Everyone has heard “Class, keep your eyes on your own paper.” It is a favorite line by teachers when suspecting cheating during a test. Now cheating is no longer just during tests and has progressively become as big a part of students school routine as lunch.

The Educational Testing Service defines academic cheating as “representing someone else’s work as your own. It can take many forms, including sharing another’s work, purchasing a term paper or test questions in advance, paying another to do the work for you.”

They also claim that 73% of all test takers, including prospective graduate students and teachers, most students do cheat at some point. 86% of high school students agreed.

Struggling students are not the only ones who are cheating on a test, but it is also students of all shapes, sizes, and type. The scary thing is it may be the 4.0 honors student who is doing the most amount of cheating.

The main reason for all of this academic dishonesty is the never ending desire for students to get the best grade possible. If students did not feel so pressured to get the highest grade they can, there would be no reason to cheat.

If they came into school every single day excited to learn instead of shuddering at the thought of the next unit test, there would be no cheating. Sadly, this is just fantasy.

High school is no longer about learning, gaining knowledge or expanding your mind. All that seems to matters now is getting a higher grade.

Students no longer learn, they memorize. They study over their assignments to cram the information into their brain, but after the test it is all forgotten.

The grading system needs to change. If students began to go to school for knowledge instead of just a passing grade, the amount of cheating would drop.

It is a pretentious person’s favorite thing to say, “athletes get paid way too much; all they do is play a game and make millions. It is not fair.”

This may be true. According to businessinsider.com, an average professional basketball player’s salary is $5.15 million a year.

This is an enormous amount of money to play a child’s recreational game. 5.15 million dollars seems monstrous compared to payscale.com’s average yearly salary for a police officer at $56,130. An adult who risks his/her life to protect the law abiding citizens of the United States makes 8% of what an NBA player makes. Something is wrong here.

People wonder who to blame for this. They have no one to blame but themselves. The general public is the only one responsible.

The general public are the ones who pay $110 for a Joe Haden jersey. They let Nike tell them a pair of Lebron James basketball shoes are worth $250.

All of that money is not directly pocketed by Nike or whatever brand is selling it. Athletes are endorsed by companies, getting paid by the company for the athlete to wear their products and the company in turn can use their name for products or even commercials.

Oklahoma City Thunder forward Kevin Durant was recently offered $265-$285 million over 10 years by Under Armor.

Someone’s name and image should not be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. This is only able to happen because people are willing to pay whatever price the corporations say they will pay.

It seems like a big cycle to me. Athletes start new trends and then the big corporations will sell that trend and make huge profit off the new style, thus increasing the corporation’s profit and their ability to pay athletes these huge endorsements.  

Overpaid athletes have only the chumps overpaying for brand-name apparel to thank for their enormous salary.