Cheating in school has happened for years. It used to be with crib notes or a T9 graphing calculator.
But the art of cheating has moved to a more digital world: with smart technology and apps.
Want to define a vocabulary word? There’s an app for that.
Learn the flags of every country? There’s an app for that.
Solve a math problem? Yep, an app for that, too.
And it’s all stored in that device you can’t get out of your kid’s hands.
That device is powering their future, but is it hindering their success in school? Here are five ways kids today cheat using smart technology.
1. Math apps
Remember the day you realized that the answers to your homework were listed in the back of that heavy math textbook?
That was a good day.
Remember how shortly after that your math teacher said she’d only give credit if you showed all of your work and it ruined your good day?
Nowadays, kids have access to an app that can jump this hurdle. A slew of math apps, such as PhotoMath, Yup, and Socratic, can solve an equation with all of steps. All a kid has to do is snap a photo of the equation and copy the steps shown in the app.
2. Group chats
Those days spent studying in the library with a friend? They still happen—but they are digital and they include a lot more people in your kid’s second-period class.
Group chats enable kids to share answers by texting the number of the question and the answer (i.e. 1B, 2C) into a group with their entire class. One student even admitted that the smartest kids in the class often share the answers for those who are struggling.
Smartwatches can do almost anything a smartphone can do—including cheating.
Some teachers ask kids to store their phones out of sight during class or test, but most don’t require students to take their smartwatches off.
"The Apple Watches, you can pull up pictures,” high school senior Isabella Garofolo said. “So a kid turned his Apple Watch and he had all the (vocabulary) definitions and was just breezing through the quiz.”
4. Translator apps
Learning a foreign language can be tough, especially all those conjugations.
Translation programs, like Google Translate and iTranslate, can turn a long Spanish project into a much shorter assignment.
However, even a computer translation isn’t completely accurate since certain words can be taken out of context.
Sometimes shortcuts are only open to those who are willing to pay a price. Fiverr, named after the colloquial term for a five-dollar bill, is a service where you can pay somebody to do just about anything, including homework.
© 2018 KHOU-TV