I know for a fact that there is a lot of pressure on a high school senior’s shoulders to get good grades, graduate and get into college. Some students not only feel pressured by their teachers, coaches or counselors, but by their parents. Some parents bribe their children with money to get good grades; that of which I am a victim of. Some parents even ground their children for having bad grades or failing a test, that’s a little extreme. But as a senior, the pressures are even more immense considering the fact that if you fail or don’t graduate then you’re not going to college (well eventually you might, but not anytime soon). This brings me to the issue of cheating. I believe that if you cheat then you don’t learn anything. If you are going to cheat and copy answers from someone else who took their time to do that and actually knows the topic at hand, then you’re not learning anything yourself. If you're going to cheat on a test, the chances of you getting caught and getting a zero are increased and that just decreases your knowledge on the subject because you may need to know that for maybe the regents or the SATs. Everything builds on each other, that book that you didn’t read from could have helped you on that homework that you copied off of and that homework will help you on that test that you don’t know anything on and that test will help you on the regents that you need to pass to graduate and that you absolutely can’t cheat off of.
Some student’s go to the extremes on cheating, I can remember last year when more than a dozen student’s paid another student to do all of their same homework sheets and when they all handed them in, it wasn’t even the right chapter they were on, so now that teacher doesn’t trust any of them and they all got zero’s and got written up.
Another newsworthy instance was when a man, Samuel Eshaghoff (19), was caught taking the SATs for 15 people over a three year period who paid him between $500-$3,600 to obtain SAT scores between 2,170-2,220 and ACT scores as high as 33. -NY Times Article
Most students feel the need to cheat when they’re pressured by teachers and their parents, when they don’t have enough time to do their work or if they’re just lazy. If you ever feel the need to cheat then you need to make a plan for yourself. Organize your assignments in a planner and manage your time wisely. Take time out of your day on weekends and especially after school to do your homework assignments, projects and studying. Most students also spend their time either working or playing a sport, but you can’t play a sport if you're failing a class and not doing your homework and also your money from working won’t pay for you to graduate, your brain and your hard work will.
So just remember, if you cheat than you are only cheating yourself.
"Stressed Out"
The left side of the graph shows a college freshman's self assessment
of their emotional health.On the right side of the graph, the same
college freshman answered the question of
how overwhelmed they felt during their senior year in high school.
This survey concluded, as a direct read, that women were twice as stressed as men.
