HIGH SCHOOL HABITS NEVER DIE

By: Shahida Arabi, Mehadi Hassan, Deidre Thompson


Students carry their bad high school habits to college when they cheat and plagiarize, studies say. The percentage of students who cheat in high school compared to college differs by a mere 5%,according to U.S. News and World Report, while the percentage of students who plagiarize differs by 2% from high school to college, according to statistics from plagiarism.org. Students can gain access to websites that do their work for them, such as customwritings.com, which charges $10
per page for high school students and $12 a page for college students, for essays.

In high school, cheating and plagiarism are more common than they are in college. "I give about thirteen exams during the whole year, and I'd say we'd have at least one to three cheaters for every exam," said Charles McCanna, a biology teacher at Truman High School.Instances of cheating range from surreptitiously looking over a classmate's exam to copying whole lab assignments. McCanna once discovered one of his best students copying lab assignments. "It doesn't really have to do with the caliber of the students, it's just: 'Oh wait, I didn't prepare, I've got to make up somehow," said McCanna. "I'll pull them aside and say,'What's up with you looking at so-and-so's paper; What's up with the answers on your hands?'" McCanna thinks the best prevention against cheating or plagiarizing is to give students incentives for doing their own school work."You just gotta relate [the lessons] to their life," he said.

As for college students,“ they use resources such as sparknotes.com for their plagiarizing purposes. "College students are more 'sophisticated'," said Akilah Smith, a senior at Lehman College. She said that while high school students plagiarize ineffectually, college students are quite adept at eluding suspicion.

"In college, you're an adult -“ no-one's going to run you down
and spank you," she said.