Chris Chan
Prof. Hall
Rough draft
 “Academic Integrity”
Education is extremely important and I feel like no one should ever take it for granted. Especially if you look at those who risk and sacrifice everything they have for their kids or themselves to learn. Of course as a little kid, these thoughts don’t fly by your mind, and you just go on and follow what you see. Your always told to just try “hard” but that isn’t always the case. Majority of the time, playing it smart and not necessarily working hard gets you further.
I was never a bad kid in school or in general, but I did do some dumb stuff here and there that got me standing in front of an adult having to explain my actions. In class, I paid attention and did my work, got some laughs in with my friends, etc. I never got to hang out afterschool daily, I was picked up in a car and didn’t ride the train. At that time, I hated it and resented the proposition of being picked up. Now that I reflect on it, I was glad it happened and now I wished I was picked up daily rather than taking the train home. Afterschool, I went straight home and did homework. Homework always took at least an hour, with English being the most time consuming. That class always had me worried, we had to read multiple books every year. It was late October in 7th grade when I started to realize that almost everybody in my English class had the same grades, all in the 90s. The teacher wasn’t bogus, she was legit, she graded hard. Seats were moved in the second semester and I had a new neighbor. I wouldn’t say he had the best attendance nor care for his grades. However, we made good connections and became close friends. I struggled hard on this book review that I was given weeks to do and I didn’t even finish reading the last 5 chapters. I ended up arriving to class the next morning empty handed. I was certain others had failed to do it as well. To my surprise, sitting beside me in the calmest stance, Orion had the whole sheet filled out. Every quote, explanation and scene, from each chapter written on his paper. I was in awe, I felt absolutely retarded and I asked him how he finished it with such ease. I was expecting a response of hard work and nights of reading but instead he showed me a link to an online site that gave every detail from the book. It kinda struck me at that point that I was clueless to the vastness of the internet. I ended up getting an incomplete for my final grade. For the next assignment, I did what any other kid would have done in my situation. It was there I understood the finesse of the system. This was all homework but I never had the balls to cheat on a test. It was too risky and I never really needed to.
Middle school went by like a breeze, tears on the last day and for me i had a lot of friends going to the same high school. It was a chance to start fresh and exceed better than I did for the last 3 years. It was during the first week on high school when I had my first serious talks about academic honesty and integrity.It didn’t really scare me that much. Class was easy for me because I knew the cheats to most of the answers and it was to the point that I barely look at the questions and I just copy it from the sites. Deep down, it was easy for me but it would hit me hard when tests came up. I wouldn’t say I never cheated on tests but I soon came to realization that I was struggling because I kept choosing the easy way out and never took my time to think and do these problems. I started to pick up my pace for a while before my senior year. When my senior year came, I stressed on SATs and college applications. I had switched between 3 different guidance counselors, and I couldn’t really go to anyone to ask about college. It hit me that it was the real deal, I can’t finesse my way out of this The night after the first SAT testing, I was chatting in the group chat when my friend told us he had cheated on the SAT. The proctor had been on his phone and half the class had their phones out. When the scores came out, he had gotten a 1400~ without super score. i was jealous, livid and shocked, because to me it was middle school in repeat. I hated the system for this and it made no sense to me. It is extremely easy to get tempted to one thing and taking the risk to push further because it didn’t affect you much. I became lazier to do the simplest things, but at the same time I would defend myself by saying I was like every teenager in high school. I’m not saying if I had done my homework, I would have gone to Harvard but it would have definitely impacted me while developing as a teenager.
