The Overachievers Analysis

Journalist Alexandra Robbins ventures back to her old high school to examine the competitive efforts students are having to take to compete on the battlefield that is the education system in her book, The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids. Robbins explores the lives of multiple students who are stressed and pressured to maintain good grades and get into an Ivy League college. This text allows for intriguing insight on how the educational system has “spiraled out of control” and displays the different measures students must now take to be the best. Robbins’ The Overachievers is an eye-opening bestseller which exposes the social pressures and anxieties students must overcome in their high school lives as they attempt to impress and prove to colleges they are worthy of acceptance.

Overachievers, by Alexandra Robbins, is an exposé about the lives of driven high school students at Walt Whitman High School in Maryland. Throughout the book Robbins central argument is that college admission expectations have made high school a very cut-throat environment, leading students who try to meet these expectations to have deteriorating mental and physical health.

Everybody is familiar with the concept that cheating is wrong. However, the culture we live in today is becoming less black and white and showing all the different shades of grey. Cheating is becoming a situational topic. In some situations it is considered the right thing to do. Everyone has cheating in some aspect of life, whether it be school, work, sports, games, using forms of enhancements or forms of deception. Cheating is all around and i very unpreventable.

Journalist Alexandra Robbins, in her book, The Overachievers, follows the lives of various high school students in order to demonstrate that students today are under extensive pressure from sports, standardized tests, the college application process, and school itself. Robbins effectively argues that the overachiever culture in America and throughout the world is severely detrimental to students and society as a whole. First, she uses logos and examples to prove her point. Her use of many anecdotes of varied characters from different areas of the country portrays the widespread effects of overachiever society.

Parents and professors speculate why children no longer display excitement and ambition for learning. Most share the common goal of educating the youth to take on the “rights and responsibilities of citizens” (Ravitch 109). Unfortunately, educational requirements have strayed from the original purpose and began to aim their attention toward the “importance” of standardized testing. As a current high school senior, my experience has been that students are branded by their grades and test scores as if they determine who we are as a person. Diane Ravitch’s “The Essentials of A Good Education”, successfully critiques the extensive use of standardized testing in order to pursue change in our education systems and prove that focusing on test scores corrupts a child’s inner creativity.

What is it? Basically, cheating - which is often referred to as plagiarism when it comes to assignments that involve writing things such as reports, research papers, essays, etc. INSERT BULLET LIST OF TYPES OF PAPERS- consist of:

Today’s education system has become focused on standardized intelligence testing and what works best for the majority. This system, although created to help the masses, is impersonal and only benefits a specific group of students who learn the best through testing. Those students who think creatively and use imagination are left behind. This is why intelligence tests are not accurate measurement of a child’s knowledge as it does not account for creativity and the child’s individual strengths. Changes need to be made within the school system. Instead of focusing on what is “correct” schools should be encouraging problem-solving through the process of making mistakes and failing. This challenges a student to learn about themselves and the world around them. When everything is already laid out for them it is easy to follow. There is no single way of thinking. By making a student have to think on their own it stimulates creativity and allows them to better connect concepts to real world situations.

The questions of learning and intelligence have long been debated since education has ever existed. That learning leads directly to intelligence is an assumption which has not been subject to adequate scrutiny. Typically, a fixed mindset believes that an "intelligent" student is one who invests less of almost about everything to not only succeed but also to achieve outstanding results. That is, by studying less an intelligent student is expected to know about study subjects enough, which requires the least effort possible of him or her. Talent, moreover, has long been praised as an exceptional gift which one is helpless to develop, let alone initiate. The ideas about learning, intelligence and talent are challenged by prominent psychologists and education scholars Angela Lee Duckworth, Assistant Professor of Psychology at University of Pennsylvania and Carol S. Dweck, Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University.

Across oceans and seas, in every village, city or town, an apple falls at 9.8 meters per second squared. This fact has remained unchanged since it was discovered, and the myth of individual opportunity and the myth of gender in the United States have also stayed true to its original meaning since the beginning of the myths, only with a few minor changes. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word myth as “an idea or story defined by many people but is not true. These myths, in particular the myth of individual success and the myth of gender can give us unrealistic beliefs about the society we live in and cause psychological harm due to society’s preset gender roles that are pounded in our heads and reinforced by our peers, our families and the media. Through educating people about the realities that underlie these myths and finding ways to break free of gender roles as well as encouraging others to do the same we can start a movement to end the chains that tightly secure us to behave based on expectations.

When referring to the concept of cheating, there are many definitions that a person may think of. According to Dictionary.com, there are three ways of viewing the term and thus three corresponding definitions. Nevertheless, the unified theme in the idea of cheating is the use of fraud, deception, and dishonesty (Random House Dictionary). Unfortunately, this is a notion that is continually acknowledged as acceptable. One scenario that is commonly concentrated on is the act of cheating in education.

Cheating is defined in the dictionary as, to deceive by trickery; swindle, however the dictionary fails to tell you if it is right or wrong to cheat. People have many different beliefs when it comes to cheating; some think its fine to do while others completely disapprove. I intend to show the different beliefs, from different perspectives of people, and also intend on proving which beliefs have the strongest and weakest arguments.

Second, people cheat on tests in school. They may not realize at the time that by doing this, they are cheating themselves out of their own education. Is the passing grade what is really important, or is it the knowledge they have deprived themselves of? Cheating does not increase their knowledge or make them a better person. What they don't realize is that once they enter their career they won't have the knowledge they need to do their work successfully.

It is clearly stated in The Honor Code of Institutions of Higher Education that cheating is wrong. Using a

Before we can use success to motivate our students to produce high-quality work, we must meet three conditions:

When asking a student do they think cheating is bad most will say yes and will even admit to cheating.Cheating doesn’t affect many students on a regular day basis until they have been caught red-handed.When it comes to cheating blame automatically goes to the student but what about the adult as well.Some teachers have admitted to seeing student cheat but haven't said anything because it was on homework.Some teachers have even gone to the depth of helping a student cheat on a test.There was a survey that was taken through all of the high schools asking students if they had ever cheated on a test, the results were that there were 64 percent who cheated,58 who plagiarised, and above all 95 percent of them admitted to cheating of some sort.(Academic Integrity Under Statistics paragraph 3 )Students cheat to make it through a semester and to make their parents proud.Students cheat simply because of lack of knowledge, pressure from the adult looking for them to do their best, and last lack of time.