argument is “everybody does it, cheating is alright as long as you don’t get caught, being caught is what’s bad, and not cheating itself.

The controversial licensure exam for nurses in 2006 comes to mind where the examinees ordered to retake the test to clean up, once and for all, the tarnished image of the Filipino nurses. The leakage, surely, had cast doubts on the professional capability of those who passed.  Where professional qualification or licensing is concerned, cheating poses serious effects.  Cheating in an exam on anatomy for example does not seen seriously harmful.   What’s alarming and not just surprising, is the finding that even valedictorians are just as likely to cheat as the laggards.  The survey says girls have closed gap with boys.

But when such student becomes a surgeon and neglects to perform an important procedure during surgery because he missed learning about it in medical school, he could endanger one’s life.

Cheating used to be just social trend but has now become part of a popular culture.  The history and etymology of cheating derives from the French word ‘escheat’ first mentioned in 1375, to mean ‘that which falls to one’ it was only in 1440 that its meaning evolved into being ‘deprived unfairly’. To cheat on someone, meaning to be sexually unfaithful was first recorded in 1934.