AP- Advantageous People. When you think of a student who is taking AP courses, you see a bright young man or woman with a preppy look and arm full of papers and books. You see a stressed look on their face at 3am as they frantically cram for their exam in 5 hours. However, what you don’t see is they mask cheating with hard work. This article is not meant to bring unfair opinions toward all AP students but to raise awareness for short cuts to get out of unfair amounts of work. I would like to say that I will be taking the side of the students and the teachers in this article.

There are three types of ways to cheat. First, is the classic peeping at your neighbors paper. A teacher who I will keep anonymous once said, “If you are going to cheat, don’t sit vertically, sit horizontally from the person.” Good point made, its much easier to peak at the person next to you then to look over your shoulder or another persons shoulder to see a paper. Second, is the “Do you have the math homework answers?” kind of cheating. This is what about 95% of cheating comes as; students don’t have time to do “busy work,” so they get it from someone else. Mr. Gorr, Air Academy’s AP US History (APUSH) teacher, once stated, “If that person is asking you for your work, they most likely aren’t a real friend.” Mr. Gorr assigns some of the largest work loads to his students, and for good reason too, APUSH is the one AP class with the largest amount of information. “I wish it were a year and half long class,” stated Mr. Gorr, “But we get a short school year to prepare you guys for the exam in May.” Gorr is known for his notorious online quizzes over chapters in the book. Of course, this makes it a golden opportunity for students to cheat online from rogue Quizlets or online resources. To try and prevent this, Mr. Gorr made multiple fake Quizlets with all the wrong answers, this not only helps him see who is cheating but also gives the students who cheat what they deserve. Finally, the worst form of cheating is asking another student what was on a test. This may just seem casual and not much of an effect, but almost all students do it. It gives unfair advantages to students who may not have studied and also may expose test questions that cannot leave a classroom. College Board makes it clear that if a test, SAT or AP Exam, is talked about in any way, the scores will be redacted.

As for the students, they will do anything to get an A in the class. The three types of cheating are the most typical, however, cheating can also create economical opportunities for other students. Remember Mr. Gorr’s online quizzes? Let’s say a student pays a smarter or more hardworking student five bucks to do one of his quizzes. Say word gets out that this student is getting 100% for five bucks on quizzes and assignments; now this student has a monopoly over other students and is getting 20-30 bucks a week. Yes, this how far a student may go in order to get an A in the class; unfortunately for them, it won’t pay off on the AP exam.

The amount of work each AP class gives varies depending on the subject. APUSH gives a lot of work to help a student retain ideas and events while AP Chemistry gives less work and has less material, but is much more difficult from an overall “grasping an idea” standpoint. However, certain classes, some AP and some Honors, give work that students find don’t provide any teaching or valid information to the curriculum. This is what we call “busy work,” something that many students “B.S.” in order to get the completion grade. Air Academy Junior Chris Peterman stated, “If it’s not on the test and there is no quiz on it, what’s the point?” Chris brings up an interesting point, we already have enough school work from our harder, more important classes, so why assign us some stupid assignment that we can find the answers to online? I have yet to find a teacher who can give a good reason for this work without getting defensive about how they teach their class. Yet who am I to judge how you teach a class? I am only here to say that if a teacher wants their students to stop cheating, they should assign work that is actually important to the students learning or not assign it at all.

AP students often get bogged down with work that’s worth doing or work that’s easy to blow off. However, no matter what the assignment is, it is always best to do it with ones own thoughts. A collaborative effort is always the best way of working, just as long as one student isn’t doing all the work. Besides, at this point in the year, any assignment given by an AP teacher is probably more for your benefit than theirs. They are there to prepare you for the AP exam. So if they are being honest with you, why aren’t you being honest with them?