Cheating in a Broken System

The question of cheating and the moral issues it raises in higher education have never been more in the spotlight than they are today. With the recent cheating scandals at Barnard College and Harvard College it is impossible to avoid this topic, particularly for high school juniors who see successful and accomplished students at ivy league schools breaking the rules. The problems that have been recently brought to light are no surprise to anyone that carefully examines our high school education system.

I have always been conflicted about cheating in school. But since the GPA system is so unforgiving to students that fall even slightly behind on a single assignment, sometimes copying someone else's work can be morally excusable. Even I have certainly felt the need, on occasion, to borrow someone else's homework when I messed up and forgot about an assignment. I know that cheating is wrong, but it seems to me that the problem is our definition of cheating. While it is one thing to copy down someone else's work blindly and do nothing yourself, it is completely different to split up a large assignment between two or more people, as long as you both understand the material. However, in the tiny and unrealistic environment that is high school, if two people work together on a homework sheet that was intended to be done alone, it is considered cheating. This lends itself to a completely naive and fantastical perception of real life. In the real world, working together on something is called collaboration, and it is a necessity for building successful relationships, professional, friendly, or romantic. Collaboration is a real life skill that the current education system tries to keep us from developing. Sure there is the occasional group project, but because kids these days don't understand how to work together or properly communicate, they always end up with a few people doing ninety percent of the work while the rest do practically nothing. A skill that is necessary for success can't be taught so briefly and infrequently. This is just another example of how the education system does not serve the youth of today.

Another problem that creates a desire to cheat is the fact that so much emphasis is put on a student's GPA and class ranking that many kids will do whatever it takes to maintain a high average. That is what happens when an education system puts more emphasis on a number than learning.  I would caution the nation's education policy makers to beware the use of a convenient system where a student is reduced to numbers and test scores. It is no wonder that kids in college and high school are cheating to get ahead, they learn how important the numbers are, so who cares whether copying is bad or not, sometimes it must be done. The school should be careful what it teaches us, because we will learn it well.