Beware of High Tech Cheating Techniques and Their Effects on Engineering Education

Cheating is an immoral way of achieving higher graders in the schools by breaking the rules and regulations and gaining an unfair advantage in this competitive environment.This dishonest behavior has been becoming a serious issue with the technological developments in many fields, and threatening the educational systems in engineering, science, fine art, law, nursing, medicine and pharmacies.Approximately, 70% of the public school students in the U.S. admitted that they were involved in direct and/or indirect cheating actions during the exams, homework, term projects, reports, papers and presentations using a variety of cheating techniques.These include all kinds of using cell phones, camera phones, ear phones, MP3 players, graphing calculators, iPad, texting devices, monitoring devices, multifunctional watches, etc.These issues are more curtail for the online courses, which have been gaining much popularity worldwide.In the present study, we have evaluated many of these high tech cheating systems and devices that have been a potential threat to the engineering education, and reported the possible ways of improper use of these items in the colleges.This study offers some opportunities for the faculty members, teachers and lecturers to take actions, prevent such incidences and increase the quality of the engineering education.