Cheating: Not Worth It

     It's funny how you can go months not thinking about something and then all of a sudden it's in your face constantly. In FCA on Wednesday we talked about cheating and I honestly didn't think it was that big of a problem, but over the course of two days, I've changed my mind completely about that. A kid in our physics class was ratted out for cheating on his test that we took yesterday. The teacher let him keep his 96%, claiming that since he hadn't personally caught him he couldn't punish him (even though the kid admitted to "looking up a few answers"). The teacher said that he would make the kid sit in front of the class for the rest of the tests and that if the kid ever asked for a recommendation, he wouldn't give him one. But he was still allowed to keep his 96%. Well, after a little... peer persuasion... the kid asked the teacher if he could retake the test because he didn't feel right taking his grade that he got by cheating. So kudos for him. Then today when I was typing up a title page for my group's NHD project, I lied about our word count and said that we only had 498 when we really had 550 (there's a 500 word limit). But then I thought about what an absolute hypocrite I was being and I thought about how embarrassed I would be if I got caught after just bashing this kid for cheating, so I changed the title page to reflect our real word limit and reprinted it. (Now that I think about it, I forgot to include the words in our titles and captions, but I don't have the word count for the captions, so I don't know for sure. We may have 600 words, actually, that's how bad it is). Yeah, we may get a few points off, but at least I won't feel guilty about it, and there's no way to get "caught" because we are blatantly admitting to going over the word limit. And honestly, there are worse crimes than having too many words on a stinking NHD project. It's not worth losing my integrity over. I just hope the other girls in my group will see where I'm coming from. Yes, we could solve this whole issue by cutting out some words, but we honestly have the pretty much the bare bones already and we've already glued everything down, so that's not really a viable option. In the grand scheme of things, it's a stupid word count on a stupid National History Day project that will mean nothing years from now, and it would be stupid to cheat on it.

Day 440 Song Recommendation: "Never Do That Again" by Ivy.
-SE Wagner