“It’s like a slap in the face,” said Ryan Hightower, senior.

There always has and there always will be two groups of students in high school—the ones that cheat and the ones that don’t. And for the students who are honest and actually have morals, they are the ones who get slapped in the face.

Students anxiously anticipate the moment when they learn their test scores. The teacher finally hands the exams back and somehow everybody hears about everyone else’s score. And that’s when the anger and sinking feeling begin to settle in. Some may have studied every night a week for this test but they still failed to score higher than the cheaters.

Cheating in high school is no new issue. Everyone knows it occurs and no matter how hard teachers try, there will never be a way to completely prevent it. Teachers may be unaware of who cheats, but students can always identify the cheaters among their peers.

In fact, cheating today has become so common in high school campuses that students have become immune to it.

“There are so many ways to get away with it and so many groups in on it. Teachers can no longer know who legitimately tries hard or just cheats at test time,” Hightower said.

But the prevalence of cheating is not the real problem. Neither is a teacher’s inattentiveness or a student’s repetitive failure to turn his peer in. The real problem lies within the cheater himself.

Just to achieve a higher score on a final, quiz, test, essay, lab, or even a
homework packet, students resort to the despicable methods of cheating. They write on their hands, create cheat sheets, steal a copy of the exam beforehand, or casually sit next to the smartest kid in class on test day.

“Personally, I don’t condone cheating. It’s not morally correct in general but at the same time we have so much pressure as high school students to do well that we pressure ourselves into cheating to ensure a good grade and have an extra advantage,” stated Irwin Nhan, junior.

And then, at the end, cheaters who have “so much pressure” get what they want: outstanding grades on tests, commendable GPA’s, and acceptance letters from the colleges of their choice. At the end, they feel like they’ve succeeded. But did they really? Do cheaters truly attain success?

Forgetting all their morals and religious values to do better on an exam, is that success? Betraying their classmates, their teachers, and their parents through their deception, is that success? Or how about knowing that throughout their entire high school careers they never really accomplished anything off of their own merit, is that success?

Everyone has heard the aphorism that “cheaters never prosper.” They never actually learn the material and are able to breeze their ways through high school. They fail to face immediate consequences and never seem to get what they deserve.

However, this does not mean that students can continue to cheat to succeed in their lives. Colleges, for example, are much less lenient upon cheating and will do all they can to stop it. Kayleigh Barnes (’10) gives a college student’s perspective.

“A lot of kids cheated in high school and it didn’t seem like much of a big deal back then but those kids are missing out on valuable information that they need to succeed in college. If you cheat on your Pre-calculus test in high school then you may get an ‘A’ but it will be harder to pass in college where cheating is much harder to get away with,” stated Barnes.

Also, even if students are intensely pressured to excel in high school, that does not justify their habits. Students may need to get good grades so that they can get into the college of their dreams or make their parents happy, but that does not mean that they must cheat.

“Cheating comes not because they are bad kids, but because there is so much pressure to be a successful person,” said Andrea Ramos, science teacher.

Large amounts of pressure have obviously forced students to leave their morals behind. Therefore, to resolve this issue on high school campuses, cheaters must straighten their own paths and realize their own shortcomings.

Administration can toughen the consequences and fellow students can start turning their peers in, but in reality it is the mentality of cheaters that truly needs to be fixed. Cheaters must acknowledge that what they are doing is wrong and whatever they get out of it, they do not really deserve.