In third grade, we had a geography quiz and had to fill out the states on a paper map. I got stuck on how to spell Tennessee. Desperate to not fail and not disappoint my immigrant parents, I did the unthinkable: I took a deep breath and peeked at the map of the kid next to me. Turns out he was the wrong person to cheat off of, because we both ended up getting that answer wrong.
That was the last time I cheated for years, and throughout middle school, my view of cheating went like this: people who cheated were lazy. They just weren’t trying hard enough, not like I was. They were morally inferior to me, in a sense. And if they tried to peek at my test or copy my homework, they were taking something away from me and invalidating my own hard work with their laziness.
Then I moved and went to high school in a wealthy and hypercompetitive area. Suddenly, with AP classes piling up and the pressure to go to college increasing, I caved. I shared homework answers with friends and copied answers to physics questions during my lunch break. I looked up test questions on Quizlet. I cheated.
But was I lazy, or dumb, or trying to take the easy way out?
No. I was overwhelmed, overworked, anxiety-ridden and depressed. Far from being lazy or trying to take the easy way out, I spent hours doing outlines and poring over my AP Calculus notes. On top of that, I had debate speeches to write, dance classes to attend and SAT prep. When I cheated, I was trying to make ends meet in a system that had largely failed me.
When I wasn’t overwhelmed, I was dealing with incompetent teachers. For instance, my physics teacher spent the class droning on about his life, and then assigned us confusing homework assignments that I just couldn’t learn by myself. I spent hours looking up YouTube videos, reading other teachers’ powerpoints and reading the textbook, but it still wasn’t enough. I resigned myself to copying my friends’ homework during lunch.
There was also another reason I would cheat, and that was because I was so terrified to fail. I clung to the idea of getting perfect grades and maintaining a perfect GPA, but for the first time, classes were getting more and more challenging, and I was falling behind no matter how long I stayed up studying.
Students that cheat aren’t trying to make your life worse or invalidate your work. They aren’t lazy. They aren’t evil or dumb. Maybe they’re just overwhelmed. Maybe they love to learn, but need a better teacher. Maybe they’re just scared to fail. Of course, cheating isn’t the best choice, but it does a disservice to students when cheating is represented as immoral and lazy.
In high school, once I dropped some of my AP classes, found a therapist and stopped trying to keep a 4.0 GPA, I didn’t need to cheat. I’ve been in college for two years and I haven’t cheated, and I don’t plan on it either.But if I ever notice one of my classmates cheating, [4] instead of vilifying them, I hope that I would be able to look at them with more empathy. I hope I would remember that third grader who didn’t know how to spell Tennessee, and in a moment of panic, looked at their neighbor’s test.
Anonymous Writer
Comments