Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game

After reading two articles in the space of a week about the “cheating crisis” in American high schools, I feel compelled to ask:  did you guys cheat in high school?  I know I (and most of my classmates at one point or another) did.

Here’s the thing:  for me, and for a lot of my friends and classmates in high school, the tests and busywork assignments we were required to complete and turn in seemed like just another box to check off so we could graduate and get to college already.  We wanted to be taught and challenged in ways other than taking a test what felt like every damn week.  There were also classes that I never cheated in, mostly because I didn’t need or want to.  These were classes where we read and talked about interesting events and ideas, and I wanted to create cool projects and write essays surrounding these concepts.  But the classes where we were required to memorize dates of historical events and exact definitions in order to receive full credit on bi-weekly tests?  These classes really pissed me off, and didn’t especially make me want to become a dicto-bird in order to get a good grade.  So I cheated.  Not all the time but in specific classes, and sometimes often in those classes.  It doesn’t mean I didn’t learn anything in those subjects, because I felt like I did, but it meant that I didn’t have to kill myself to remember that the Battle of Bunker Hill took place in 1775 instead of 1776.  And cheating was, for the most part, pretty easy.  I didn’t get caught and I didn’t fail spectacularly at school when I got to college, because college required from me skills other than solely rote memorization and regurgitation (or at least my major did).  I never, not once ever, cheated in college.

I specifically remember a high school history class that I cheated in and almost got caught.  My best friend and I realized that our teacher, a woman who was completely new to teaching this class, was using the same test that the former teacher, a man who had retired the year before, had used for who knows how long.  The exact test.  She didn’t change around the order of the questions or make new answer choices or use some questions and also write new ones, every three weeks she just handed us a recycled test that had been given to our friends and older siblings for years and years prior.  So of course we got ahold of old copies of all those tests and looked up the answers to every question ahead of time, memorized them, and then regurgitated those on her tests.  She confronted my best friend about it and then started writing her own, new tests eventually, but I always kind of wanted to say to her “What do you expect?  We’re putting exactly as much effort into this test as we need to, and definitely more than you are.”  And I liked this woman, and for the most part thought she was a good teacher.  She just wasn’t a good test-giver, and so she made it easy for me to justify (to myself) cheating on her tests.  (The irony is years later when I was studying for the GRE I pored over every old test I could get my hands on and they were really valuable study tools).  

I never cheated on school-wide tests like the TAAS (Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, given to every student in the public school system every year and used to measure things like school performance) because I found the test to be easy and I didn’t feel like I needed to cheat.  I didn’t cheat on the SAT because I wasn’t that stupid and also didn’t feel like I needed to.  As I mentioned above, I never once cheated in college.  I don’t think it even occurred to me.  College was the big leagues, the real deal, the place where the teacher is asking you to think and understand, not just to memorize.  I thrived on that kind of learning, and it made me want to work harder, learn more, and be a better student.  And I was a much, much better student in college, both in terms of how much I learned and grew as a person and in terms of the grades I made.

I think the problem obviously lies not in these high school students but in the system that is testing them to death and trying to force every student into a specific mold:  get good grades, go to a good college, get good grades, get a good job.  If you put all the emphasis on the grade and not on the learning, then of course they’re going to figure this out and cut to the chase: the good grade.  They are, after all, teenagers.  It doesn’t mean that they don’t want to learn, it means that they don’t want to be prodded down the path by a bunch of adults telling them exactly what to do and then poking them every week to see if they’re doing it in one specific, pre-approved way that is used as a yardstick to measure their entire worth.  And to be honest, I don’t blame them.