Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

In twenty-first century, there is an obvious tremendous frenzy to move towards

dealing with technology in every aspect of man’s life. With the information age merging

with the tech-boom, the world saw a rapid convergence towards technology usage across

borders at a global scale. Education was no different.

Education with the use of Technology is E- Learning, or electronic learning, this

is the type of learning that is formalizing the relay of information to a class through the

help of electronic resources. The use of computers and the Internet forms the major

component of E-learning. It can also be termed as a channel that will enable the

transfer of skills and knowledge, and the delivery of education is made to a large number

of recipients at the same or different times, despite the changes, the presence of cheating

is still present, whilst cheating and plagiarism in education are not new phenomena,

technology is widely viewed as having a great contribution to its increase, however as

part of a multi-faceted approach to addressing the issue, technology may also have an

important role in preventing cheating. If it happens with the use of certain devices it is

called, E- cheating. (Merall, et. Al, 2018).

In South Korea, due to the pandemic, they have implemented strict guidelines to

follow in order to prevent the wide spread of the virus. This also include the changes on

their educational setting, even though online schooling is not new in South Korea,

majority is still affected. An article was published about a group 91 of medical

undergraduate students in Inha University that were caught cheating during their

midterm examination. The students gathered in groups of two to nine people, according to the
school, or used messenger services such as KakaoTalk or Telegram and phone calls to share

answers. The students changed the wording of their answers to avoid getting caught. The cheating

incident was reported by those students who didn’t participate in such act. The students who

participated were given zero point as punishment for their misconduct.

In Philippines, the Acads Helper, an account on a social media platform called

Twitter exist. This account claims to help students who are stressed with workloads,

struggling with deadlines and are tired of substandard work. Its services range from

essay writing (including scripts, book amd movie reviews, etc.) to editing videos and

doing posters for fees of P500 and below. The very existence of this account were given

critics and raised concerns about supposedly promoting “academic dishonesty” and

“incompetence” among Filipino students who are supposed to do their own tasks. A

lawyer and academic similarly said that the account could be enabling “intellectual

dishonesty”. This can easily be abused by the students, which is not helping them nor

the society. It is like breeding mediocrity and incompetence when teachers are doing

their best to breed excellence and passion.

In the local context, at Tagum City there has not been any study related to this.

The researchers have observed that during the new learning method, the online class, it

is hard to identify if the students do really cheat or does not during quiz and tests. The

main enemy that the teachers of the English Language won’t be able to easily conquer.

To date, there have been many researches conducted about the teacher’s

perception on the thought of e-cheating, but mostly on the idea of plagiarism. In

addition, there has not been a study conducted that explores the perception of the

English teacher’s perception on e-cheating. It is for these reasons that we, the
researchers, decided to conduct this qualitative phenomenological study in one of the

Private schools of the Division of Davao del Norte which is situated in Tagum City.

It is significant to provide quality information that would talk about the

perceptions of the teachers towards this issue of e-cheating. This concern can affect the

teacher’s strategy upon how he or she can take action on this form of academic

dishonesty. Through this study, English Teachers and other persons that contribute

language learning would be given relevant idea and valuable suggestions as to how they

would deal to the challenges the academic dishonesty provides.