Cheating Students

Rhetorical Précis
Raskin, Tommy. “Cheating Students.” American Humanist Association (2013):
Print.

Tommy Raskin in Cheating Students (2013) asserts that our schools fail the humanistic vision of education. Tommy supports this assertion by reviewing the 2010 study conducted by Josephson Institute of Ethics that found 59 percent of high school students had cheated on a test in the past year, and over 33 percent had cheated more than twice. Not only does Tommy point out the problem of students cheating, and the pressure that is put on the students to memorize in order to succeed, but he asserts the problem that schools have turned what should be a shared learning endeavor into a ruthless competition. The article “Creative…motivated’ and fired”, found on page 24, where a fifth grade teacher was dismissed because of the highly unusual number of wrong answers that were corrected, is a perfect example of this competition that has become a crisis. The writer concludes that cheating has brought the economy to near ruins, and that the nature of schooling must be altered to make true learning the number one priority. The writer establishes a direct tone to convince his audience of educators that it is vital for humanists to play a leading role in reforming competition based grading that takes the joy out of learning, because it is humanistic values that are at stake in the cheating crisis.