Colleen Wenke Too Much Pressure

In the article “Too Much Pressure”, Colleen Wenke brings the issue of cheating in schools to light. She argues that the reason kids are cheating is because kids are faced with the piles of pressure and they feel that cheating is the only way out. The punishment for cheating at my school is that if you are caught cheating you will get a zero for that assignment. However, the teacher has to see the student cheating with their own eyes. Even after several students tell a teacher about a specific incident, the teacher cannot do anything unless they witness the issue themselves. What would you do if you witnessed several “honors students” cheating on anything from a homework assignment to a final exam? Would you tell the teacher? What if that didn’t work? What can you do? Where is the line? It is time for teachers to acknowledge the problem and fix it.

I am in honors classes and students are held to a higher standard in those classes, however cheating is just as prevalent. If you walk into one of my classes while we are taking a quiz, you can see people with their phones out and hear them whispering. It is just very hard for me to think that teachers do not see it. So if they do see it, why are they not doing anything? What happened to “No tolerance for cheating”? It is expected for people to cheat because it is so common. It’s almost as if it is even accepted. A student in one of my classes became so fed up that he told the principle and still nothing was done about it. The punishments need to be enforced before my generation believes that cheating is the “right” thing to