Do you feel constantly under pressure at school? Keeping up with studying, homework, and extra curricular activities can be a lot to handle. It is a proven fact that over the years, the pressure on students to get into college and get a good job is increasing. With this pressure building up on students to get good grades, it is more likely for them to cheat. In St. Mary’s County public schools, there is a policy called product/process. Under this system, tests and quizzes count for 70% of your grade, while classwork and homework only counts for 30%. This makes it hard for people that are not as good of test takers, but work hard on their classwork and homework. I and many of my classmates have experienced this struggle throughout all of high school.
I recently took a survey asking kids what effect product/process had on them, and if they would be more likely to cheat with or without product/process. 68% of the students I asked said that they thought product and process makes it harder for them to get good grades. Though this is not an overwhelming majority, 88% of students said that they would be more likely to cheat with product/process in place.
In my AP English 11 class, we read an article called “Too Much Pressure” by Colleen Wenke. Wenke states that “State and national statistics show cheating among high-school students has raised dramatically during the past fifty years.” “There is a new ‘class’ of cheaters today. In the past, as one would expect, the students who cheated were the ones who could not pass or did not do the work. They were the lazy students. But today the majority of the students who admit to cheating are college-bound overachievers.” I asked one student in an Advanced Placement class about their feelings on product-process and they said, “Product-process definitely makes school a lot harder. I feel the need to always do better and get good grades in order to feel good about my efforts. I would probably be more likely to cheat with product-process.”
By using product-process, it seems that cheating is more likely to occur. We should not let kids think that cheating the system and getting straight A’s will be a parallel for how you can get through the rest of life. I think we can all agree that cheating is the wrong thing to do. So why encourage it?
