How far will you go to get an A?

Cheating is all around us, whether it be a picture sent to a group chat, a glance at a phone under a desk or a formula written beneath a sleeve. But why are students so inclined to do it? The answer for many students lies in one thing: college. As twisted and counterintuitive as it may seem, the pressure put upon students in this country to excel and get into good colleges has heightened a culture of “the easy A”, where students recognize that they should be doing well in their classes, but the reasons are often morally wrong. The cycle starts and ends with students’ GPAs. The narrative goes: If I get a B in pre-calc, will I still have a chance of getting into UC Berkeley? If I do not do well in my French class, will Tulane disqualify me? The paranoia is endless and for good reason;college applications are so saturated with contenders that schools have to whittle down their applicants somehow, often resulting in simple numbers. Julie Honda, one of the college counselors at Samo, does her best to dispel this “all or nothing” mentality whenever students appear to be resorting to it. “You don’t need perfect scores and perfect grades for every college of your choice,” Honda said.However, students struggle to believe this and feel the pressures of perfection from an early age. It is handed to us from the moment we enter middle school in the form of Illuminate, the color-coordinated grading website that students check obsessively, watching the green A’s drop to light green B’s or yellow C’s. Even in sixth grade, students find themselves constantly refreshing the Illuminate browser throughout the day, hoping that their hard work will culminate in shiny green rectangles on their phone screens. Anna Kroskrity (’21) has seen how cheating and the obsessive “Illuminate” culture has affected her peers.“Cheating takes on many forms and a major part of it is that students are overworked and feel the need to excel in their classes. That being said, oftentimes they are just trying to find the easy way out,” Kroskrity said. Though the levels of grade-obsession and willingness to cheat vary, all types of students still find ways to rationalize their cheating habits. From the other side of the grading screen, AP English teacher Evan Koehler, has witnessed the obsession with grades- and how they lead to cheating- firsthand. “It’s clear that scores in my first period class are often much lower than the other periods when it comes to quizzes and tests. These are AP kids that systematically do worse on a grading scale than their 5th period peers. Not only does this make sense because they are taking it earlier in the day, they also are the type of kids that obsess over grades,” Koehler said. While all teachers take cheating seriously, only some take the necessary measures to ensure that students are not on their phones during a test. Nevertheless, Samo has recently taken further measures to prevent cheating. Google Classroom, which is now a mandatory aspect of every class, has a new originality checker. Additionally, many teachers use turnitin.com to check for plagiarism. At private schools, however, cheating can occur on an even larger scale, exacerbated by factors like money and prestige. Affluent families in the LA private school networks may resort to extreme measures, as revealed by last year's college scandal, to ensure their child's place at a top-name school.Finances play a significant role when private-school parents take their kids to doctors that will willingly diagnose kids with ADHD so that they get increased time on their tests. A study indicative of this trend demonstrates that the richest districts in the country are those with the most federal disability designations (504 plans). This is obviously an ethical issue, but it also undermines the circumstances under which kids legitimately require additional time on tests.Though this form of cheating is much less common, particularly because most do not have the means for it, the undeniable truth is that cheating is systemic and something greater than whispering an answer to the person next to you. Students are increasingly willing to do whatever it takes for that desired letter grade. Unfortunately, students seem to be at a point where it is not the thrill of learning pushing them to work, but rather the fear that if they do not do so, it will hurt them down the line. The sad truth is that people have lost the desire to grow and, in turn, care more about a resumé than their morals, allowing cheating to become the norm.