“I think most definitely cheating is a problem at Bethel Park because I honestly do not know anyone who hasn’t cheated before,” says a Junior at Bethel Park High School.

As technology advances and society expects more, the pressure to be perfect and exceed expectations falls on the current generation of students. As a result, students succumb to taking the easy route of “borrowing” a friend’s homework or perusing the Internet to find an exact copy of their homework with the answers already filled in. While this method is a quick solution to the “procrastinated study guide” due tomorrow, in the long run the cheating only catches up.

The World Wide Web is an ocean of information. With the click of a button, search engines such as Google provide pages upon pages of relevant sites. In many ways the Internet is useful for explaining tricky concepts, looking up definitions or double checking your own knowledge. However, some students take double checking too far.

When the Internet is used to find copies of homework or test answers, it becomes an accomplice to cheating.

As defined by Mr. Hare, “Basically it’s getting answers from any place – from an outside source that you’re not supposed to have access to.”

While the Internet can be used to innocently find an answer to one or two troublesome questions, students have been able to find entire worksheets; as a result, homework that would normally take 45 minutes takes a total of 5 instead. Although this method makes for an easy A, the consequences will soon add up.

Mr. Hare adds, “I think that kids look at the short term without looking at the long term.”

And this is certainly true. At some point or another we have all found ourselves awake at 11 o’clock with homework in every subject left to do.

The Internet is taunting because as Mr. Howard puts it, “I think it’s a problem that students too readily resort to the Internet or to Google or to Wikipedia to find their answers instead of thinking critically…Nowadays with Google and everything being so easily accessible, the critical thinking skills have gone down, and with Google you want an answer you type it in, the answers right there.”

In today’s society, we are used to finding everything with ease, and in a matter of seconds, that actually putting forth an effort seems far-fetched.

Mrs. Bouch points out that the Internet works both ways. “Some students don’t realize how small it [the Internet] is, in a matter of seconds I have found full research papers that have been turned in from freeessay.com and 123helpme.com and sites such as that. So I feel like at first glance, ‘Oh my gosh this is exactly what I need to be writing, let me just copy and paste’ but at the same time it’s an easy feature for me as the teacher as well to find. So yeah it might make it easier, but it’s also easy for me to find as well.”

At Bethel Park, plagiarism and cheating are currently ranked a Level I violation. If a student is found guilty, they are to receive a zero for the assignment, a note is sent home to their parents and of course colleges will be able to see the mark on the student’s record.

Mrs. Bouch comments on the current consequences, “Based on what I’ve seen I don’t know that that’s harsh enough because I see it year-after-year, I encounter plagiarism of some sort probably once a nine weeks…I’m not so sure that our current consequences are severe enough. Some schools you get a zero for the class, others you can be kicked out of a class; that might be a direction that we need to head to really make the point that plagiarism is wrong.”

Plagiarism can be defined as stealing someone else’s work and presenting it as your own.

The price of cheating does not come without a high cost. A student’s future is affected in all ways through college and beyond. According to Mr. Howard, “Everything gets harder in college and if you get stuck in your bad habits now, that’s what’s going to carry over into college are those same bad habits.”

If a student continues to plagiarize and copy their papers in college, chances are that they won’t stop after college either. Mrs. Bouch pointedly states, “If you’re going to do it in a small way, that is going to extend in a big way, and if you’re going to cheat on a homework paper, it might be probable that you’re going to cheat on a tax return.”

Students will definitely benefit from doing their own homework and writing their own papers in the long run because of the worth ethic naturally forming. In addition, there is no risky behavior involved because no rules are being broken. When you cheat, not only is your grade in jeopardy but so is the person’s grade of whom you are copying or vice versa.

Despite the consequences and long term effects, one student comments, “Cheating is justified because of the work load we get. No one can do it on their own.” However, another student retorts, “I don’t think it’s really justified, I think people should work for, you know, their work. But if you’re taking on too much and you have to cheat maybe you should drop some extra curricular activities, modify what you’re doing.”

None of the students believed that there was a reasonable way to discourage their classmates from copying homework without doing the impossible. Someone suggested jokingly, “The solution is to isolate people into their own little cubes.” Another student still argued, regardless the circumstances, cheating will never end.

“People are going to cheat no matter what.”