Cheating: a gateway drug to “success”

Many of us are acquainted with the experience of not doing homework by the time it is due. Most of us have experienced afternoons of watching Netflix, eating frozen pizza and in the end scrambling to find a classmate who actually finished the work.This is practically routine for most students — we have been weathered by our school years, and have learned to copy others’ work with nonchalance. But it wasn’t always this way. We cheaters all have a point of no return, when cheating becomes so easy and addictive that we relinquish any desire to do our work.For some of us it is junior year, when the coursework, combined with the extracurricular activities and the dreaded acronyms (AP’s, SAT’s, FRQ’s, etc.), becomes too much, and cutting corners appears to be the only option. For others it is freshman year, when high school is either too easy or too hard or too weird for us to actually care about it. Others still haven’t completed a math worksheet or a reading assignment since kindergarten.But the time is regardless — we have all weighed the benefit of completing the work against the cost, and the conclusion is simple: the value of this intellectual stimulation is so minimal that we only do it for a grade and in fact screw Western society for encouraging competition and making us do unnecessary work for straight A’s what if I don’t want to be a doctor or a lawyer I just want to live off the land and this textbook chapter outline is worthless…!Evidently, the question is not about the ethics of cheating — we know that it is frowned upon. Instead, we must ask, from the eyes of student, whether or not cheating is justifiable.One of the most commonly used justifications is that the framework of our society makes cheating necessary. If the Western world emphasized equality over getting ahead, the argument goes, we wouldn’t feel pressured to cheat.But while it is likely that our educational system would improve with the removal of the competitive edge, does this really have anything to do with cheating? Educational and social philosophies are always corruptible, no matter whether you’re in America or India or Djibouti; changing the system wouldn’t have any impact on the desire to do the work assigned. Cheating may be independently correlated with a desire for upward mobility, but it doesn’t have to be a result of it.There is also the argument that much of the homework assigned to us is devoid of intellectual value. The claim definitely has some soundness, but is the correct response really to copy the work from someone else? First of all, work that seems tedious may actually have a lot of value come the unit test, even if it has little worth. But if you’re truly driven in your campaign against homework, you can show your disregard without actually disrespecting the teacher. Talk to the teacher about your issue, or if you really feel rebellious, civilly refuse to do it. At least you can maintain your integrity.It is also important to consider the perspective of your supplier. For many people, sending a picture of the answers to someone else is not too big a deal, but constantly asking to copy can lead to social strain — friends don’t like to feel used.The argument that cheating is “immoral” is outdated, and there’s no reason to expect a high school student to have religious convictions against copying homework. But we should all know that it’s a slippery slope. Sure, the Netflix and frozen pizza beat differential equations in the short term, but there is a lot to lose from cheating. You might throw away a lot of the value of a public education that millions of people around the world would do anything for.Or you might get caught.