During the past three years of my high-school career, I’ve been to three different high schools in three completely different states, each with different ideas on religious tolerances, racial injustices, and acceptance - or disbelief - towards teenage behavior. One thing that has not changed, however, is how much we teenagers, as a group, cheat. I’m not talking about cheating on your boyfriend/girlfriend, although that certainly has its place with our generation, but cheating on tests and homework.
If I had a dollar for every person who’s asked to copy my homework, I’d be able to walk out of Alameda High School right now. But the most bizarre scenario for me is witnessing a majority of my peers brag about their high GPA’s; but what’s behind those 3.0’s? Somebody else’s work. Doing your own nightly homework assignment, especially when it comes to monotonous History or Math assignments that either have a right or wrong answer, is very uncommon. I’ve seen and been apart of groups of people, who rotate nightly work, to limit the amount of homework they had to drudgingly do.
The other day I was taking a Math test; Math is definitely not my easiest subject, but I had my notes and had studied relatively hard, so I was semi-excited to pour myself into this quiz. And then I see the guy sitting diagonally in front of me with a half-torn sheet of paper hidden between his butt and his seat look up at my teacher, and slyly peek at the paper from under his arm. I thought, “Okay, he’s cheating. Hasn’t been the first time I’ve seen this…” but for some reason, it got to me. I’m not going to deny that I haven’t copied an assignment or glanced inconspicuously at the persons’ test sitting next to me, but I think the advancement of cheating has created many new ways to cheat, and get away with it.
Let’s look at websites: Sparknotes, for example, is a great help to students; however, I wonder if students using this website blurs the line between cheating. We may not be copying an essay word-for-word, but I think going onto these websites stunts our ability to drive emotional inspiration from our own creative energies. We see a clever line that we otherwise wouldn’t have thought of writing for ourselves, and suddenly we’re forming an essay around this idea.
Also, since we’ve entered the electronic age, many students have been riding the wave that is teachers’ naiveté. Yes, a lot of students ARE sincerely listening to their Ipods to promote concentration during a test; but what about those students who flick through the web to get the answers? Personally, I have always thought this was just too much work, but after seeing more than one person doing this on more than one occasion, I’ve had to wonder: can us teenagers be given that inch? We want to fight oppression, and we don’t want to be kept in an environment comprised of ugly uniforms and ruler-whipping authoritators. But I do believe that some teenagers, when given an inch, take a mile: “cheating is wrong” sounds like a broken record, like something that has been preached thousands of times over. But why mess with a classic?
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