Easy A not worth academic dishonesty

Annual tuition for an out-of-state student studying at Plattsburgh State is roughly $15,000. The in-state total is about $6,000. While it can be hard to remember as you’re walking from class to class, you’re not spending that money to write essays, take pop quizzes and live in a dorm room. You’re spending that money to learn the skills that will hopefully earn a job and help you keep it.

As a college student, you pay for every page of notes you write, every lecture you listen to and every exam you take. By cheating on an exam or homework assignment, you’re not only wasting your time, you’re wasting thousands of dollars.

Not cheating might sound like a kindergarten lesson, but we’re not trying to talk down to anyone. It’s only natural for adults and kindergarteners alike to try to find ways to earn more while working less. However, there’s a difference between peeking at someone else’s spelling test and cheating to pass the exam that you’re paying to take.

That exam is not just a line on a syllabus, it is a tool for making sure you remember the lessons that you’re paying to learn.  The answers to those multiple choice questions could one day end up being the answers to a problem that you need to solve to earn your paycheck. The information you learn at college is meant to last, not to be written on your hand for a pop quiz and forgotten when you turn the quiz in.

Even information that might not be directly related to your career is still costing you hundreds of dollars a day. You’re paying to have your professor come in and lecture. Don’t cheat your way through the class and leave knowing just as little as you did on the first day.

This might all sound like common sense. Every student from their first day of school is told that cheating is wrong. Unfortunately, the need to fit a college education into a four-year time span can sometimes make learning seem more like an obstacle than a reward. 

When even high-achieving students at Harvard are caught cheating, it seems like the belief for many students is that the purpose of college is to do homework and get good grades. Again, this is not the case. College is more about what you learn, not how you learn it.

Employers will not care that you got an “A” on the assignment you copied from a friend or the essay you plagiarized.

Employers will care if you remember how to do the task question five asked about. Employers will care if you remember the details of the essay you were supposed to research. Employers will not ask “How many tests did you pass?” Employers will ask “What do you remember from them?”

If all of that is not incentive enough, imagine the medical students who bring cheat sheets to the brain surgery test. As they lean over you with the scalpel, what do they remember?