I know the feeling. You spend all night studying and get as bad of a grade as you would’ve gotten without opening a book. Especially at Minnetonka, classes are only getting harder and having straight A’s may feel like a fleeting dream. However, for some people, getting the grades are becoming easier. The fact is that traditional studying isn’t always the easiest way to score well on tests; many students are looking for shortcuts around academic legitimacy, and it’s adjusting our academic landscape.

In a study of 24,000 high school students, Donald McCabe of Rutgers University found that 64% of students admitted to cheating on a test during the preceding year of school. These statistics were compiled between 2002 and 2011. A more recent poll taken by ABCNews in the past year showed that the number was closer to 70% of students admitting to cheating on at least one test. Don’t think that Minnetonka is exempt from these stats, either; last year over one hundred students got caught cheating on the same math test by sharing a picture of an answer key, and this practice is much more widespread than many would expect. The ability to have a camera in your pocket coupled with the simplicity of texting a photo have facilitated this process to enable hundreds of cheaters at once.

These simple ways around academic integrity that have manifested themselves in our student body doesn’t stop with simple violations of the MHS cheating policy. Another common way to avoid a hopeless test after a night of failed studying is to be called out of the testing hour by parents. Through discussing this with both teachers and student, it is clear that certain test day absentees start to become transparent on test number two or three. 

At an upper-class school like Minnetonka, some students have even used their socioeconomic status as a means to improve test scores. A controversy that has recently been in conversation with regards to ACT scores, there are many students who deem intense tutoring as unfair. It is a simple algorithm: the wealthier the family, the more it is willing to spend on tutors. Some students even have private tutors for every single class. For our students who don’t come from backgrounds where this is a possibility, it can seem like an unfair academic advantage that doesn’t necessarily benefit the students who work the hardest for their grades.

I’m not here to indict you if you have used any of these methods. In fact, based on the expanse of the use of these academic shortcuts, you probably have. This isn’t a criticism. Instead, a description of the methods by which students fall back on to avoid slipping into poor grades. This isn’t so much a student body program, rather a Minnetonka program. We must step back and understand the environments that push students towards these tricks, we must understand that school is stressful and, with stress, students will do anything to alleviate the anxiety of testing.