Cheating

‘’ I have seen people copy and paste when it comes to internet assignments’’. – Mrs. Brafman

Cheating these days is an issue most teachers have to deal with and is more common than you think.  Here are some teachers and their most common cheating situations.

” I have had someone take off the water bottle label and write the answers for a quiz”. -Ms. Duran
”I have not witnessed or seen anyone cheat in my class”.-Mrs. Garcia

 

”The common cheating method is plagiarism where they copy and paste things on to their essays or homework”.- Mr. Ryan

 

 

 

” The most cheating is plagiarism”. – Mr. Paulus

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grades, rather than education, have become the major focus of many students now more than ever, as stated by www.nocheating.org. And so, why do we do it? When we commit an act that involves cheating, we’re involving ourselves in an unfair advantage we’ve received by dishonesty. Do you and I cheat because we feel like we’re pressured to succeed? Do we cheat because cheating is so common that we don’t even think of it as cheating anymore? Or do students cheat because they’re just lazy? Depending on you are your opinion, you may believe all or none of those reasons are true. But we all can agree that if this cheating trend continues, our culture and our generation could be in serious trouble. Because, cheating can affect our lives.

As presented from the article “Why Cheating Hurts Students Now and in Their Future” by Laura Hanby Hudgens, she states, “It’s clear from talking to my students that most of them do not see themselves as dishonest. They don’t even see themselves as cheaters – rather just kids who cheat in school. They don’t consider that the habits and work ethic that they are forming, or failing to form, now are likely to be the ones they will carry into adulthood. When we discuss workplace integrity, many of them don’t realize that slacking off on the job is actually a form of cheating, of stealing even. As a generation of cheaters, they seem to have developed the mindset that if they can get away with it, it’s not really wrong. “. The quote tells that we as students are likely to carry the habits of cheating so much, that we’ll be doing it in our adulthood too, and that we wouldn’t even notice or care.

According to www.plagiarism.org , in a survey of 24,000 students at 70 high schools, Donald McCabe (Rutgers University) found that 64 percent of students admitted to cheating on a test, 58 percent admitted to plagiarism and 95 percent said they participated in some form of cheating, whether it was on a test, plagiarism or copying homework. Today it is almost all above average college and high/middle school bound students who are cheating than in the past.

Cheating devalues our education, but cheating increases due to pressure for perfect grades. Trying to be the perfect student any great college-especially still in high school, can be very overwhelming, believe me. Not only does it make school really disengaging, it makes other feel in competition 25/8. But cheating for an easy shortcut isn’t good either. “Our educational system must stop treating kids like sources of data to be mined and instead instill in them a passion for learning, for true education.” (Hudgens).

-Kattie Zavala