Cheater Cheater Pumpkin Eater

Recently, a college professor caught 200 of his students cheating on a college exam.  The entire class of over 600 students was required to retake the exam, regardless if they cheated or not.  Each cheater was given the opportunity to come clean, and admit to their mistake.

In the Information Age, where any type of information is literally at our fingertips, we are facing a problem of epidemic proportions.  We’re all getting lazy and stupid.  Really lazy, and really stupid, and really morally corrupt.  I myself certainly fit the description. I’m lying on the bed, writing this.  Not sitting at a desk.  In my pajama pants that have robots on them. Food coma is setting in. Lazy?  Affirmative.  (That’s robot language for YES)

I can download cliff notes versions of pretty much any book ever written straight to my laptop or smartphone.  I can read those cliff notes in another class, while my webcam on my laptop records the session I’m ignoring to cram for my next class.  I can go out and get hammered with the boys, come home, and ‘go to class’ by watching the recorded session.  If I’m really lucky, I can get a previously written paper of the web from a multitude of sites.  You cannot use your webcam to record the video you’re playing back of your class on your laptop that you recorded with your webcam, because you can rip the time/space continuum.  Don’t ask me how I know.

Hollywood would rather rape an old film by remaking it with fresh ‘actors’.  It’s kind of like locking your sweet grandmother in the closet, and replacing her with Russell Brand.  It’s just not right, on any level.  They even let that coke whore Lindsay Lohan ruin the Herbie franchise.  I cried that day. (I’m whistling the Herbie The Love Bug theme song, just to get it stuck in your head.)  Don’t get me started on that remake of King Kong a few years back... Dinosaurs?!? What the hell was that all about?!?

I know people try to get through their lives cheating.  Cheating on their exams, cheating on their time cards, cheating on their wives.  Going to the dog park with your neighbors' dog counts, too. I guess the more concerning part for me is the lack of remorse for their behavior. The "Whats the big deal? Everybody’s doing it." attitude is what scares me the most.  If everyone was jumping off a bridge, would you do it, too?  (sound familiar?)  I know I’ve cheated the system before, too. My concern is that if it’s wrong, and nobody cares that it’s wrong and the behavior is allowed to continue, what’s next?  This is where I should say something about Jersey Shore, but you’ve already thought of that.....

So the end result is a bunch of kids who floated through high school on the backs of a few kids who actually did the work to keep the bell curve up.  Then off to college to cheat on exams, share homework with their roommates and post the answers online.  They cut and paste the novel review into their electronic files they submit to their professor on a thumb drive or disc.  They get their degrees, head off to the job market, and FAIL.  They fail miserably because they never learned A THING about their chosen major.  And then YOU end up explaining to THEM how to make change because “It’s just too intense, man.”

Will you ride in a plane built by an engineer who didn’t pay attention or actually learn anything in his aeronautical engineering class? (the cast of Lost did) Or, would you be okay sending your child to  a class that is taught by a person who has little or no knowledge of the topic they are presenting because their roommate “Totally hooked them up” when it came time for exams?  Okay that last one may be a bad example, since you’re probably already doing that......

I guess these days I don’t need to know anything.  I can just look it up instantly on my laptop or my fully loaded smartphone.  There’s no point in actually retaining any information, as my phone can do all of that for me, including my own phone number, which I forget constantly.

One thing that I don’t need my smartphone to tell me.... Tom Cruise is not an actor.

EDIT*  I cut and pasted this blog post from another browser, where I can store my info online.  I did one small edit from my fully loaded smartphone, I used spell check, and have a piss poor command of the English language, because my high school English teacher was boring and lame.  This is all I’ve got people.  Get used to average.