Before you go out and purchase your teen a new smartphone you might want to reconsider your decision. You might want to think twice before spending that much money on a phone, and for many good reasons. One, it is that is a very expensive toy to be putting into the hands of kids that have by and large, too many high tech toys already. Another reason why you should think twice before getting this for your teen is the fact that more than likely they are not going to "remember" to keep it turned off while in class and then that will tempt them to chat, SMS or play games, etc. The most important one however that should bother you the most is the fact these phones give them free access to the Internet no matter where they are and can lead to any child trying and using it to cheat on school work and exams.

A national poll was taken not long ago that was called a common sense poll and some of the results should be alarming to teachers and parents. The poll showed that about 65% of the kids polled said that they had heard and seen other kids using their smartphone to get answers for their exams.

More than one third of the students that took the poll admitted that they had used their smartphones to access the Internet to get help with their in class assignments as well as answers for their tests. That is an alarming amount of kids cheating.

The more advanced our technology becomes, the easier it becomes to cheat. Using the Internet for cheating is easy to do because it is hard to track and can be completely anonymous. A couple of ways that students choose to cheat is by taking the information for a test and storing it until it is needed. And gone is the day of passing notes or looking over someone’s shoulder to cheat now they just simply send a text to someone for the answer without being heard or seen by the teacher.

One of the most alarming things to come out of this poll is that about 36% of those students that were polled didn’t think that taking exact information or plagiarizing something on the Internet for their school work was bad. And some of those students did not even see this as cheating.

Even worse half the students of who were polled really didn’t think that cheating with the smartphone was serious.

And if they aren’t cheating with the phones they are at least sending messages to their friends to warn them that a certain class was having a pop quiz, therefore taking away the element of surprise that a pop quiz is all about.

When parents were polled on who they thought were cheating, they readily admitted that they believe kids were using their phones to cheat, but their kid would never do something like that. Nothing like a little denial.

Teens claim they probably send about 400 messages a week and about 100 of those are sent while they are in school.

So if you think that your child would never do this, you might want to thing again, especially since their mentality is that they don’t think it is a bad thing and isn’t breaking any rules.