Deadlines are approaching for many grants, scholarships and graduate schools, and the pressures to stand out are running high.
It’s a competitive world, and unless you can invent a new wheel — or better yet, a new Facebook — the only way to stand out is through academics.
A 4.0 GPA no longer guarantees instant success or college acceptance. A bachelor’s degree might as well be an associate degree, which is basically a GED certificate. Students seeking acceptance to Ivy Leagues have to tap dance while painting portraits of the American presidents in reverse-alphabetical order.
Such pressures to be magnificent, however, don’t encourage authenticity. The pressures can create charlatans, willing to act any way and do anything to impress the committee of people who decide how the rest of their lives will be lived.
Cheating to survive has become commonplace, and there is little guilt involved, such as in last year’s scandal at Stuyvesant High School in New York City, which involved more than 60 students sharing answers on Regents exams. The prestigious and well-known school can almost surely usher a “good” student into the college of his or her choice, though this effect may have been diminished since the scandal sullied its reputation.
According to a New York Times article, Stuyvesant students were quoted as being unremorseful in their cheating.
“It’s like, ‘I’ll keep my integrity and fail this test’ — no. No one wants to fail a test,” one Stuyvesant senior said. “You could study for two hours and get an 80, or you could take a risk and get a 90.”
Occasional cheating has become almost necessary to maintain the image that you’re able to balance a full load of classes, an internship or two, a part-time job and extracurriculars, all of which are decisive factors in determining future success.
An online class warning that cheating is disallowed in all forms and will be punished indiscriminately means nothing to two friends who sit next to each other and take the quizzes together.
Some classes call for more time to be allocated than others, and when you’ve stacked 18 credits into your schedule, making more time for one class means taking away valuable time from another. Then comes the minor cheating, where you quickly Google on your phone what “alguien” means during your Spanish test, since you were too busy studying the periodic table for your chemistry class to be able to run through your Spanish flash cards.
It’s a constant juggling act. Each semester, you choose one class as the one that will require most of your attention, and so the others fall into the realm of “I may copy a few homework answers.”
The pressure to be ever greater than those around you, to stand taller, swing harder and go bigger has reached a point of reversing its effectiveness.
We’re now trying so hard to be extreme go-getters that we’re losing our moral fiber along the way.
Competitiveness only drives innovation to a certain extent.
If you do what you enjoy, you shouldn’t have to lie and cheat to make yourself significant.
Reach the columnist at kwrenick@asu.edu or follow him on Twitter @kwrenick
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