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Cheating our way to the top

Posted on August 26, 2010 by Staff

By Becky Bush

It is the spring of my senior year. I am staring out the second-story window of Chapel Hill High School at the crystal clear Carolina blue sky and blooming trees, wishing I did not have to take the quiz that my teacher had just placed in front of me.

The brown-haired boy behind me taps my shoulder.

“You look like you don’t wanna take this test,” he said. “Do you want me to text you the answers?”

For many students in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school system, the internalized pressure to get into an Ivy League college, please their parents, fulfill the reputation of the school system and just do well hits hard.

Unfortunately, this pressure often leads students to cheat.

In too many students’ minds, it does not matter if you get the answers to the test on your cell phone, get a master key to the school and steal the tests in the middle of the night or actually sit down with a textbook and study. An “A” is an “A.”

Chapel Hill High School’s cheating problem reached national news in 2008, when a group of students were caught sneaking into the school in the middle of the night to steal tests. It was later found out that they had a master key to the school for cheating purposes.

I graduated from CHHS in 2009, and cheating is a prevalent problem. I know from first-hand experience, although it was something I chose not to do.

I will say that going to CHHS taught me a great work ethic. I had a wonderful high school experience and probably would not be the hard worker I am today if I had not gone there. However, the pressure to get into a great college that makes so many students cheat comes from somewhere.

“It’s a huge problem, but not just in Chapel Hill,” Danielle Cohen, an English and dance teacher at CHHS, said. “I think that the pressure asks our students to do things that are unrealistic. Everyone expects his or her child to be exceptional – and because knowledge and grades and intellect are so highly valued in our town, people want their children to exemplify their values.”

Every year since 2006, Chapel Hill and East Chapel Hill high schools have been in the top 330 of Newsweek magazine’s top 1,300 high schools in the nation. In 2010, ECHHS was 119th, CHHS was 219th and Carrboro High School was 257th.

In addition, U.S. News and World Report looked at 21,000 high schools across the nation and chose CHHS and ECHHS as honorable mentions for Best High Schools in America.

There are expectations to meet and reputations to uphold.

Like gum on the bottom of your shoe, the sticky situation of cheating in the local high schools is hard to wipe away. You don’t want the gum to be there, but sometimes the Trident is so deeply embedded in the bottom of your sole that you will never be able to completely get rid of it.

“I can hope that we move toward a place where we can be proud of our school without that nagging feeling in the back of our minds that some of our kids may not be achieving quite at the level that they appear to be,” Cohen said.

Jan Boxill, director of UNC’s Parr Center for Ethics, said that when a person feels the need to cheat on tests, “they believe that it is OK to deceive others for [their] own ends, to gain an unfair advantage over others.”

Boxill added that those who cheat during high school are likely to bring those ethical values with them to college and into their careers. “The same rationalizations are present. There is likely as much cheating in college as there is in high school, and those who cheat in college use the same faulty rationalizations.”

So here is the question: Is it worth it? Is it worth having our name in Newsweek when not all of the students earn their grades?

I personally would not want someone who cheated his or her way through AP Biology to one day perform open-heart surgery on me.

There are many students in Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools that have never cheated and I’m proud to say I’m one of them.

However, I truly believe that the pressure that runs through all local high schools puts more weight on students than they can carry by themselves. Instead of cheating, students should be taught that hard work is more important than getting a perfect grade. It has been proven time and time again that if you study hard, you will do well. It may take longer than getting the answers on your cell phone – but at least you can say you earned your grades honestly.

Becky Bush served a summer internship with The Carrboro Citizen and is now a sophomore at Appalachian State University.

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