The Causes For Cheating In School
Cheating is ridiculously easy, especially with all the technology at hand, and around 95% of kids admitted to cheating at some point in their lives. There is a plethora of influences that encourage cheating; rapidly increasing social pressures, the lack of passion for a subject, the advantages of academic dishonesty, and even the way school is structured. All these lead to students believing the benefits of cheating outweigh the potential risk of getting caught.
The way school is structured encourages cheating. Students spend a lot of time doing work that seems like useless information. They don't care about the information they care about the grades because grades are used as the only motivator. Getting from school year to school year depends on grades after all. So because of this mentality and the fact the grades are used as the sole motivator they’ll do anything to get good grades, this includes cheating. Even at an early age students begin to realize that they don't need to remember the information for long, only after the test is finished. All they need to do is provide the correct answers in class. And correct isn't what they think is correct it's whatever the teacher/test producer thinks is correct. An A high school student once summed this up perfectly, “I don't need or want to know why it works this way, only that I know how to get the correct answer.''
Even when students are passionate about a school subject they tend to cheat in it, this is because with all the other work they have to do don't have time to truly dive deep into learning that subject. Take science, for example, a student who loves science but isn't that into learning about history can't really dive deep into learning science because they don't have time to learn more than what the school tells them to learn. If they do try to learn more science and actually engage in learning more their other grades drop. Also, many students believe to get into top schools they need to take several extracurricular activities to appear “well rounded” because that's what colleges are looking for. To do well and achieve high grades students need to learn the bare minimum that schools teach them. If they try to do anything else it's a waste of time, all the best-performing students learned that.
Also often the rules of cheating have very little to do with actually learning. For example, if you create a sheet with a summary of all the things you learned for the test and review it right before the test that isn't cheating, however, if you do during the test it is. This leads to students committing it to short term memory then forgetting it soon after the test. If you copy a paper or just write a paper close enough to a source then you’ve cheated, however, if you write a paper but paraphrase enough then you haven’t. Now you can draw a lot of parallels between school and a game, especially the rules of both. The only difference between them is school is a game that you are forced to play, and if you were forced to play a game and found an exploit that let you finish the game faster and better, would you use the exploit.
One of the arguments against cheating is your hurting your education, however, if you cheat in one subject but get to spend more like learning something you actually care about is it really hindering your learning, or are you just putting more time into learning what you're passionate about? Take me for example, I don't care much for learning school ELA I would much rather learn history or science, however, I can't really learn more than what I get taught in science because I have to spend more time writing an essay for ELA. Another more effective argument is that by cheating your hurting other students, but that only really matters if the teacher grades on a curve, or if you give them answers. Students don't mind cheating the system because a lot of students don't like the system, but if they hurt other students it's more debatable. However, again if you give them answers and they get to spend more time doing something they're passionate about, I for one, would still see that as a win for the other person.
In fact, one of the biggest reasons cheating gets caught is because someone told one of the staff. For example, let's say we took a test and someone in an earlier class told someone else what to look for on the test, and that person told everyone in their class. Then someone in said class tells the teacher, the honest student who told the teacher then gets ostracized by the other students, the honest student ends up being worse off doing what is “right”.
Also, cheating to get good grades seems like a situation everyone wins from. The student gets the high grades they're hoping for, the teacher sees the student getting high grades, and the parents also see that their kid is getting high grades. Also, some teachers would just overlook cheating if they saw it because students getting high grades looks good on them, especially on standardized tests. And even if the teacher told the parents some parents would never believe that they would cheat especially the students who have a history of doing good in school.
In fact, cheating went from this serious thing that only the most struggling would do to the norm. Statistics show that 98% of students admit to cheating and about 70% admitted to cheating in the most obvious ways, like copying whole tests or plagiarizing entire papers from other students. And when asked if they second-guessed themselves most say no. The rates of cheating and reasons are all pretty consistent from high school al the way through college. The surveys also show a general increase in cheating, and also who cheats. It went from the worst-performing struggling students who cheated the most to the best-performing students who are destined for the top schools and highest grades who cheat just to gain that little bit of extra advantage to get into said top schools. As one high school graduate said in an interview about cheating, “I was in honors classes in high school because I wanted to get into the best schools, and all of us in those classes cheated; we needed the grades to get into the best schools.”
Apparently, the “best” students who would do great on their own are driven by the same desperation that the worst-performing students used to be driven by. Because they don't want to let down the people they care about, like their parents, they cheat, because not getting into the best schools is complete failure to them. These are all kids who work hard, are smart, and can do very well just so they can get that extra edge, just so they go from great students to the best.
One of the worst things that school does is it never really lets students find what they truly love to do. Most people don't show up to school hoping to learn Pythagoras theorem, they have other dreams like being an online influencer, being a businessman, or hell even being a politician. And most of the time you learned that on your own, not in school. Let's say you want to be an online influencer you probably discovered that through watching YouTube, Twitch, Vine. Not from being in a classroom. Fortunately, most people do eventually discover what they want to do and follow that path but some never do, and that’s truly, genuinely sad.
