In my high school, cheaters were very common. At first I really hated these people and couldn’t understand how someone could be so desperate for a grade that they compromised their integrity. After stepping back and getting to know people better, I realized that this wasn’t uniformly the case. Cheaters could generally be classified into two groups:
Bored students who just desperately want to get through a class while doing a minimal amount of work. They usually struggle with writing and end up bombing the test. These cheaters are usually so lazy that they get caught by themselves pretty quickly, and don’t have to be reported. Once a guy tried to turn in a writing assignment that was literally copy-pasted from a Wikipedia article. Not only did he forget to change the font formatting, but all the blue hyperlinks were left in as well. He actually thought the teacher wouldn’t notice.
High-achieving students under a lot of pressure from family, administrators, and a highly competitive school culture. One of my friends in high school had an archetypal “Tiger Mom” who would constantly berate her, say she wished she had never been born, and threaten her with all sorts of things (i.e., sabotaging her other school projects unless she got an A on her next exam). Once she was doing an in-class essay test when her computer glitched and lost all her work, so she had to stay after school to make it up. Her mother stormed in and started screaming at her (in the middle of the test) for not getting it right the first time, and wouldn’t listen to the teacher or the librarian when they explained that the situation was not her fault. I was not surprised to learn later on that she occasionally plagiarized assignments. If I saw something like this now I would talk to them first before going to the administration, because if they have an abusive home life I would not want the problems to get worse by getting the school to put a black mark on their disciplinary record. However, if they were really unrepentant about what they were doing and saw nothing wrong with it, I would have no problem with turning such a person in.
The issue, in my opinion, is the grading system. It discourages students from doing any more than what is absolutely necessary to complete an assignment, and if they are piled on with too much work (as today’s students often are) then they are likely to resort to less ethical means to complete it. I don’t think this makes cheating OK, but I understand why students cheat. I advocate a “three strikes you’re out” policy, tempered with the opportunity for the student to explain the circumstances that led them to cheat. A student who cheats is hurting the teacher, themself, the other students, and the reputation of the school. It’s a habit that needs to be nipped in the bud before it grows out of control.
lmao, one time I helped a friend cheat. We got our marks back and I found out that he had done better than me, because the marker(another student) forgot to mark a question. So he starts bragging and I’m like: “You stupid, I helped you cheat!” The teacher overhears this and we both get cut 10 marks, I was lower than I initially started. I’m not gonna say how this changed my life and what not because it didn’t. I don’t cheat(as i do not have a phone) but I do come as close as possible to cheating. For example, I find practice tests from online on a specific unit or for my Cisco networking class, we had a practice online test(same as the real test) where one can see his/her errors; I would always try to get everything wrong. So do I cheat? No, but I flirt with the boundaries and I would not consider it detrimental to my abilities, in my senior year, I have the highest grades(without doing any of the stuff i just mentioned). You guys have to realize that some kids have the pressure from a parent to do certain things, and in that moment of time, it seems very harmless. You guys are against it, but what if you were in that same exact position?
I know it can be pretty irritating to see someone who cheats get a better grade than you, but I mean what can we do? I know someone whom everybody said she cheats; I’ve never saw it with my own eyes because I don’t really pay attention to her, but that’s what ppl said. And since she is so cocky about being #1 on our class rank, ppl just hate her even more. But honestly, I don’t really care because I just focus on myself and what I do.
Can’t do anything about them cheating but wanna beat the cheater? Just study harder and Ensure highest marks on all your tests and quizzes so even when they cheat you won’t fall behind.
Personally, I’m weaker at English. If I had cheated on English essays instead of working for it, I wouldn’t get better at English. This would snowball badly, as I would have to constantly cheat, and I wouldn’t know the basics. More cheating= more chances getting caught= you should have just done the work.
The problem is that letter grades and GPA are the commonly accepted proxy for learning in school that can be evaluated in volume (i.e. for thousands of students applying to colleges, graduate or professional school, jobs). Some colleges have done full written evaluations instead of or in addition to grades, but that tends not to scale to large numbers of students. Recommendations can only be supplemental, since they are typically only from a small number of student-selected recommenders, rather than all or a large sample of instructors (of course, recommendations from all instructors would be the same as full written evaluations for each course).
My view is change the picture! Why an African American (presumably)? It’s not the demographic reputed to be cheating. Someone purposefully used this picture and its wrong! CC clean up your act!
EDIT: Nevermind, I figured it out. You’re talking about the photo that CC has in the featured thread box. However, this really has nothing to do with this thread and theres nothing wrong with the picture. It shows a student studying.
In addition, there’s is no specific demographic that is reputed to be cheating. You’re making this racial when it isn’t.
Last year in English II Honors, one of my classmates asked to look at my homework for Great Expectations. He explained it to me as though he would be using my work as a reference to merely check his work, so I told him sure as long as he didn’t copy my work. I get called into my teacher’s room two days later and I am getting the death stare. She proceeds to tell me that she noticed that mine and my classmate’s work was the same. She then asks me what happened. I continue to tell her that I did not let him see my work with the intentin of copying it. She tells me that he confessed this fact and vouched for it. She then says that I would still be receiving a 0% on it, but it didn’t affect my A at the time so it didn’t matter. From this point on, I did not let anyone near my work unless I got to see what they were doing with it.
I seem to be a bit of a hypocrite though because I have looked over once or twice at a neighbor’s iClicker device for AP Psych, so I should be a bad guy here.
@SamRam This isn’t a racial issue here.
In response to the question, cheaters do not always win. In my AP Gov class this year, on an FRQ, there was a part about casework. There was also a substitute, so half the class looked up the definition of casework. Except it was the wrong definition. And since half the class put down the same definition, half the class failed the FRQs.
Honestly I think cheating here and there, like a question or two on a quiz or test is acceptable. Even the smartest kids blank out a few things some of the time. However I understand what you are saying. There i a girl in my grade who totally cheats on everything and her mom is so proud of her when really she has no idea. That bothers me a lot, and it bothers me even more when she gets awards for academic stuff that doesn’t even make sense.
If you honestly think you are so entitled to “success” that you will cheat instead of putting in even a minimal amount of effort, then yes, you do deserve to be outed to the administration.
No, it’s not “acceptable.” Yeah, sometimes people who study and now the material blank and forget an answer. But that doesn’t make it acceptable. It’s not like, “oh, well you’re pretty smart, so it’s okay that you did it because normally you would know the answer.” If you don’t know the answer, you guess and risk getting it wrong.
I consider myself to be pretty laid back, and I don’t care what people do, but I really hate cheating. And to whoever said that everyone’s cheated at least some point in their life on a test or quiz, I have not. I can guarantee that a few other people I know haven’t either. Believe it or not, some people would rather take a lower grade over compromising their morals.
Morals are fine and dandy, but also very arbitrary and limiting. I see no need to strictly follow any set of rules other than that which I am legally bounded by. In a case in which following morals would result in an equal result, then I would so so; but if doing so put me at any disadvantage, I would ignore them in a heartbeat. Morals serve to improve one’s quality of life by imposing a higher-leveled guideline above social or legal rules; thus, most of the derived benefit comes from one’s own pleasure and not any external factor, and is a case such as this, if following them produced a loss greater than the pleasure I obtain, it is simply illogical, in my opinion, to do so.
I totally get how you feel. It just sucks to see everyone around me cheating because then I feel like we’re not on a level playing field when I’m not willing to cheat.
^ Yep. I actually had an interview on the same day after one of my AP exams, and I was quite distracted and nervous about the interview - couldn’t quite focus and do as good as I would have liked on the exam… That might just be a “me” problem, but that was just to say that a lot of factors can play into doing poorly on the AP exam, not just cheating.
