A Brief History Of Crime

I've had my share of cheating in highschool. As a matter of fact, and I wont deny it now, it was a lion's share. At a certain point in my stay there, I was only studying for two things: the finals and an hour before making my codigo so I don't end up writing the wrong information or writing the right information and not knowing where to use it.

First question asked usually is why do I cheat? And like any student who cheats now, I have the same reason - because I knew could. I've long since considered it as an immutable natural law that a highschool kid is only about as honest as the options he thinks he can get away with. I hated wasting my time over stuff that I knew I wasn't going to be able to use in college when I know I could spend that time for something more relaxing - like sleeping, because sleeping rules.

I studied in a school with a system designed give a student just enough slack to learn how to cheat the right way. At least, that was how I saw it at that time. In other schools, getting caught means public embarassment, a failed grade in your card, your parents being called in by no less than the principal, and of course a really bad reputation that you are a dirty gradethief.

For my school, getting caught was about as embarassing as slipping on a wet sidewalk. Everybody's cheated at least once in our class (a simple confession session during one of the retreats revealed this) so if you get caught, that doesn't mean you're cheating against the whole class. That just meant you weren't cheating well enough.

Why do you ask is cheating this rampant? In my school, you start a quarter with a conduct grade of 95. For quizzes, homework or any one of the three long exams (different from the finals), getting caught means you'll get a zero for that exam and then you get a 10 point subtraction to your conduct for the first offense, and only 5 points deducted for the succeeding offenses (promo ata).

Now what does that mean? That means, if you know your math without cheating, you can get caught three times and still have a conduct of 75 - the passing grade for acting uncriminally. And since we're using an averaging grade system, the following quarter, you can get thrice again. That's three times per quarter, four quarters a year.

Theoretically, you can get caught 12 times in a school year and not get kicked out. But of course that's not the case in real life, every now and then people start noticing trends and then they lay the smack down for ultrarepeat offenders. Still, if that's not lenient, the following case probably demonstrates the extreme:

A friend of mine got caught cheating by the Principal during the finals. During one of his rounds, the principal saw that my friend's chair was dangerously too close to another guys desk. So he approached my friend and asked him to move his ass. My friend, being the biggest moron in cheating history, started sweating profusely. He said "Sir, okay na po ako dito."

That's probably the dumbest thing you can say. But as it turns out, he said it for a reason. When he was finally commanded to stand at the risk of being hit by a baseball bat, it turns out that he had been sitting on THREE NEON COLORED POST-ITS filled with names of Asian History figures. I'm sure that was the last thing those Indonesian Presidents wanted - to be written on a post-it cheatsheet and stuck to the buttocks of the dumbest kid in school.

Given that offense, you'd think he'd be out of the school faster than a straight man in a seminary. But that's not what happened. He got a zero for the exam, a 70 in conduct, and a section demotion the following year. From section A he became... *drumroll* section B. BOO HOO. If it were up to other schools, he'd be Section O - O for OUT OF SCHOOL YOUTH.

But I got caught too. Haha, of course I did. Twice during first year, once during second year. And yes, I got the shaming of a lifetime everytime I got caught. Because that's what you risk everytime you cheat. But after that, cheating has become so sophisticated, getting caught was just a matter of somebody ratting you out, otherwise, you're off scott free.

You'd think that a school with this lax against cheating and this many cheaters would have the best grades for students. WRONG. Our first honor student of the best section has roughly the grade percentage average of 88++, not even line of nine. The first honor of the last section is 79.5. You can imagine the grades for the rest of the students in that class.

I think I can guess the explanation for that. Cheating has been such a part of our academics that they actually put an allowance for cheating as part of the grading system. So even if you do cheat, the best you can do is just pass. I'm not kidding. A guy from our class perfected every quiz, test and exercise in math once. He got a 93.

After graduating from Highschool, I vowed never to cheat again (at least, in exams that will bear on my grade) and stuck to that promise. Truth be told, cheating removes any feeling of satisfaction you can get from hardwork to an otherwise outstanding achievement. I wanted to prove to myself and the world that I can do shit with our without cheating my way into things.Either that or I finally got bored from the thrill of risking getting caught. And to some degree, I think I did succeed. (Of course I found it hilarious to watch amateurs from other highschools try to cheat in college during exams. What a bunch of noobs - good for them I'm not the professor.)

Now that I'm done with my studies, I've been thinking long and hard about the whole system. Why they allowed something like that to exist for so long. Hell, my doctor, an alumni of my HS 15 batches higher than me recalls the fact that even though he was cheating and studying already, he still couldn't seem to pass his exams. But that didn't mean he became a loser. He's a cum laude of DLSU and he's not like a bad doctor anyway, at least nobody's died yet under his care to my knowledge. So a school that produces somebody like that cant be bad right? So maybe here's the premise of that system - the best that I can think of:

If you're stupid enough to get caught in school, you're still not ready for real life.

Because cheating is bad, even with all its benefits. And it's just worse if you get caught. If you see a cheater - reprimand him without any secondary thoughts. Either for cheating or for being stupid enough to get caught - just lambast that bastard. And I swear, he'll walk away a better man for it.

(ps. this is not the end of my discourse regarding the subject, I'll be posting more someday, when I get the time)