My Academic Nightmare: The Myth of Academic Dishonesty
At this point in my academic career I see myself in a severe predicament regarding my feelings towards reading and writing; mostly towards reading. I briefly remember a time where reading wasn’t that much of a hassle and more so a pleasure, but these were also simpler times, with much less digital screens, and more toys and games. Nowadays I simply read things only because it is a task and I find myself reading with almost no effort to digest and understand these readings. Perhaps this is due to the severe “senioritis” I found myself having to overcome my last year in high school. I’ve noticed that as I become lazier I can see it starting to affect my everyday life. It’s a struggle because I can’t find myself becoming truly invested in any books or magazines, unless it relates to something which I am very interested in, which is very rare to come by nowadays. When I do read, I like to read things like online articles about my favorite sports teams, or an occasional National Geographic article here and there. These texts provide me with a connection to what the writer is saying, unlike the educational textbooks or Historical Fiction novels that students nowadays are required to read in their English Classes. English class was not the only class where I found it hard to connect to a book, I have a hard time feeling the need to dive into a Chemistry Textbook and reading page for page, when I could just look in one or two sections and find the help I need. This method of textbook reading has seeped over into the way I read other books and magazines, mostly skimming through and picking up on key words, which often led to my misunderstanding of a text. Not understanding the texts can have some serious side effects, and perhaps make a student do rash things to maintain a good grade. I found myself in this situation last year during the senior year of high school.
I looked forward to Senior year being the easiest year of my high school career, but I single-handedly made my senior year probably one of my worst academic years. This is due to the fact that I was caught cheating on a paper in my Honors Senior English class. In Mrs. Fenimore’s class, we were assigned to read “The Things They Carried” and we were giving some learning objectives for each of the checkpoints for reading, checkpoint meaning the amount of chapters we were required to read by the end of every other week. At the end of every other week, we would have an online test of the checkpoint we read. I could never find myself really getting into this book, most of the time because the chapters in this book seemed repetitive at times, so when I realized I was behind on my reading, I would just look up chapter summaries to catch myself up. If you’ve ever used a chapter summary to “read”, you probably realize that it doesn’t work at all, its like reading a light outline of the book. Looking back on it, I do realize that looking up chapter summaries wouldn’t have been necessary if I just read the book completely, but I just could not find myself to connect to this novel. So when the checkpoint test came around, I was lost, I had absolutely no idea what any of the answers were, but since the test was online, I decided to just paste the questions in online and just copy the answers down, and for some reason I thought that everything would be just fine since I never have heard of anyone actually getting caught for academic dishonesty. To me it seemed like a myth, until the next morning, the online grade tracker glitched and accidentally marked everyone’s paper as “cheated”, though that marking was only meant for me. At the time I had no idea that it was me, since me and my friends all got the notification that said “cheated” than I assumed that it wasn’t actually meant for me, even though it was the other way around.
An hour goes by and I get a text message from my friend Jacob saying that most people’s “cheated” had gone away. So I nonchalantly pulled out my iPhone, tapped on the Grading app, I always hated the color of the app, it was kinda like a baby puke green with a beige overlay, not too appealing to the eye but then again, this was one of the main sources of anxiety for most students so I’m sure the color didn’t really matter, but it bothered me severely. After going through this little thought, I tapped the English section of the “Grades” tab, and my sank, there it was, in a bold and red colored font, “cheated”. At that moment I knew for a fact that it was me, right then and there a surge of emotion went through my head, though you probably couldn’t tell because I was just sitting at a desk with my hand supporting my head which was slouching to the left, probably due to the fact that I was cramming for a math test the night before. All I could think about was that all my friends had cheated and they got away trouble-free but I somehow had gotten caught, I was mad, but I was also sad, sad that I had sunk this low, I was scared, what would my parents think, I mean as students were taught all of our lives not to cheat, especially not to plagiarize, like there was no excuse except for laziness and I knew it. It was all my fault, and now I have to deal with the consequences. Then it hit me, what are the consequences? Oh god, forget about what my parents are gonna say to me, what about my teacher? That’s what I should be scared of, am I gonna get kicked out of my class with all my friends? Are all my friends gonna think I’m a loser for getting caught cheating? So many questions were going through my mind, all of which had unknown answers.
I had my English class at the end of the day, so the day felt so long because I was dreading the fact that I had to go to class, I didn’t even want to show my face around school. I remember when that second to last bell rang, and I knew that meant that it was time. Walking down that hallway never felt worse than on that day. Walking into that room, and listening to everyone’s nervous chatter, most likely because of the notification situation, I knew it was gonna have to be addressed, in front of everyone. After class that day she told me to talk with her and told me that she was very disappointed with me and that if I cheat then I didn’t deserve to be in her class.
What I got from that day, was I great big smack in the face, a wake up call, indicating that, sure, you can go about your life, cheating and not getting caught, risking all for a short term gain, but no matter what if you go throughout your life cheating, it’ll eventually catch up to you somehow, some way, and even though it was probably the most embarrassing experience of my entire high school career, I’m kinda glad I got to realize that the road I was going down was the wrong one, and that there was other ways to get around and having to fake my intelligence would get me nowhere.
