Cheating at your fingertips

I would bet that there isn’t one person at Samo that hasn’t at one time sent a picture of the homework, notes or other classwork. Because of smartphones, so much information is at students’ fingertips at all times, and as much as teachers try to stop the incessant cheating, it will always prevail. Cheating has become a natural part of high school for students across the country. However, it’s far different than it was in the past. Widespread cheating does not come as much in the form of whispering answers during a test or physically giving someone your homework to copy; in the new age where technology is everywhere it has become so easy to take the low road and snap a picture of someone else’s work rather than complete it yourself.The average high school student has a massive workload. Balancing five to seven classes and often many AP’s, it is hard to stay on track all the time. When a teacher assigns a worksheet that seems of no importance, but would take far too long to complete, it is much easier to cheat than not to. This issue stems from the unrealistic expectations of the modern student combined with the convoluted modern grading system; completion of homework and other papers are often valued at the same level as tests and quizzes. This is a clear example of the school culture pressuring students into valuing grades over subject knowledge.Cheating simply no longer has the negative stigma that it used to. While it used to be classified as the “easy way out” that only the less intelligent, struggling people did, it has now become far more mainstream. Because of the increasingly competitive nature of colleges, students have begun to value grades over education. Consequently, it is much more important for students to complete the homework mindlessly than to spend hours of care to get the same result. According to Stanford University, during the 1940s, only 20 percent of high school students told surveys that they had at one time cheated. Today, between 75 and 98 percent of students have admitted this. It has become more irregular to avoid cheating than to cheat.Administration, however, has not waivered on their position on cheating, as is expected. The school itself still condemns any sort of cheating, but there is only so much they can do. There is no real way to stop a person from cheating, no matter how many regulations are put in place. Students will always put in work in order to prevent doing work.Students are at a crossroads. When given the choice between spending far more time than one has on a variety of pointless worksheets, or simply getting answers from a friend, it is often so much easier to do the latter. With modern technology, almost no effort is required, making the only con to cheating an arbitrary moral idea that seems to be fading with the times.