As a young woman who is still attending high school, I am hell-bent on making college admissions officers want to take a second look at my transcript. I'm in my junior year, and am holding on paper a 4.0 GPA as of right now, a 98.62 cumulative average, and am ranked 10th in our class out of 280 students. I'm not bragging, trust me; you will see my point later. I'll admit that I am very proud of those numbers, but they didn't just appear on my report cards; There are many nights where I scream for taking all honors and having a huge workload. I realized also at a young age, colleges aren't only looking for numbers; They're also looking for extracurricular activities. I'm 2nd chair in my school orchestra, and I am 1st chair in select strings. I've done the play and musical two years, and this year, I snagged a lead role in both. I started singing as a sophmore and am now in our select choral group of 20 people. There are other various activities I do, but I realized I needed something bigger and better than musicals and orchestra: National Honor Society.
National Honor Society (from now on, refered to as NHS) is an elite group of students who have a culmination of outstanding grades along with volunteer experience and school activities. I knew this would look amazing on a transcript for college.
I am currently a member of NHS. I was inducted in the fall of 2008, and have enjoyed the doors it has opened for me. But just like everyone else, my workload is huge, and the pressure to do well is overwhelming...but is it enough to cheat?
It's a known fact that people cheat in high school. The unlucky ones get caught, but what about the 'lucky' ones? At my school, some of the biggest cheaters have cheated themselves right into NHS! How hypocritical is that?! National HONOR Society, for crying out loud. And once this cheating was brought to our advisors attention, they stated, "We know who some of you are, so watch your back." Hello!? If you know who some of them are, why aren't their butts kicked to the curb? Cheating is not acceptable even with a regular, middle-of-the-road student, but for an honors student to cheat, it's down right disgusting.
It seems to me like the advisors of our NHS are protecting the cheaters. They know people are cheating because it was brought to their attention, so in my opinion, they should be doing some research to see if there is any solid proof. Giving the group as a whole a 'well, don't do it again' speech is down right patronizing. If they even remotely think that we are honors students, they shouldn't even have to tell us this! They even went as far to say that they understand why we would cheat because of all of the pressures put on us. Gag me with a spoon, please...
The advisors say that we all deserve a spot in NHS, and we should know we don't have to cheat to look better. But what they fail to realize is most of the ones who are cheating currently have been cheating since their freshman year...hence their existance in NHS. If they wouldn't have cheated then, we wouldn't be having this problem today because they wouldn't have been inducted.
Has anyone else run into this issue at their school?
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yeah cheating is everywhere
Yes. I switched high schools my senior year, but at my old high school both the valedictorian and salutatorian had been caught cheating before. It is a big problem, but I think that once they go to college they will get caught and face serious consequences.
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