There appears to be a widespread belief among the students at Cam High that the most important thing as a teenager is to do well in high school, primarily through success in the classroom. Sometimes, the pressure for success causes countless students to do whatever it takes to get a good grade, even if it isn’t always morally right.

“I see it every test,” said freshman Davis Crater.

With the addition of smart phones, enlarged class sizes, and simply the creativity of students, cheating has become almost impossible to enforce, similar to the prohibition of alcohol during the 1920’s. “Everybody’s cheated,” said Manuel Young, junior. In an anonymous poll taken by students at Cam High, nearly every student has admitted to not only witnessing cheating in class, but also cheating themselves. According to a 2002 confidential survey of 12,000 high school students, as released by ABC News in their article “A Cheating Crisis in America’s Schools”, 74 percent of students questioned admitted cheating on an examination at least once in the past year.

In the opinion of the majority of most Cam High students, the reasons for cheating come down to laziness, desire to do well, and even their lack of confidence in their ability to succeed. “I think they want to feel like they have the right answer because they don’t think they’re smart enough to get it themselves”, continued Crater.

Perhaps a contributing factor as to why so many students cheat is due to the fact that students only think about the present, not necessarily the future, according to freshman Jarod Smith, attending River Ridge High School in Woodstock, Georgia. “They want to make themselves look better than everyone else. They aren’t thinking in the future, they are thinking in the present”.

Not all students cheat, however. Steven Porta, junior at Cam High, objected to the morals of cheating, saying, “I understand the mass amount of pressure put on students these days, but to throw most of their accomplishments away and have the potential to be expelled, all from cheating for a few correct answers on a test is absolutely not worth the risk”.

Whether or not cheating is right or wrong, or whether or not people care which one it is, it’s widely known that cheating is widespread in schools all across the country, and countless cases of cheating go ignored and unnoticed. It has yet to be determined whether or not academic dishonesty is worth the possible immorality.