By Rimah Babiker, STEM Teacher & Educational Advocate

In a system where progress is measured by grades, not growth, it’s no wonder students are increasingly turning to cheating.

Most children don’t cheat because they lack morals. They cheat because they’ve been taught — explicitly or implicitly — that grades are everything, and that effort, growth, or genuine understanding come second to performance on a piece of paper.

In this high-pressure environment, we’re not rewarding resilience or curiosity. We’re rewarding short-term memory and the ability to perform under stress. We tell pupils to work hard — but we evaluate them on how well they perform in a few high-stakes moments. This mismatch creates a dangerous message: that results matter more than the road taken to achieve them.

💡 Why Some Children Cheat:

• They’ve worked hard but fear their efforts won’t show in the final grade.
• They feel their intelligence is judged by a narrow metric, not their actual understanding.
• They don’t want to disappoint teachers or parents who equate success with marks.
• They see others rewarded for outcomes, not honesty.

Cheating is not always about laziness or defiance. Often, it’s about survival in a system that values product over process.

If a pupil revises for 100 hours and scores a C, while another copies an answer and gets an A, the current system praises the latter. This isn’t just unfair — it’s educationally and morally corrosive.

🔄 The Solution? Rethinking How We Define Success:

• Shift the culture: Celebrate persistence, improvement, and effort.
• Reimagine assessment: Include coursework, oral explanation, and project work alongside exams.
• Normalize struggle: Make it clear that learning isn’t linear, and that mistakes are part of mastery.
• Protect integrity: Help students see that cheating cheats themselves — not just the system.

We need to build classrooms where students feel seen for who they are — not just the numbers they produce.

Let’s stop teaching children that a grade defines their worth — and start showing them that character, curiosity, and commitment are the true signs of progress.