The more recent generations of students from Washington Township High School have come with new things, for example, the cell phones which can be seen being used in the halls, or generally a smarter school populace. With this second factor something else has raised, along with the intelligence of the students, their amounts of work, and more importantly stress. When taking an honors class is now viewed as just not enough, it shows the changing of times, how AP level courses have become the only acceptable courses for academically serious students in their minds, as well as those of many of their parents and teachers.

Predictably, with all these high level courses there is going to be larger amounts of work. But how much is too much? When students are attempting to balance 4+ hours of homework each night, sports or extracurricular and sometimes even a job, the excess amounts of work and studying may be enough to drown them. Instead of slowing down, dropping the job, or only doing two clubs instead of three, students have come up with a better solution. Teamwork.

In the eyes of many administrators, and teachers this could be viewed as cheating, and it may be vague as to what I mean by ‘teamwork’.  By definition it means ‘the combined action of a group of people, especially when effective and efficient’. Students may pair up and assist each other with the limitless bounds of modern technology, from the use of google docs which students can use to work on the same document at the same time, to the idea of ‘group chats’. For long assignments some students may split the work with a classmate, and review their peers’ work afterwards. Or in group chats which can be composed of massive amounts of people, usually an entire class or many of the students in the same course with the same teacher, people can ask ‘what did you get for number four on the homework’ and instantly find assistance.

These are means of survival for AP and honors students, with the workload they must carry, sometimes the options are either, don’t sleep that night, or see if someone is willing to give you the last answer on your math homework.

Many educators believe that this is a violation of academic integrity, which is far from the case. More often than not it is a mutual comparison of work, one night someone lets a classmate see how they thought was the best way to solve an equation, while the next night the same classmate will help them out with analyzing the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Very often teachers will say things along the lines of “You’re honors/AP students; there’s no need to be sharing work/not completing your work on your own.” This can be followed by a statement on how that specific teacher only gives an hour of homework each night, but that’s the case for a student’s five core teachers. How can they be expected to deal with 5+ hours of difficult homework along with necessities such as eating, sleep, or social time away from school work?

Teachers will relentlessly complain about their students cooperation with one another on homework assignments, and threaten punishment. They do this as if they do not realize that students have other courses, all with massive amounts of work as well, and if the choice is between getting more than a few hours of sleep or losing their ‘academic integrity’, any student will choose the latter.