Cheating - 4/10

            Stanford University recently looked into some allegations that their students were cheating. They found that during the 2013-2014 school year, 83 students violated the honor code by cheating, including copying from another's examination paper or allowing another to copy from one's own paper, plagiarism, or representing as one's own work the work of another. The punishment for any of these actions was to receive no credit for the unit, suspension for 1 quarter, and 40 hours of community service. However, these 83 students of their roughly 16,000 population student body are likely not the only cheaters. A spokeswoman for Stanford admitted that even they didn’t know how many students had violated their honor code over the years.  Cheating is easier today than ever with smartphones and new technology, so it is not a stretch to believe that more students were cheating than were caught cheating.

            Students today feel pressure to cheat because everyone is seemingly doing it, getting good grades, and getting away with it. If Sally has to cheat to get an A, then other students will feel the need to cheat just to stay relevant in the class. The more students cheat, the more the overall academic structure of a school will fail to work. If everyone cheats, then no one learns and the school isn’t doing its job: to educate the future of America. Cheating while in school just leads to developing bad habits for later in life. Maybe they want to become politicians! If people don’t stop cheating, education will just keep getting worse and worse, and then everyone will be cheaters by the end; no student will learn anything. Luckily for some of these students, however, you can’t cheat at flipping a burger for McDonald's.