In today’s society, cheating in academic settings has become considerably more normalized, and many direct the blame of this issue onto the increase of parental expectations. It’s no secret that students nowadays share exam questions, images of old tests, and test answers. However, it is important to look beyond the sole cause of cheating as the parental pressure on students, but at the educational system overall and societal norms, along with its unrealistic standards.

The emphasis on the importance of academic performance has caused cheating to become much more prevalent amongst students. In high schools across the country, cheating is a popular occurrence, with students from earlier periods often sharing test questions with other students, taking and distributing photos of a test, and more. Cheating isn’t restricted to knowing the answers on a test either; any form of academic dishonesty, such as using new generative AI such as ChatGPT to do schoolwork also counts as cheating.

Although parental pressure plays a large role in enforcing good academic performance, students are also being influenced by societal norms to maintain their GPA. At a young age, both parents and students have been shaped by messages that affirm good grades equate to success in life, and that people who don’t do well in school will fail to achieve anything.

This stems from the popular belief that the college a student attends is a determining factor in the trajectory of their life. Less selective colleges, including community colleges, have been stigmatized by numerous competitive parents. These parents believe that attending a community college is a mark of failure and inadequacy, usually the last resort for high school graduates. Therefore, with satisfactory grades as an important criteria in getting into one of the more prestigious universities, the importance of grades has been emphasized immensely.

It’s not just schools in America that cheating has become more normalized in either. In other countries, like China and South Korea, where academic performance plays a larger role in determining the college a student goes to, cheating rates and the use of generative AI have skyrocketed as well.

To address this issue, however, tightening cheating protocols is not the solution. Although enforcing rules to deter students from cheating will temporarily decrease cheating rates, it is not a permanent solution as competitive students will continuously search for ways to access answers. Instead, it is essential that we, as a society, promote other measures of achievement that stress the importance of personal growth and critical thinking. Only by redefining our measure of success can we create a fair and honest learning environment.