By Ellie Smith
Features Editor

Most people would be lying if they said they have never cheated. The majority of students are guilty of asking a friend for answers, looking on sparknotes.com for ideas, or glancing at other students’ answers during a test.

People cheat for a number of reasons. Some students may cheat because they don’t feel like studying despite having time to study. However, most cheat because they want to do well in school and run out of time to study or finish their homework.

Cheating is reportedly more common with honors level students. This is because these students work hard to succeed and get exceptional grades. When they are nervous that they will do poorly on an assessment, they know how greatly a poor grade would affect their average in the class, so they believe that cheating is the only option to ensure a good grade on the test.

The majority of students have an ultimate goal of being successful and to them, failure is not an option. When students take on too many activities and a heavy course load, they run out of time to study for some tests. Students either stay up late studying and only sleep for a few hours, or decide to figure out a way to cheat on the test.

The problem is that students are taking on too much in their lives and are running out of time to study, so they feel they have no other option than to cheat if they want to be successful. For a lot of students, they would not cheat if they had time to study, but because they have so many classes that require a large workload, they run out of time.

Students feel that they are under a large amount of pressure to do well in school and often have anxiety about doing poorly. Even when these students do study, they feel nervous they will not do well and use cheating as a back up plan. If they do not understand a question, they may look at other students’ papers or use another method of cheating.

To avoid having to resort to cheating in order to achieve good grades in class, students should try to cut down their workloads by taking on less activities. Students also need to not put so much pressure on themselves and set such high expectations because they need to be realistic about what they can accomplish and how much studying time is required to make it happen.