Integrity and being morally correct is not something we actually care about as members of Generation Y. We don’t call people out for cheating. We call people out for being dumb enough to get caught cheating.
Universities across the country try to stress how important it is to be ethically conscious and not take the easy way out. If only the alternative got us anything in life.
We are a generation on cheaters. We are constantly looking for the most efficient, least stressful way to handle anything that’s put in front of us. When we cheat on an exam, we don’t just want a B, we want an A even though the test looks like it’s in another language. Sure, you can call us lazy or a group of people that doesn’t care about the future but we just like to call it improvising.
Let’s all be very honest with ourselves. We all cheat to get our way to the top or to even survive in this dog-eat-dog world. Through middle school and into high school, every student has cheated to excel academically. If everyone took every test with no help from an external source, we would be looked at as the dumbest generation known to man.
We don’t like to study or actually do any of the necessary work for a class, so why waste our time when we can just take adderal the night before and make a bunch of cheat sheets to get the grades we want?
Throughout my academic career, starting from Kindergarten to my last year of college, I can honestly say that there has not been one test, quiz, exam, paper or presentation that I have not completed without some form of cheating. I have cheated my way to a diploma and graduation without getting caught once.
Why did I do it? Not because I was lazy or because I wanted the easy way out. It was because everyone else was doing it too! Even the smartest kids in the classes were doing it! Why should I do the “right” thing when everyone else is showing me that this isn’t what it takes to do well in school?
It’s just too damn easy and exciting of an opportunity to turn down. I even cheated on my LSAT’s and SAT’s! And those are supposed to be “impossible” to cheat on. Cheating is more so seen as a forbidden challenge, which is why it seems so enticing to embark on. It is much more gratifying to walk around and tell your friends how you doped your professor into giving you an A rather than saying you studied hard.
Our current ADD is on cloud 9. We are worried about too many things during the course of the semester to worry about how we are going to do on a test a few months later. Having a good time and who we are going to bang are more of a priority in college than getting good grades.
College is not a place we go to study or learn about a particular industry. It’s just a giant venue for partying and cheating when the occasion calls for it. Like I said, we take pride in how clever we are, in our ability to get around any academic obstacle no matter how imposing it seems.
The easy way out wouldn’t seem so appealing if it wasn’t proven to lead to better grades and less stress. After all, school actually censors creativity, so we have taken it upon ourselves to add creativity with the wild card cheating.
Only the idiots are the ones who get caught and there is nothing funnier than seeing that girl cry after she got caught cheating. Cheating has spread to a massive scale not because we are lazy but because everyone is doing it, just like everyone took steroids in baseball during the 90′s. And as these athletes taught us, why hit ground balls when you can hit home runs?
Preston Waters | Elite.
