Cheat or Fail?

Tigers never cheat.
Staff – Tiger Times

In today’s society many students fear the image of failure. It is no secret among today’s students that cheating is an easy way to avoid being seen as sub par. Between parents, college applications, and the impact from their peers, students try to hold themselves to a higher grade point average each year. The way our culture views anything below success pushes these students to extremes.

Cheating has become a very prominent obstacle in today’s education system both for educators and students. According to a national survey by caveon.com eighty percent of “high-achieving” high school students admit to cheating. When contrasted with the current national drop out rate of twenty two percent (according to boostup.org) it is very clear that the majority of today’s high school students would much rather take the risk of being caught as cheaters than to be seen as failures. When asked why she believed her students cheated, Mrs. Young of Mountain Ridge Middle School said, “If my students fail then everyone knows about it and they are seen as a failure and feel embarrassed, but if they cheat and they succeed then only they know that they are a cheater.” Once again, the risk is worth avoiding the image of failure.

A survey with over 30,000 responses hosted by CollegeHumor.com showed that honest students were on average, at a disadvantage to students that cheat. According to the survey, people who cheat have a higher GPA (3.41) than those who don’t (2.85). Not only has cheating been incentivized, but many feel that it has become mandatory just to keep up. According to caveon.com almost eighty five percent of college students said cheating was necessary to get ahead, and that fifty one percent of high school students did not believe that cheating was wrong. It is obvious that the way our culture views failure has largely impacted our education systems. Many of theses students feel like they have been left to choose the lesser of two evils.

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Tanner Nichols

As an editor for the news and feature sections of the Orem Tiger Times newspaper, I am highly involved with school, local, national, and worldwide news. The news is always evolving and people are always adapting and growing. That is my purpose as a journalist, to document the movement. It is truly fascinating.