A Life Lesson: Don’t Cheat Yourself. Read the Whole Book.

I just finished grading this semester’s major essay for my senior English classes.

My goal was to have each student read a book– cover to cover– and write a paper on that book.

Sounds simple?

Not so much.

We are in an age in which the technology at our fingertips makes cheating ourselves out of an education marvelously easy:

Read the summary. Copy and paste someone else’s words and pass them off as your own. Rearrange them a bit if you like. Or pay for an online subscription to browse prewritten papers, and choose one to pass off as your own. Or if you’re a more sophisticated cheater with some cash in your pockets, pay someone you’ve never met to write your paper for you. Just send the ghostwriter a copy of your assignment and a credit card number and consider it done.

I am pleased to note that of…