Dear Mrs. Terranova,
Recently we have had an outbreak on plagiarism here at Monte Vista and I would like to say as much as we students want to be overachieving and brilliant, it’s a difficult task to do without the internet. We have so much stress on us by our parents, constantly pushing us to do better than average and balancing sports and a social life. I know most people cant balance sports and academics and if you can, you’re put on this pedestal and everyone wants to be you. I think what drives people to cheat is the fact that they want to get into a good four year college after high school and be able to live a happy and successful life. Our parents portray it as “if we don’t do good in school you wont live a happy successful life when you’re older” which actually is somewhat true. The internet has advanced so much in the past decade or two and with all this information at our fingertips we take advantage of that and use it to our benefit. I’m not saying it’s a good thing because I actually realize it’s really sick that we have become so lazy and get everything handed to us now a days. We don’t understand the value of knowledge and when we copy stuff from the internet we aren’t helping ourselves at all. I think most people understand its wrong to cheat off of other peoples’ papers but I don’t think kids in high school realize the true meaning of plagiarism and what exactly that word means. When we pick things up from the internet we don’t think its cheating simply because it wasn’t copying off of a classmates worksheet, and I think that’s where the big misunderstanding is. In order for students from Monte vista to stop cheating I think we should be given a full blown