Cheating in Highschool by Katie

Cheating in Highschool by Katie - August 2018 Scholarship Essay

“Would you do it for a Scooby snack”, Daphne said in the dark outsides of a haunted mansion. Scooby and Shaggy, trembling from fright, have a change of heart and decide to accept her offer in exchange for going inside. Her gift has granted them more than just a snack, but rather confidence. Scooby and Shaggy needed a physical incentive to complete a task that should have been morally rewarding - the same way students need class ranks to obsess over and grades that are calculated inorganically when the thought of gaining an education should be the reward. Scooby-Doo and Shaggy may seem irrelevant, but their plight may be very similar to students own plight to achieve academic success, even if that includes being dishonest with their work ethic. With grade point averages (GPA) and standardized testing scores viewed by students nationwide as being overall more important than an understanding of a concept, many students feel it the only option to ensure a successful future. Although cheating may seem morally wrong, the possible payoff of better grades and glorification can cause students to put moral aside and begin to cheat to compete.
Cheating is introduced to many humans from a young age. Whether stealing extra money in a game of Monopoly, taking a headstart in a race or changing answers on a quiz, the more times one cheats when they are younger the more normalized it will become in their mind. The normalization of cheating sets a reference point of where it is morally acceptable to cheat and when it is not. The older one gets, the more it seems cheating is glorified and revered. After cheating on a school-issued assessment and getting away with it, it is thought of as common practice to tell friends, deciding as a group who is the more accomplished cheater.  Clever phrases such as ‘Free Brady’ and game highlight reels of players rolling around pretending to be hurt to gain a call for their team are plastered all over social media and websites. These social media platforms play a large role in the promotion of dishonesty. On platforms such as Instagram and Twitter, adolescents boast about which classroom teachers are easy to cheat with. On the social media platform YouTube, there are over 2,300,000 results for videos with information and techniques on how to cheat in school. These videos have received more than four billion views (YouTube). This staggering statistic shows that magnitude of how many people worldwide are putting forth the effort to find ways to cheat on school-related assignments.
Cheating is present in nearly every high school in America as well.  In a 2018 survey conducted on students who are in their junior at Blackstone Valley Regional Vocational Technical High School (BVT), 50 males and 50 females were asked regarding their personal cheating habits.  During this survey, 100% of students admitted to cheating on a homework assignment in one way or another within the past six months and 82% admitted to cheating at least two quiz-weighted assessments per week (Houskeeper). Using the above data, if a teacher gave their class a quiz and had 24 students in their class, on average 20 of those 24 students could have cheated on the quiz and all 24 may have cheated on that week's homework. If the 20/24 students who cheated on the quiz looked up the answers on a smartphone and received a perfect score but the remaining four honest students got a lesser score, the teacher unknowingly punishes the students who honestly completed the quiz and rewards the students who were academically dishonest. On the next quiz, many of the same 20 students will cheat again, seeing as though their previous cheating efforts successfully paid off. In addition, some of the once honest students may convert to cheating on the next quiz due to the fact that they now have a lower grade point average than the rest of the class. This vicious cycle has the potential to continue until the whole class is cheating. There are such a high number of adolescents nationwide cheating on test and quizzes, that it seems the real people being cheated are the students trying to be academically honest. Now more than ever, there is a trend that “struggling students...cheat to survive...but more and more, there are students at the top who cheat to thrive” (Pérez-Peña). With exorbitant amounts of pressure placed on students, especially high achieving ones, to succeed, pressure quickly builds and causes students to look for shortcuts.
In a classroom setting, teachers can play an important role in preventing cheating. Teachers can mix up the order answers are listed in on multiple choice quizzes or they can make more tests in the open response styles. The teacher can also create barriers out of folders, wood, or other material to discourage peering eyes. All these preventative measures and more can be implemented in an attempt to ensure academic honesty and integrity.   With the increasing prevalence of cheating and the seemingly never-ending academic dishonesty of students, many more students would have gotten away with cheating if it wasn't for meddling teachers.