A Whole Lot of Cheating Going on Essay Example

One of the more serious issues going in schools today is that of plagiarism, or just plain cheating. “A Whole Lot of Cheating Going On”, by Mark Clayton, gives us some insight into this growing issue. It seems everywhere you turn this is happening even with all of the things setup to prevent it, such as screening papers or checking sources. Cheating is not right, but it also will be very hard to prevent. I know this from personal experience as well as through all of the tools students have at their disposal this day in age. There is an image in Clayton’s essay that portrays cheating in a classroom. Right in the middle of the image you have a girl wearing glasses looking directly at her paper as if she studied and knows she is doing well. Next to her she has one student looking at her paper for answers, as well as one sitting behind her practically “breaking his neck” in order to see her answers. Then on the other side of her is a student in disbelief and confused as to why they are cheating off of her paper, and with a look as though he has seen it before and doesn’t know what to do about it. That image very well describes what is involved in cheating. I have seen it before, and as early as middle school. When students don’t know the answers, they will usually resort to cheating because their grades are on the line, and as we all know those are very important. While the image is drawn almost to look humorous, it hits the nail right on the head. There is the girl wearing glasses, depicted as someone you might say is a “bookworm” or “nerd”, and out of the other three students, two of them are cheating off of her. With all of the resources students have such as the internet, to just the different ways to cheat on a test such as a cheat sheet, it seems that this problem will only continue to grow. The information that Clayton gives pretty much states that every student has done it before. It just takes me back to middle school, when I first saw