hey, did you do the homework?

Oh really? Can I see it? Yeah, if you can't tell already, my topic of choice for this week's post is cheating. Inspired by Sutherland's recent blog post on the topic. I'd have to admit, a lot of cheating goes on in Alameda High. There's usually a lot of bickering between friends finding out whether or not they can or can't copy some homework. It's not just homework either, it could be classwork, tests, quizzes, and maybe even more. The amount of cheating that goes on around school is probably staggering, but not exactly surprising. With the 'fill-in-the-blank' type work, cheating would probably be more common, because it's the easiest to copy. Could you really call it cheating though? Could it be just students working together?

Why do we cheat in the first place? It's probably because we are too lazy to do it ourselves, or a person has done the work already and the cheater just wants the easy way out. No matter what, there's always a circumstance. Whether it be a person didn't have the time to do it, or if they were just too plain lazy, that person will always have two choices: Get no credit for that assignment or copy the assignment, but sacrifice the knowledge. Most of the time that person will try and find a way to copy, just because they don't want their grade to be lowered. But even if they aren't caught cheating, the consequences show up later when you're tested on the material and don't know how to do it. Because they copied it brainlessly.

Another idea I got from Sutherland's post was the awareness of our very own teachers. Are they really aware of how extreme the degree of cheating is around the school? I asked Sutherland that question when he posted it up on his blog, and a couple minutes into the conversation he asked his colleague the same question. He said that he was pretty aware, but he has took his own measures to minimize the cheating that goes on in his own class. But he raised another point. If the teachers are aware. what can they really do to stop it? I personally don't think teachers would actually take the time to crack down on every single cheater in their class. It would be too time-consuming and it would ultimately result to no benefit.

In fact, the above paragraph reminds me of an idea I was introduced to not too long ago. Natural consequence. A teacher would know who was cheating based on the test/quiz results of a student. Let's say a student has 100% on his homework, but his test grades are down the toilet. That has to be an obvious sign of cheating. It wouldn't make sense for a student who does all of their homework to do bad on a test. So I would also consider that an option as to why teachers don't exactly do anything about cheating even if they are fully aware. It would take too much time to crack all the cheating down, it would have little to no benefit, and natural consequence would take its course. It all makes sense.