Cheating has been a topic that I have not been able to escape since the fourth grade, when a girl I barely knew accused me of  looking at her math test. I was actually just gazing out the window, and I remember being surprised that this random girl would accuse me of trying to copy her answers. At the time, doing that instead of thinking of my own answers seemed like a crazy, horrible thing that no one should ever do.

Years later, in seventh grade, there was an incident where a friend had, without my knowledge, went into my Google Drive account and copied and pasted my essay outline into her assignment. The event, where both of us missed all of gym class because our homeroom teachers were interrogating us, was frustrating because I didn’t do anything, yet I was being punished as well.

By now, I realized cheating was a common thing, just not in my school. The reason for this was that at my small school, and probably many other middle schools, essays and tests didn’t feel like they mattered. All you had to do was show that you tried, and you got an easy four (the progressive private school equivalent to an A).

Now that I’m in high school, A’s are certainly not as easy to come by, and showing you tried, but getting wrong answers, counts for nothing.  The fact is that the importance of learning has decreased extremely. It used to be that learning was the absolute most important thing in schools. Now, education to parents and students alike is replaced with getting good grades. There are too many people that have straight A’s but very little actual knowledge, and people who get C’s, but are incredibly smart and just don’t test well. This is a huge problem that much of the older generation doesn’t understand. Many high schoolers’ parents define their child’s intelligence by the grades on their report card, not by the knowledge in their head.

So what do high schoolers do to deal with the increasing pressure for good grades? They cheat. On tests, on homework, on anything that could possibly bump up their grade. It’s sad that many of us don’t find copying homework or looking at someone’s test to be the horrible thing that my fourth grade self did. According to a recent study, 70 percent of high school students have admitted to cheating on tests at some point. 90 percent of high schoolers have copied someone else’s homework. These statistics prove that academic dishonesty has lost its shock value and is now very common place.

So what can we do to change this? Stop putting pressure on high schoolers to value letter grades over actual learning. Teenagers are going to do whatever they can to get good grades as long as parents and teachers put pressure on them to do so. Kids have learned that it’s okay to cheat because that will help them get good grades, which is what everybody wants. Once this pressure is lifted and kids are no longer defined by their letter grades or GPAs, cheating can become a thing of the past.