Olivia Starke
According to College Reviews, studies showed that 51% surveyed students confessed to cheating on at least one test. This statistic is for the average group of students, but here at West, this doesn’t have to be a reality.
First and foremost, cheating affects the cheater, as Mrs. Stites puts it, cheating doesn’t allow a person to learn for themselves and it is quite obvious whether a person has learned or resorted to cheating when the IB test scores reveal all.
“It’s pretty difficult to cheat in IB, especially when it comes to, and AP, when it comes to exams and that’s when the truth comes out a lot of times…If you’ve cheated on all of your assignments throughout the semester and it comes to that final exam and you really don’t know what you’re doing… You’re not gonna get the passing score you need,” Mrs. Kerry Stites, a counselor here at West, explained.
IB is a college course type class and when someone doesn’t understand the information, and has only been keeping up by cheating, it shows on the test scores. In the same sense, Mrs. Chambers describes that college reflects like behavior, when someone has to cheat just to get in the school, how promising will their college experience be coming from that?
“If you can’t get into the college of your choice on your own merit, you’re not going to be terribly successful there… That’s the reason that, you know, colleges have application processes and… those types of things is you know they want to bring in students who are going to want to be successful at their school,” said Chambers.
In addition to losing that opportunity to learn, a cheater then is obligated to lie a second time in order to keep their grade from dropping because they didn’t know the information they cheated on so now they can’t figure out the harder stuff as senior Jasmine Glaze reasons.
Glaze thinks that cheating can easily turn into an endless cycle that can be very hard to break out of, especially when someone has to cheat to keep up with the lie that they know the information being taught.
According to Mrs. Stites, the lying cycle doesn’t just stop there, it continues on until eventually a person is caught and the consequences at minimum will lead to loss of credit for assignment.
“You’d get a zero for the assignment. So depending on how important that assignment is, let’s say you’re in eleventh grade and it’s your major paper that you have to finish to graduate or to earn credit for that class.”
“You’re not gonna get credit for possibly for that research paper, which means you’ve now failed English 11 and you have to retake it,” said Stites.
In Jasmine’s opinion, cheating is wrong mainly because it takes away a person’s integrity, which she views as a characteristic that is desperately needed.
“I believe that cheating is bad because it hurts everyone and it hurts our integrity. And our integrity is all that we have as a human,” said Glaze.
Everyone has been told since they were a kid that cheating is wrong, but how it affects even the people here at West in ways such as never truly knowing the information or, according to some people, ruining one’s integrity makes this matter all that much more important.
