Colleen Wenke's Too Much Pressure

That stomach churning feeling of guilt for many, seems to appear as a small price to pay when completing an act of academic dishonesty. Colleen Wenke wrote an essay on cheating eighteen years ago called “Too Much Pressure”. Although, In the past fifty years, students who admit to having cheated has increased fifty to seventy percent(stanford.edu) Today, the number of students who cheat has risen because it is no longer seen as a large infringement on the school system that one should be punished for. Therefore, it is an easier way to receive the grade that one feels will lead them to ultimate success.
Hundreds of programs, videos and websites have been made across the digital world, making cheating look like a task completed regularly instead of an offense.
Although the creation of the internet has solved millions of problems and helped mankind reach a new level of understanding, it has also come with some complications. The internet possesses such a multitude of information that the leakage of websites targeted at students who wish to cheat has become a large problem. Because of how easy it seems to break these rules, students can “start to blur the ethical boundaries”(‘cheating with technology’), not realizing how fatal their actions are. If people believe that many have gotten away with academic dishonesty, they won’t feel as though it is wrong. With the internet at hand, cheating has expanded quickly, leading to more students thinking it is okay. Unfortunately, a cheater will always be one step ahead than the teacher trying to catch them. In my opinion, stopping all forms of cheating is impractical in our modern world because of the technology we possess. Objects that seem harmless like a watch or a calculator can become the ultimate tools for an academically dishonest student. It is no longer passing notes or writing answers on pencils, it is the collaboration of hundreds of students working together to outwit authority. Some of the things that almost everyone does on the internet in modern times don’t seem at all like cheating to some students. For example, “cutting and pasting a few sentences at a time from the internet”(Gabriel) People often question how a student could see cheating as a viable option to get ahead in life and what led them to this conclusion. The structure of the modern school curriculum …show more content…
ABC news interviewed a business student that came to the conclusion that when it comes to grades, “Nobody looks at how you got it”, what matters is seeing that ‘A’ on the assignment. The ticket to success in life for many students is grades. It is how one makes it to the next step in their academic career. To some, it matters so much that they would risk being academically dishonest and breaking school rules to get to that prestigious college or program.
C One reason for cheating is the result of teachers teaching the curriculum in a fashion that requires students to copy the teacher, a theory developed by a teacher who interviewed an avid cheater.(Lahey, The Atlantic) If the students get into the habit of copying the exact words of the teacher, they will become natural cheaters, subconsciously plagiarizing another’s work. There is a multitude of information that states that cheating has risen and that it has gotten worse. But some believe that the number of students that cheat has actually declined over the