preview

Cheating Essay

Decent Essays

Cheating

There is an ever broadening problem spreading throughout colleges all across America: cheating. Is it a serious offence or just a harmless crime? Cheating is on the rise, but schools and colleges are not far behind with ways of dealing with it. Mark Clayton deals with this issue in his essay entitled “A Whole Lot of Cheatin’ Going On.”

Clayton’s essay is heavily quoted along with an obvious absence of his ideas. The reader is supposed to believe that his quotes accurately represent his views on the matter at hand. Clayton’s essay is primarily pathos due to the amount of quoted ideas.

The essay starts off quoting a freshman at University of Texas: “’Cheating is an answer. It might not be a good answer, but none …show more content…

Students of this generation are reluctant to turn their classmates in.’” (20-21) Clayton states that critics believe that college cheaters get their bad habits from high school; it is what they have gotten away with before and they think they can get away with it again. Even though his essay lacks personal opinion, Clayton does make some interesting points.
According to Who’s Who among American High School Students, “80 percent [of high school students] said they had cheated during their academic careers.” (21) Such logos is a common sight in Clayton’s essay. Another fact that helps prove his point that cheating is only getting worse would be when he states that, “66 percent of the parents of these top students [Who’s Who] said cheating was ‘not a big deal.’” Clayton tries to start his essay with a nice variety of pathos, ethos, and logos, but he ends up overwhelming his readers with other people’s quotes.

In the next section of Clayton’s article he describes how colleges are starting to fight back. He says colleges are starting to condemn dishonesty; some are even making students’ cases very public so as to advertise their willingness to deal with cheating. Some schools are trying to prevent cheating before it has a chance to happen by performing skits at freshman orientation as well as giving out pamphlets on plagiarism and cheating. One of the more common approaches colleges take is

Get Access