Obtaining good grades is one of the many pressures associated with high school. Occasionally students resort to cheating in order to get the credit for hard work and to receive high scores. Recently, multiple students in AP History were discovered to be cheating, and caused consequences for all students in the course.

Reading checks are quizzes that test students on their knowledge of the assigned reading. Many students like junior Dillon Lake prepared for the evaluation, but one was caught with the quiz’s answers.

“The reason that one of the people got caught was because he was bragging about cheating,” Lake said. “He was not aware that the teacher was behind him while he was talking about it.”

After the discovery that students were distributing answers to one another, the teachers decided the students should receive a new reading check. The new quiz was not open-note, unlike the original which usually is.

“I thought it was a poor way of handling the situation,” junior Ryan Huston said. “Why make everyone in APUSH retake the check when it was a couple of kids trying to cheat?”

According to Lake, the situation was unfair because he was not the one that got caught. Although he did not cheat, he said he understands why a student would want to.

“In today’s society all that really matters to any college, or school for that matter, is the number you get on a test,” Lake said. “Still, those students should not have done it and especially shouldn’t have been bragging about it.”

Despite this, Lake also said it should be looked down upon.

“Cheating shows that people are weak-willed and would rather go the easy way,” Lake said. “It shows that they would rather not really learn the information than taking the time to learn something.”

Overall, Huston says cheating is unnecessary and wrong. According to him, in this case it was selfish of the students because one was caught and made all of the APUSH students suffer.

“Cheating is uncool,” Huston said. “Earning a grade that you worked hard for by studying is a much better feeling.”