Who Is Really Getting Cheated

Who Is Really Getting Cheated?

Imagine a high school boy getting ready for an exam. By getting ready, I don’t mean studying like one should do for an exam. Instead, this boy is getting ready to cheat. He spent the past hour and a half writing the answers to the exam on a notecard that he plans to sneak out when the teacher isn’t looking. Everything goes as planned during the test and the boy ends up getting a perfect score. Why would the boy cheat? Well most thoughts would be because he is lazy, didn’t pay attention in class, or other reasons that focus on the individual’s own internal setbacks. While this thought process makes sense, it is not the only reason to cheat. Cheating can come from many environmental circumstances outside of the

This competition is shown in the way tests and assignments are set-up. Things like grade curving actually creates a more dense environment for cheating than focus on good grades (Kohn 6). When these assignments are made, they are usually made in an in-the-box, standard way, that might be naturally easier for one student to accomplish than another. When the latter student knows this, they feel that the only way to succeed at the same or a better level than the first student is to cheat. Alfie Kohn made a great comparison in the article “Who’s Cheating Whom?” where he compared competitiveness in a classroom creating an environment for cheating with a warm, moist substance creating an exceptional environment for mold. While competition can produce hard work, it gives too much of a risk to

Emphasis and importance is supposed to be put on the learning going on in school. However, when the teacher and administration is more concerned with getting the right assignments done and get enough information out to have a certain amount of exams at certain times, the learning process fades and loses its significance. The effect of all this pushed on both the student and teacher is short-term memorization, which itself can end the learning process(Kohn 8). This short-term memorization takes away the substance and meaning gained by actually learning something. With the loss of meaning, it becomes more difficult to remember much of the information, creating a lower resistance to