[Zen653]

Cheating is rampant in high school. Most of us probably cheated at one time or another in our lives. While I stayed completely clean throughout college and law school, and never plagiarized at any level, I occasionally tried to gain an unfair competitive advantage in high school by asking someone taking the test before me what the essay questions were. I wasn't the only person in my class who did this, practically all of us who cared at all about our grades did so. Sometimes the essay questions would be the same, other times they'd be different. Even if you wanted to stay honest, sometimes you couldn't help overhearing something while waiting to go into class.

There were also instances where we'd be assigned large projects and would divide up the research and note-taking, as a time-saving mechanism. Person A would read and take notes on Book 1, Person B would read and takes notes on Book 2, Person C would read and take notes on Book 3, and then everyone would swap notes with each other before writing their papers. I feel somewhat guilty about it in retrospect but I also know that about 80% of students (if not more) cheated on a semi-regular basis, many of them in far more egregious ways. Students would regularly copy off each other during exams, sometimes with the teacher sitting just a few feet away from them. Smarter cheaters in social science and humanities classes would take turns writing papers and would then distribute them to the other people in the cheating group, who would then tinker, paraphrase, change the order, and flip arguments. Smarter cheaters in math and science classes would store formulas and other facts into their graphing calculators.

I think it's human nature to try and gain an edge. Teachers eventually come to accept this, focusing their energies primarily on the blatant cheating that shatters the integrity of academics (plagiarism and copying.)