Cheating is a pernicious problem that most teachers deal with at some point. In her research, Stanford senior lecturer Denise Pope found that out of thousands of juniors and seniors surveyed only five percent did not cheat. It's hard for teachers to catch cheating, but when they do trust is broken, students are penalized and no one ends up happy. In her Atlantic article, Jessica Lahey explains how she has begun to shoulder some of the blame when her students cheat and describes how creating a culture of learning based on mastery instead of test scores helps solve the problem.
"My teaching methods and classroom habits are often as much to blame as their response to them," writes Lahey. "If my teaching practices create an atmosphere in which students resort to cheating rather than rely on their own hard work and discovery, I'm doing something wrong."