I consider cheating as an act of taking someone else’s work and using it as your own. Whether you are copying homework, looking at your neighbors test or copying someone’s work word for work without citing it is still cheating. Does anyone feel bad about cheating when the grade they get afterward is good? You may get a good grade, but you certainly have not deserved it. I know that some teachers in high school would see you copying homework from others right in class and not say one word about it, this is a problem because you would not feel discouraged to cheat but want to do it more. I think that these teachers are thinking that they are discouraging you and that you will feel bad about that grade, but the student has no guilt wanting to cheat more.
There are teachers that look out for cheaters. I read about teachers using software to check if anything in the paper is plagiarized, but this is time consuming and all teachers don’t have time to do this. Some teachers say that they see a change in the way the student writes, but does that necessarily have to do anything with that, what if they just tried harder because they wanted a better grade. But what about when they buy their papers online? If I were the teacher I would fail that student for the semester. They obviously don’t want to do anything so it seems like they don’t even care about their grade, so I don’t need them in my class.
Many students today don’t have enough time to do all the homework that we are assigned. We have a lot of other things going on from work, friends, family, boyfriend/girlfriend to other problems at home. Where are we to fit homework in? students often just start copying from others, as it will get done faster. It may be as simple as copying an easy homework sheet that you forgot or didn’t have time to finish, or you know the material and the teacher is wasting your time. We don’t want to do things over and over again; we want to learn new things and not something to just pass our time by. Sometimes it’s just cheating on a test that you didn’t study for and it is easy to just look at the abcd answers from the person next to you. One of the big things in our high school was to store things into a calculator.
Many students have also done things as switch papers for different classes. I would consider this cheating too because you already have all the homework done for you, you may say it is just to study but you know you will copy it, and you learn absolutely nothing from it. The only thing that I would find ok is for the teacher to give you old tests to study from. They are well aware of what the student is to know. In my high school the PE final was always the same for all for years. By your sophomore year you would know answers to every question. I believe that it is the students’ responsibility to know the consequences about cheating; the school should not have them sign a piece of paper but tell them about cheating and consequences. It’s their responsibility to know about cheating and they should be honest.
To conclude I think cheating is an act of taking someone’s work and making it your own. There are no excuses that the student should make about cheating. Cheating is cheating. You cheat and you are responsible for the consequences, and how you are going to feel about yourself. Cheating may ruin your reputation and admittance to another school.
