Cheaters really hurt those who play fair
January 5, 2009
By Carla Mokin
Hall Monitor Carla Mokin Liberty High School
Whether you’ve “accidentally” caught a glance of someone else’s poker hand, or you peered over the shoulder of the kid sitting in front of you during a calculus test, you’ve likely cheated.
These are not the most serious cases. But the kind of cheating that I see daily is damaging to those individuals who do it; this apathetic attitude toward cheating is eating away at the collective conscience of my peers.
When the person sitting next to me in chemistry has the answers to the final exam programmed into his $120 graphing calculator, it adversely affects me in more than one way. It’s unfair, because despite the fact that I actually studied, this knucklehead is going to get a better grade. And by choosing to cheat, he has become another step in my own desensitization toward cheating.
The more often students are exposed to cheaters, the more trivial it starts to seem. Almost every day, a girl in my Advanced Placement psychology class feverishly copies large portions of her homework from someone else — the same assignment I spent more than an hour on the night before. This girl is really smart, at the top of her class. Why does she cheat? After being surrounded by cheaters for the last decade or so of her life, she probably doesn’t see the harm in it anymore.Last year, I took a science class and on several occasions the test answers were stolen and made available to other students. This created a major dilemma for a lot of kids who were forced to either cheat and get an A, or not cheat and get an average grade. I believe this caused many otherwise good students to resort to cheating in order to keep up with the rest of the class.
Movies like the “Ocean’s Eleven” series glorify cheating on large scales. What 17-year-old boy doesn’t want to be like Brad Pitt?
Liberty has a zero-tolerance policy toward cheating, and students who get caught face severe consequences. Kids know it’s wrong to cheat; they simply don’t care.
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Thank you for this writing and publishing this article! Great to hear this from a student’s prespective. I will be sharing it with my family.