Cheating in School by Armando Herrera

While the standard for education increases so does the pressure among students to do well. Within the past 50 years cheating a dramatically increased. Cheating is said to be increasing because of pressure for good grades and increased competition among students. Surveys given in the 1940’s estimated about 20% of college students cheated in some way. Today it is estimated that 75%-98% of college students cheat on papers, tests, etc. There are significantly more reports of cheating going on in high school and college rather than elementary schools. This is probably because younger students don’t comprehend the concept of what cheating really is and to them telling a teacher is just “snitching” or “tattling”.  Online classes make it extremely easy for student to cheat by taking tests or quizzes with others in the virtual class. But who is to blame? Are students getting lazier or are colleges burdening students with unfair work loads. The way most college courses are ran, students don’t learn the material the class is intended to teach. Intstead students have been trained their entire academic career to simply learn how to beat the class.  So students continue to find ways to pass classes even if it requires them to go against the academic honesty policy, which is seen as a complete joke by most of the student body. Cheating is such a major concern that colleges spend millions of dollars to try to fight the issue by using companies such as turnitin.com. Most students including myself think this is completely unfair. Colleges are paying these companies with our tuition. So we (the students) are paying a company to use our papers to prevent anyone from plagiarizing, and these companies are making serious money off our hard work. Students whose papers are submitted should get some compensation from a company making money off their work.  As cheating continues so will the efforts to suppress it, but as students are continuously loaded with work it is easy to see why it could be a tempting alternative.

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