Passage2
Cheating was, is and probably always will be a fact of life.Recently, technology has provided new ways to cheat, but advanced electronics can't be blamed for our increasing willingness to tolerate it.
Once upon a time, being an honorable person included the notion that your word was your bond, and integrity was a crucial clement in establishing a good reputation.My teaching experience tells me, however, that lying and cheating are seen by a lot of kids today as a crucial part of any path to success.The only shame is in getting caught.And our school's not-uncommon policy is basically to forgive a first offense and to enter it into the permanent record only if the student is caught again.
What's worse, many students aren't fully aware of what constitutes cheating. While teaching at a university a few years ago, I was surprised when a student I had accused of cheating by cutting and pasting text from a website denied having cheated.He indignantly argued that he would never cut and paste——he had retyped the entire thing.
A few weeks ago, a student took my final exam in the morning and gave the answers to someone who was taking it that afternoon.The second student didn't notice that the question on his test was slightly different, and the answer was now wrong.When confronted, he professed not to understand that he had cheated.He thought that getting a test answer from another student in advance was no different than studying with a partner.A few days later, when his mother came in to find out why her son :had failed, she too said she couldn't understand the difference.
As for the proposed penalties in a survey of students, they thought that giving an F on an assignment was OK, giving an F on the report card was acceptable but harsh and that putting the names of the cheaters on a public "wall of shame" would be going too far.
That implies that students put a value on their public reputation, so a wall of shame might be an effective threat.But one of my colleagues compared it to cutting off the hands of a thief as a deterrent to further crime.Another went so far as to say that it would be the same as taking the offending students outside and having the class throw things at them.Instead of focusing on the penalty for cheating, she said, we should be addressing the pressures that make students feel they need to cheat to succeed.
She has a point.It's easy to hear every day about people borrowing money they had no way of paying back, and banks falsifying forms to enable the borrowing, and Wall Street brokers knowingly selling worthless housing securities based on those loans.And no ope was punished for that.
Students, parents, teachers and administrators complain that there is too much cheating going on in our schools, but they tend to point at each other when asked who should be responsible for fixing the problem.That's not how change will happen——but something has to change.
Which of the following can best explain the word "deterrent" in Paragraph 6?
A、Challenge.
B、Discouragement.
C、Resistance.
D、Punishment.
【正确答案】：B
