Daily Arizona silver belt., 1910-04-05
NOT A HABIT BUT A RECOURSE


 The university authorities are much wrought up over the discovery that the students cheat at examinations. A high school principal comes to the rescue with the statement that "cheating is fundamental. It does not start in the unver- sity, the high school nor graded school but can be traced to home environment"
 So this becomes but problem of the schools as corrective institutions. It is like all forms of mischief, 1t is product of temperament, part of our endowment of original sn something propagated in the family life, in heredity or what you please, and to be suppressed or sup planted in the schools
 As suggestion to the schools in dealing with this problem which is as old as human nature those familiar with student life might suggest an investigation to determine in what studies there is the most cheating. The testimony of graduates would be most reliable as to this
 We venture the advance assertion that cheat ing would not be found to be habit, but re- course. If schools fulfill their primary purpose and inculcate the habit of study, the power of concentrated effort and the proper use of books, they will have laid the foundation of distaste for this cheating
 Most high school students get this drill or re- suit before graduation. If they do not, then their school is fundamentally weak. But if they do not get 1t there, they must get it in any col ege worthy the name or completely funk.
 To such students as have this student habit and have learned how to study, cheating is not a pastime. It is used only in emergencies, and as a last resort. This means it is used in those studies in which no amount of application brings proficiency, and for which the individual has a distinct distaste.
 There are boys and girls who simply cannot learn German, for example. There is only one way in which these can possibly hope to pass a German xamination-cheating So they cheat and should cheat just as long as lot of assinine. so-called educators insist that it must be on the required list and will accept no substitute
 The same is true of other languages, of higher mathematics, of physics, chemistry and the whole list of non-essentiaIs. Many cannot mas ter one or more of these subjects; they are mental impossbilities to them, and so long as they are required of every student, willy-nilly. such students must cheat or fail to graduate
 The other class of studies in which there is most cheating is the so-caed "snaps" No study IS snap when rightly and seriously taught. But snaps as class are those subjects which begin nowhere and lead to nowhere in the school courses as now planned.
 They are subjects which are injected for no rational purpose, save to give students smat- tering of information in what are specialties. These are such as botany, geology, zoology, as- tronomy, mineraogy and other oIogies Teach CTS, almost invariably, recognize their futility, and in consequence make them easy, and so in vite lack of seriousness and cheating.
 So it is that the schools by their castiron courses, system as rigid as the laws of the Medes and Persians, holding of all in the same model, a refusal to accept substitutes and to base the earning of diplomas purely upon units of completed work, invite cheating and make it inevitable. It will last just as long as the sys- tenn lasts.