Recently, a handful of students at Great Neck North High School, a school located in a particularly affluent Long Island suburb, were busted for allegedly participating in a SAT cheating ring. While these actions are certainly condemnable, I assert that they should not be shocking, and should have been expected to occur.
My knowledge of Great Neck North High School, which admittedly is vague, is as follows: It is typically ranked among the top high schools in the country. The Daily Beast, a website that conducts a yearly ranking of high schools across America, ranked Great Neck North at No. 71. I also speculate that Great Neck North typically sends many students to prestigious American universities.
I’m fairly confident that the opportunity to attend schools with both national recognition and prestige certainly exists within the mindset of most students, serving in many ways as a form of eye candy, particularly for students wishing to match the lavish lifestyle which many of their parents, but certainly not all, led.
The implications are quite clear. The pressure imposed by surrounding affluence, of expectations to perform well scholastically, to attend top-ranking universities, is to blame.
It would be fruitless to say, “Oh no, most certainly it’s the students who are to blame. These students had a history of being a bit mischievous. Rule-benders, if you will.”
“Erroneous, erroneous on all accounts.”
Rather it is the ubiquity of desire which is largely to blame, at least the ubiquity of desire in a lavish neighborhood like that of Great Neck, where “Benz’s are plentiful and dem tits are fake.”
I certainly don’t wish to scrutinize the school’s neighborhood as a whole, nor do I wish to be particularly disdainful of the perky breasts purported by the women there. But frankly, the cheating scandal should be a wake-up call for the entire neighborhood, a wake-up call which encourages the town’s members to re-evaluate, to perhaps put aside material desire, learning to curb appetite for toys and gems, for good things and bad.
Immediately after the scandal, two things were discovered which certainly lend credence to the argument that it is largely the societal pressure and nature of the town’s culture to blame. First, it was discovered that the former student who was hired to take the SAT was paid a pretty penny, a whopping $2,500, which suggests the act was more or less a product of wasteful affluence.
The student who made the payment certainly saw this as but a small investment for a large payoff. I suppose he should have had the foresight to hire a risk analyst beforehand.
Additionally, the students were busted not because of poor on-the-job operations, but because they were overheard bragging.
A lesson will likely be learned from this entire fiasco, but it won’t be not to cheat. I’m cynical that it will not install any value of integrity, but might just encourage students to be craftier when it comes to cheating. If that is the case, hopefully it will provide motivation for a future column …