It is difficult to fathom what others think, but my opinion in regard to the given topic is adamant. I believe that making the exam more difficult is the best option to prevent students from cheating on their tests for two reasons which I will explore in the following essay.
To begin with, telling parents to monitor their children while they are working on their assignments is not the realistic option these days. To be specific, parents are living in a world of meritocracy and they suffer from tight schedules. Therefore, in modern days, parents can not spend time with their children the whole day and monitor their children effectively. Thus, I believe the most realistic option is to make the exam difficult to cheat. For example, I will give an example of myself to elucidate my point. When I was a primary school student, my mother and father both were busy working for their companies to make money. Thus, I need to spend most of my time with my dog and wait for my parents the whole day since they came back home at night. Unfortunately, they could not focus solely on me and did not know much about me. From this experience, I believe that telling parents to monitor their children doing their assignments is not possible in our competitive society.
On top of that, Increasing penalties on cheating is not a good way to help students not to cheat because they are smart enough to trick their teachers. To explain, even with the increased penalty, students will not be punished if they are not caught by teachers or their parents. The fact that it is highly demanding for one teacher to monitor the whole class, students who cheat sometimes cannot be caught by their teacher. In this way, the situation gets worse. Eventually, students will not only learn that cheating is the easiest way to improve their academic performance but also develop a more knotty way to cheat on their tests not to be caught. For instance, the experience of my friend YoonSik, a middle school teacher, can be a perfect example of what I contend. Last month, to prevent his students from cheating on their tests, he imposed a demanding penalty on cheating such as cleaning the classroom for a month. However, the result was devastating. Since he could not monitor the whole class exclusively, some students got A on their tests while cheating and other students started to cheat on their following tests. Even if it was a short period, he learned from the experience that increasing the penalty is not the effective way to prevent students from cheating and might make the matters worse.
To sum up, I believe that my explanations above sufficiently prove that making the exam more difficult to cheat is the best option to prevent students from cheating on their tests. Obviously, the significance of limits on monitoring one’s child and hardships on prevailing every single bad attitude cannot be overemphasized enough.