As classes shift towards being online, the Honesty Board has struggled to keep up with the times and is scrambling to catch those who are cheating from the comfort of their own homes. “Online services have always been the bane of righteous, honest work,” said Chief Inspector Laramy, the head of the Honesty Board, in a Zoom interview from their home. “Chegg, SparkNotes, CourseTutor, Miniclip — these have all been blights upon the student population that have yet to be cleansed by the holy fury of the Honesty Board. And now, students will have access to these vile tempters at all times! Even during tests, those most sacrosanct of examinations! And for what? A measly plague? What about the plague upon our collective souls? What about those illnesses which can only be cured by the medicine of hard work and the Ibuprofen of upstanding virtue? The plague of dishonesty, or the pestilence of academic sloth, those so formidable of foes! This is intolerable! It’s inexcusable! Incomprehensible! It’s—no, Mom, I don’t need any peanut butter squares right now. No. Yeah. No, it’s for the newspaper! Yes! No, leave the plate! Thank you! I love you too!—Sorry, as I was saying, [Mouth filled with peanut butter] whee canno et the shhool all ino anachy!” [sic]
The Honesty Board High Council has approved the creation of a special Online Crimes Division, tasked with hunting down any suspected cheaters using online classes to their advantage and taking them to justice. One investigation team, ready to brave the World Wide Web in full riot gear, were assigned specifically to curb the use of Chegg for school assignments. “We’ve been seeding false answers for common Stevens questions, then hauling people off if their answers match the fake ones,” explained one investigator while furiously typing an explanation of how 1+1 is, in fact, equal to 1. “Think about it,” the page says as it spins its web around the potential cheater. “1×1 is 1, and 1^1 is 1, and 1/1 is 1. From that angle, it’s very clear to see that 1+1 has to equal 1, or what is the point of math?” The investigator then sat back in their chair, satisfied with a job well done.
The general student body at large seems unaffected by the Honesty Board’s renewed vigor, as more and more students are taking this opportunity to cheat as much as they want. “I’ve pretty much got the entire semester solved,” said one proud student in front of their 12-monitor computer station. “I’ve got Chegg accounts for each of my classes hooked up to these monitors, and I can download an entire Canvas site onto my laptop for easy reading. It’s not hard to avoid the trap answers the Honesty Board put out: they all start with the Honesty Pledge, so that’s a dead giveaway. I’ve also recorded myself staring at my computer screen for three hours, so I just hook that up to my Zoom when I’m taking a test so they don’t suspect anything.” The student has recorded that their grades have improved by an average of a remarkable 54 points since the school went online, up to a staggering 57.
Entire communities of cheaters have sprung up as a result of online classes, with the number of groupchats formed within the student body tripling in the last few weeks as people rush to swap homework solutions and/or personal anecdotes from their childhood. The three or so people in these groupchats who actually do the homework have come to be revered as deities by the unruly masses who clamor for the solution to 2b. “I get the biggest rush of my life whenever I post homework solutions,” said one brave soul in an anonymous interview. “I always wait for someone to ask for the answers, so I know they’re desperate. Then I hit them with the answers, and everyone’s so grateful! I’ve gotten around 40 likes on all of my messages, and I’ve gotten like six girls’ numbers asking me to add them to the chat!”
As you can all clearly tell, Off the Press is a firm believer in the sanctity of hard work and integrity, especially in journalism, and we can only applaud the Honesty Board’s championing of proper scholasticism. For our own part, we have cracked down on our own journalists, and we can promise only a few of the articles released this issue have been plagiarized, and those that have been are actually pretty good so it’s really a win-win.
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