Dear Friends and Fellow School Peers,

School has been quite the journey for me, I’ve gone from dreading school, to not minding school, to even wanting to go school, and all the way back to dreading it again. A true full circle moment. Many a time, I’ve found myself not wanting to do an assignment. And to get out of putting in the effort required to complete that assignment, what do you think I did in order to minimize? I cheated.

I write this letter to express my utmost concern for the future children of our generation. So many of us are so content with cheating our way through school, so long as it means our families are pleased, our college admissions officers are slightly impressed, our futures are set. But are they really set? What does this mean for the generations that will come after us? Will our future children have us as doctors, when we’ve ChatGPTed our way through Organic Chemistry? Will our future children have us as engineers, when we’ve Symbolabed our way through Integral Calculus? As scientists, when half of us don't know an atom from a molecule because we copied answers from our friends our whole high school career? What will become of our children when the people they rely on for answers and help are the same people who relied on AI and fraudulence to pass their way through school. Where will it end?

I do not use the “we” pronouns dismissively. I very much include myself in the groups to which I refer. I am very much a part of the problem and have well played my role in it, which is why my concern runs so deep. I know exactly what we are truly capable of—and that is absolutely nothing. Cheating has become so normalized in school, that students who on most occasions have relatively high academic integrity, feel compelled to cheat as well. Because if they don't, how else can they compete? By upholding their academic integrity, they end up finding themselves at a disadvantage as everyone else who's ok with cheating passes them up. An article from Edweek correlated the cheating epidemic in schools with the steroid epidemic that passed through the sports world. They mentioned how professional sports players felt compelled to usd steroids because everyone else was using them too. They stated it’d be, “impossible to win… without [emphasis added] doping.” In a likewise manner, students feel compelled to cheat as well because if they don’t, they too feel that they would not be able to ‘win.’ They further the detriment by saying how “...the normalization of AI doping would create an arms race among students… ” Not only from what this article has said, but from personal experience, I can attest to this, as in my very own school, the competition among us students is more socially and academically violent than anything I've seen before.

So now, I look to you, my fellow peers, it's up to us to stamp out this epidemic. There's no surefire way to completely rid schools of cheating, (we’ll always find a way). Peers, I urge you to think about your futures, cheating now, only serves you now; the reverberations will be felt as you progress further in your academic careers, and will likely spill into your work. In high school cheating is so normalized we don't even realize how serious the ramifications of it really are. As a kid in high school it seems like nothing, if you're caught maybe you get a zero on an assignment, your parents are called, big deal right? But once you get further in life, college, your work, the consequences steepen dramatically. Most institutions and corporations have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to plagiarism. So expulsion from your dream college or termination from your dream job are all very real possibilities you may face. If that’s not enough deterrence, according to The Citadel, you could also be met with very steep fines of up to $50,000 and up to a year in jail for plagiarism. Never in my life have I been given an assignment that was worth that much.

Even with all these consequences listed out, they should only be a portion of the reason you wouldn't want to cheat. The primary reason should be to uphold your academic integrity, because not only is cheating consequential to your future career or school, it's also consequential to your knowledge. Cheating only gets you a grade, but what you don't get is the actual knowhow from the class. Imagine cheating your way through all your math classes, and when you actually need to apply it in a serious situation or something of the sort, you're unable, because you didn't actually learn anything.

This is why, peers, we need to stamp this cheating epidemic out as soon as possible, so that the generations to come, can have a precedent set before them. Because if not, cheating through schools will only compound and compound and what we’ll be left with are people who don't know what they're doing in life. I hope to bring awareness to the seriousness of this issue and encourage you peers to go through school and life genuinely and do not cheat. Think of the consequences, think of the gaps that will form in your knowledge, and think of the future generations to come, that will look to us for answers.

Humbly,
Joshua L.