Reading

Students Say Cheating Is OK

Before you start reading, study the following vocabulary:

Cheat
Efficient 
Grades 
 

"Cheating is a shortcut and it's a pretty efficient way in a lot of situations." 
That's what 17-year-old Alice Newhall, a student in a top high school in northern Virginia, says she believes. There's growing evidence she's not alone. 
A national survey by Rutgers' Management Education Center of 4,500 high school students found that 75 percent of them cheat.
More than half have plagiarized work they found on the Internet. Many of them don't see anything wrong with cheating: Some 50 percent of those responding to the survey said they don't think copying questions and answers from a test is cheating. 
Miss Newhall says students find cheating a way to get good results at school. 
"What's important is getting ahead," she says. "The better grades you have, the better school you get into, the better you're going to do in life. And if you learn to cut corners to do that, you're going to be saving yourself time and energy. In the real world, that's what's going to be going on. The better you do, that's what shows. It's not how moral you were in getting there." 
Some say the Internet has caused the problem. It made electronic plagiarism as easy as having a modem and a credit card. There are many Web sites like schoolsucks.com where you can download a paper on nearly any subject for $9.95 per page. 
McCabe, a professor, asked the students in his survey why they cheat. He says he found the most common response was that the adult world shows such poor examples.

Download the audio file in MP3 format (1397 kB)

Questions

What do the following phrases mean?
  1. "What's important is getting ahead." means: 
  2. "Cut corners" means: 
  3. "Cheating is a shortcut" means: 
  4. "It made electronic plagiarism as easy as having a modem and a credit card." means:
  5. "The better you do, that's what shows" means: 
Are the following statements about the text correct?

1.   According to Miss Newhall, cheating seems to be an essential principle of a good career.

2.   There are not so many student who cheat.

3.   Many students say they cheat because the adults are not better.

4.   The internet is a good source for plagiarism.

5.   Most of the students who cheat know they do something wrong.