Why Students Cheat

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Everyone has cheated on something at some point in their life, whether it is in a game, on a test, or in a relationship, everyone has done it. Cheating is anything that involves breaking a rule, or getting an unfair advantage. Schools are one of the most popular places people cheat. Many people down play cheating and use excuses like, “He shouldn’t have let me see his paper,” or, “I am just using my resources wisely.” But, what causes people to cheat? Students cheat in school because of laziness, high standards or pressure to do well, and misunderstanding.
The first cause as to why students cheat is because they are lazy. It happens all the time, where students go home from school, have a snack, watch television, take a nap, play some video games, and just keep saying that they will do their homework later. The next thing they know it eleven o’clock at night and time to go to bed, but no homework was accomplished. The student keeps pushing back the assignment until the last minute and the last minute is not enough time. This is also known as procrastination. The student does not want to fail, but they were too lazy to do their own work, so they ask to copy the work from a friend that did the work. I once said something to a guy about how this was cheating and he told me that he was, “using his resources wisely”. Another time I asked a student next to me to stop copying my answers in class and he told, “Then you shouldn’t let me see your answers”, he blamed his cheating on me. One time when I was in seventh grade in my ecology class we had to put together a presentation with a partner. My partner was a close friend at the time, and our topic was solar power. I ended up doing all of the research and put together the presentation a...

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...ell out and the name I couldn’t remember was staring me in the face. The teacher had not collected my paper yet and I could have just taken it and written the answer and he would have never known the difference. Whether I cheated or not, I still thought about doing it since I did not know the answer. Simply not knowing the material leads students to cheat all of the time.
Misunderstanding, pressure, and laziness are not good reasons to cheat and the effect of the consequences are not worth it. You can end up with an F, in detention, written up, kicked out of school, and with marks on your permanent record. There is no way to justify cheating, no matter how hard people try to. No matter what happens, students will continue to cheat, it is inevitable.

Works Cited
Grease 2. Dir. Patricia Birch. Perf. Michelle Pfeiffer and Maxwell Caulfield.Paramount, 1982. Film.

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