Back to the real world

I finally caught up on some much needed sleep. Let me tell you, if there was a college in Mexico that students went to, I am sure there would be a lot of plagiarizing. It is so gorgeous down there! People are always out and about and everyone is drinking. I was not even in school and I was peer pressured to go out to the clubs and drink all of the time. Now that I am home, I only have a weekend to do all of my work and I am peer pressured by my friends at home to go out with them because I have not seen them in a long time.

Peer pressure affects students whether they think it does or it does not. Peer pressure to someone may be to go out and party all night, but to someone else it may be to just hang out and watch a movie. Which ever one it is, the students are still avoiding their work. This pressure students have from their peers leads to the avoidance of work. In this case, students will do anything to succeed, resulting in plagiarism.

Plagiarism, I think starts at a young age, and starts with cheating. Cheating in high school seems like something everyone does. When students see the good grades they get from not doing their own work, they then want to do that for everything. I was just talking to my brother, a junior in high school, when he was doing his homework. I looked and he was copying someone’s homework. Turns out, it is an older girl’s binder who has already completed the class. He refers to this binder in order to complete his homework. My brother, Joey, is a smart kid, but he also faces a lot of peer pressure. He is never home! He is always hanging out with his friends or making something out of wood in the shed. This “little” cheating seems like it is not a big deal because he still studies and understands the material, however, if he depends on this to much, it could become a larger problem at the college level.