The city’s abundant wealth and resources create a Palo Alto “bubble,” which often causes residents to be unaware of hardships that people from other areas experience: lack of resources, funding and a clean living environment.

Educational privileges

Palo Alto is known for its excellent public school system. According to Niche, all three Palo Alto Unified School District middle schools are among the 15 highest- ranked middle schools in California; Palo Alto High School is among the top 10 public high schools in California; and PAUSD is the best school district in America. Gunn itself is ranked first in California and 35th nationally among public schools, according to Niche. In addition, Gunn has high standardized-testing scores and a graduation rate of 94%, higher than the public school national average of 85%.

Gunn is able to provide its students with exceptional education largely through PAUSD funding. PAUSD is a basic-aid district, meaning that it receives funding from local property taxes in addition to basic-aid funding from the state of California. Partners in Education also works to raise money specifically for teacher salaries across the district. Altogether, PAUSD receives nearly $300 million each year to support students’ education, almost 90% of which come from local taxes.

Using these funds, Palo Alto provides educational resources such as Gizmos, Naviance and other applications, available in each student’s Rapid Identity portal. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, PAUSD spends approximately $25,000 to $26,000 per student every year, exceeding the national average of about $15,000 to $16,000.

These readily available funds give Gunn students access to a variety of resources and extracurricular activities. Junior Solyana Biadglegne, a transfer student from Leipzig, Germany, who moved to Palo Alto in November 2022, explained the disparity in resources between Gunn and her old school. “This place is just incredible — I think it’s obvious because it’s Palo Alto and Palo Alto is a rich city, but also there’s so many resources and opportunities for you,” she said. “At my old school, we had great teachers and a few clubs, but that was basically it.”

Gunn alumna Shauntel Lim, a freshman at Northwestern University, explained that the educational preparation and support that Gunn provided her made her college experience easier. “Within Palo Alto, we have access to good teachers, classes and extracurriculars, whereas I come here and I hear about (other) people’s high school experiences, and it definitely sounds harder where they’re living, where their schools are underfunded,” she said. “They definitely have to work harder on their own to reach the same amount of achievement (at Northwestern).”

Most of the resources PAUSD provides, such as Individualized Education Programs that ensure specialized instruction for students with disabilities, are state-mandated. However, history teacher Benjamin Beresford finds that Palo Alto often offers more than the minimum required by state mandates, such as co-teaching and the Academic Center, which has student tutors available to aid their peers. “At my previous school, which was very small, we didn’t really have all of these resources,” he said. “I had students who would have really benefited from the resources you could get at a public school like Gunn.”

Gunn students are instructed by a supportive and qualified teaching staff: Many teachers have pursued higher education, such as masters and doctorate degrees, further improving the quality of education in Palo Alto. PAUSD guidelines also require teachers to meet certain standards of accommodation and attention to students.

Environmental factors

Palo Alto, as a major center of technological innovation, is home to many of today’s most prominent, industry-leading corporations. Hundreds of startups have begun in Palo Alto, many started by alumni from nearby Stanford University, including Google and HP. According to data from Pitchbook, a venture-capital database, Stanford graduates have founded more startups and raised more venture-capital funding than graduates of any other university in the country over the past decade.

Many have moved to the city because of its reputation for technological excellence: Biadglegne’s parents relocated her family to Palo Alto for those very reasons. “Palo Alto and Silicon Valley are known for innovation and good schools, so education and jobs are the main reasons we came here,” she said. “We found everything we needed and wanted.”

Palo Alto also has shopping centers, restaurants and recreational spaces both in and around it. However, rising property values create high prices for foods and goods compared to other areas — one of the pitfalls of shopping in the city.

Since 2021, Palo Alto has been designated as a Gold-Level Bicycle Friendly Community by the League of American Bicycles, and has plentiful communal amenities such as parks, playgrounds, libraries, and walking and biking trails. In 2021, only 15% of cities and towns in the U.S. received a Gold or Platinum designation. Although many take these facilities for granted, they greatly improve residents’ daily lives. For example, research from the Journal of Transport and Health found that people in more walkable environments had lower rates of obesity and chronic diseases. According to KRON4, Palo Alto residents have a 22% obesity rate, 11% lower than the national average of 33%.

Furthermore, Palo Alto’s natural environment is well maintained and healthy thanks to environmental services provided by the city. These services include Zero Waste, a waste-management system that seeks to decrease landfill waste and encourage composting; Watershed Protection, which reduces the amount of waste entering local waterways; and the Sustainability and Climate Action Plan, an extensive strategy to reduce citywide carbon emissions in coming years. To receive funding for these services, Palo Alto has several community partners that provide financial support to the city, including Stanford University, Friends of the Junior Museum and Zoo, Palo Alto Arts Foundation and Neighbors Abroad.

Expectations

Living in a wealthy city replete with resources, Palo Alto residents, including students, can be isolated from the challenges that less wealthy communities face. However, mental burdens still exist. While — or perhaps because — Palo Alto is a center of technological innovation and excellence, students often feel pressure to succeed and surpass their peers academically. Biadglegne said the environment at Gunn is more competitive than that of her previous school. “At my old school, it was competitive, but it was also a small school,” she said. “Even if one had an accomplishment or internship, they would tell their friends to apply, and if someone has a big accomplishment, everyone celebrates it. But here, they (often) say, ‘Don’t tell that person I got an internship at this place.’”

This competition and pressure manifests itself most conspicuously during the college admissions process. Beresford noted that Gunn students often have high expectations to attend prestigious universities after high school. “There’s a culture that you’re expected to apply and go to some kind of elite (university) like the Ivy Leagues, or at least Berkeley, Stanford, University of Chicago,” he said.

As a result of this culture, students often become hyper-focused on their grades and test scores. “A student’s motivation to complete work is around getting a certain grade, not necessarily around completing an activity or understanding,” Beresford said. “As a teacher, it can feel like my intent for why I’m teaching you something feels different from (a student’s) reason for wanting to learn something.”

Additionally, with the abundance of engineering, computer science and science-based companies and opportunities present, students often face pressure to pursue and succeed in STEM-related fields. Gunn alumnus Michael Wang, a freshman at Brown University, said that if somebody mentioned that they were from Silicon Valley or the Bay Area at Brown, people would automatically assume that they planned to work in technology or computer science.

Palo Alto has established Wellness Centers and mental health resources to support students. Gunn has mental health professionals working on-site, as well as an established SELF program to aid students in social-emotional learning. The ability to create such resources is, in a way, yet another example of Palo Alto privilege: According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, during the 2021-22 school year, around half of public schools in the U.S. received funding for mental health services, and less than 41% of schools hired staff to focus on students’ mental health.

Ultimately, Lim believes many Gunn students are unaware of, or do not acknowledge, the privileges they possess. “It’s important to acknowledge problems (outside of our bubble),” she said. “(This includes) socioeconomic and racial problems. Living within the Palo Alto bubble, we don’t see a lot of that firsthand.”

Expectations

Expectations of a grand holiday dinner feast are shown in the extravagant meal in the famous Disney film “Mickey’s Christmas Carol.” Family and friends from all over town come with presents and gifts to celebrate the holiday together. People clink their glasses, savor the food and have a merry time. The fragrant Christmas tree is adorned with beautiful ornaments, candy canes, fairy lights and a glistening gold star at the peak. Along with the grand depiction of holiday festivities in media, are also portrayals of characters falling in intense, romantic love. This is featured in major film franchises such as the “Harry Potter” film series and the romantic comedy “Holidate.” In the movie “Holidate,” a man and woman agree to be each other’s holiday date to avoid remarks on marriage from family, but ultimately end up falling in love.

Throughout the Harry Potter films, Harry and his friends form bonds of friendship as they spend time or keep in contact with each other over the holidays. Ron Weasley’s feelings for Hermione Granger are officially confirmed during the Yule Ball, a holiday celebration at Hogwarts, in “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.”

Of course, one cannot forget the music. The winter playlist that many people compile yearly is often full of Christmas Carols such as “Jingle Bell Rock” by Joseph Beal and John Boothe, “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey and “Deck the Halls” by John Ceiriog Hughes. With lyrics such as “deck the halls with boughs of holly,” to “dancin’ and prancin’ in Jingle Bell Square,” all of these songs depict an atmosphere of love, beauty and joy in celebrating the holiday season. These various forms of media depict a version of the holidays that cause people to form high expectations for their own holiday season.

Popular culture often dictates that finding true happiness can be as simple as huddling around warm fireplaces, decorating Christmas trees and sipping seasonal drinks topped with whipped cream. In reality, however, holidays can often be a time of stress, loneliness, schoolwork and extracurriculars.

Reality

Finals are always scheduled the week before winter break. This year, finals week falls during Hanukkah and ends merely three days before Christmas. For students, the high-pressure academic environment in the middle of the holiday season makes it difficult to truly get into the holiday spirit. The stakes are especially high for seniors, who likely must turn in their college applications less than a week after January 1. Students also feel pressure to receive good scores on finals in order to maintain or achieve their desired semester grade. With academic stress at its peak, expectations for how the holidays should unfold only add to the pressure. Nonetheless, holiday movies and commercials depict people in a state of unblemished joy, oblivious to the stresses and pressures of everyday student life. The pressure to enjoy the holidays, ironically, makes them even less enjoyable.

A realistic holiday season for many students will likely look like this: After recovering from finals, they will stay at home, scroll through their phone and binge-watch a season or two of their favorite TV show. If they themselves are not traveling out of town, they may miss their friends who are. Students might spend more time bonding with their parents, pets and siblings. Equally likely, they will spend the entire break holed up in their room on their devices, surfing through social media to see what others are doing over the break. Seniors will anxiously try to get their college applications in order while juniors will worry about the upcoming Advanced Placement (AP) tests in the spring. Freshmen and sophomores may feel nervous about their first semester final grades, hoping for a better second semester, but lacking motivation to prepare. Of course, everyone will still feel bouts of the holiday spirit—when lighting the menorah, exchanging Christmas presents or having a small family holiday dinner, for example—but much of the time in between time-honored holiday traditions will feel, for the most part, boring. As winter break comes to an end, students may return to feeling unproductive and unaccomplished, as well as anxious about the upcoming semester. The holidays, in the end, will have passed just as any other two week vacation.

Next Steps

Students should avoid criticizing themselves for not living up to their high standards of unreasonable happiness around the holidays, nor should they assume that none of their peers feel the same way. Although constant joy may be an unachievable expectation for the holidays, true love—the everyday kind, not the all-encompassing Disney-movie variety—and genuine human connection are not. Spending time with friends and family and having moments of true social bonding can be much more fulfilling, not to mention realistic, than singing Christmas carols, decking the halls or any other cliché holiday tradition. Instead of idealizing the so-called season of joy and good tidings, students should mitigate their expectations by seeing the holiday season as it truly is: a time of self-love, compassion and giving. The holidays are a time for you to take a break, enjoy yourself and spend time doing the things you love. As the quintessential holiday movie “The Grinch” once said: “To kindness and love, the things we need most.”

Most Gunn students are familiar with the statement, “I stayed up so late studying for my math test, I only slept three hours last night!” If they haven’t used it themselves, they’ve almost certainly heard it from a friend. This isn’t surprising, as glamorizing lack of self-care is now the norm at Gunn. This echoes a national issue in which self-care is downplayed in favor of work and social lives. People who spend time on self-care are called lazy or unproductive, while skipping meals and sleep for work and school is considered admirable. The tendency to romanticize not taking care of oneself leads to an unhealthy dynamic in schools in which students feel pressured to take worse care of themselves in order to fit in.  Lack of self-care as a way to compete or connect with others or prove one’s academic strength should be deglamorized in order to create a healthy atmosphere at school in which taking care of oneself is valued.

Staying up late or skipping lunch in order to work on homework is considered a mark of academic success and effort. This leads students to ignore the importance of their health, and even purposefully take worse care of themselves in order to look like they’re putting in more effort. In fact, according to a 2015 Stanford study, 76 percent of Gunn students have skipped sleep in favor of homework. This is an alarmingly high percentage, caused by the idolization of students who seemingly spend all their time on schoolwork. Students who take good care of themselves or prioritize their health over their schoolwork may begin to feel guilty for this, leading to a lowered self-esteem. Such a trend leads to the popularity of neglecting self-care in favor of homework.

Several studies have shown sleep to be directly linked to academic performance, yet the glorification of not taking care of oneself leads to the idea that in order to perform well academically, students must skip out on sleep. According to the National Institutes of Health, sleep deprivation leads to a lower grade point average because of its negative effect on focus and memory. Sleep-deprived students are unable to retain information from the schoolwork they skip sleep to do. For students running on too few hours of sleep, homework can also take longer, leading to even later bedtimes. Although data clearly shows that a good amount of sleep (a recommended eight to 10 hours a night) is vital for academic achievement, romanticizing lack of sleep at Gunn has lead to the belief in many students that the only way to do well in school is to stay up late studying, hereby missing valuable hours of sleep. Students also skip lunch, an important time to spend with friends and eat in order to take a break from school, in order to do homework. Although some students genuinely believe that in order to get good grades they must neglect themselves, others deliberately take worse care of themselves in order to look like they’re putting in a greater effort. This warped perception of what is needed for academic achievement is a direct result of glamorizing bad self-care habits.

Students often use self-deprecating statements about their bad self-care habits in order to call attention to something they are proud of, such as dedication to academics, as a means to connect and compete with each other. The result is feelings of resentment in other students, who like they must not take care of themselves in order to fit in. This normalizes bad self-care habits and makes students who do take good care of themselves outliers, further degrading the importance of wellness. Students sometimes deliberately take worse care of themselves or exaggerate the extent of their bad self-care habits in order to gain the admiration of their peers. This makes bad self care a social norm instead of an issue that needs to be resolved.

Some people may call humble-brags about bad self-care “just jokes,” meant to be taken lightly and point out that students already know how to take care of themselves. Although such students may know this in theory, they are clearly not applying it in practice, as 76{74e2084e47f46e06e62dbba283cef78e0e039417a59d0bb63ac31908f44b1eca} of Gunn students go to bed after 11pm, and most Gunn students get an average of seven hours of sleep per night, two hours less than the recommended amount. Treating a serious issue such as lack of self-care lightly encourages the idea that it isn’t important to take care of oneself, and that self-care is simply something to joke about. Just as students should not joke about health or other sensitive issues, they should not joke about self-care.

In order to encourage healthy habits at Gunn, it is crucial for students to stop bragging about how little they take care of themselves. Lack of self care is an important issue and needs to be treated as such. When students hear their friends bragging about their bad self care habits or idolizing students who chose not to take care of themselves in favor of academics or social time, they should step in to express their concern for their health. Although some students already do this, it is currently far from the norm, and needs to become such if self-care is to become a priority. Staff should also take the opportunities they have to remind students of good self-care habits. If the conversation at school shifts from glamorizing lack of self-care to condemning it, students can become healthier and excel still further in their academics.

I went into freshman year feeling confident, like most if not all freshmen. I had just graduated from middle school, had done fine in all my academics, and didn’t feel as if I could mess up. For me, the world was limitless, and anything I wanted to do I could accomplish.

A few months later, I wondered what the hell was wrong with me. Forget my optimism—Gunn was more of the same struggle that plagued me throughout elementary and middle school. Biology was destroying me, history was destroying me and even math – a subject I was normally great at and enjoyed – became a struggle. High school was more of the same fight that earlier grades had been. What I didn’t realize back then, though I suspected it, was that school had stopped being fun. I had stopped enjoying school, hanging out with friends, doing math and choir and badminton, even eating lunch. There was no joy in this ordeal—just a never-ending struggle of turning in homework, sleeping enough and finding some way to be happy but never reaching it. I began wondering if I was good enough to be in this school, to be in the classes that I was taking, to be “equal” to everyone else.

Sophomore year rolled in last year, and I was quite shaken from my performance freshman year. I vowed to put in the time and effort needed to get the grades I wanted. The community kept reinforcing the stereotype that “Asians get A’s,” and at the time, I believed that I had to get all A’s in order to be myself. The one day I walked into the choir room and saw the teacher with a clipboard—I had no idea what had happened. As he explained the news, I saw many people crying and leaving. I kept wondering, throughout the day, why this had happened to him. Why he had acted the way he did. What was the difference between me and him, when we had both thought the same way?

My classmates and I continued through the rest of the semester shaken. I kept asking myself—what was it that kept me from acting the same way that he did? I thought for ages about what excuse I could say, what I could claim was the source for all this mental trouble. That winter break, I went on a cruise to the Caribbean, where I surprisingly met with another teenager who thought much the same as I did. We talked, and the more I tried to help her the more I realized that the same advice could be applied to me—I needed the help just as badly.

Why didn’t I go talk to someone else then?

Because I was afraid.

Of what?

Of not being normal. Not—well, not like everyone else, who can put their feelings outside of the classroom and their focus into everything they ever do. Not like everyone else, who manages to be perfect. I’m just me, and I’m just a pawn in this world. One that has less use than normal, one that can’t explain WHY he’s there without realizing that he isn’t being the person that he COULD be.

Second semester rolled around, and I couldn’t handle the pressure. I told my counselor that I had thought about ending my life, and my counselor (as a mandated reporter) took steps to keep me safe. I ended up hospitalized for five days, and through those five days I met others. Seeing them, I wondered how I had managed to end up among them. Was I really that unstable? During my “exit interview”—the talk where they check to see if you’re mentally stable enough to leave—I heard a statement that I simply couldn’t believe.

No one’s perfect.

I couldn’t take it. I flat-out refused to believe, and had done so for the past few years, that no one could be perfect, regardless of how many friends they had, what their relationships were with those friends, what their grades were, what they showed on their faces, how they acted all the time—you’re telling me that these people aren’t perfect? That, beneath the surface, they all had their own problems?

I knew it was true, of course. There was no way that anyone could be perfect, under Advanced Placement (AP) classes and the culling of zero period, the new schedule and college apps, the desperate desire to stand out from the crowd. Perfection was a dream, a mirage—a goal that had brought me far, but had also held me back from enjoying myself and having the good time that teenagers are supposedly known for.

My parents had told me this many times over, but for some reason I didn’t buy it. I kept working under the belief that perfection was attainable. Only after hearing it from my therapist and reflecting for a long period of time on what I had experienced and seen in others did I finally start to believe that this statement was true.

No one’s perfect.

At some point in the school year, after I had come back to school and been requested to meet up with a therapist, I realized that this statement was completely valid. I can’t say when this suddenly rang true in my mind—whether it was my friends, my family, or my actions and recollections. At any rate, it became true, and I can look back on my first two years of high school and be glad that I’ve at least overcome one mental obstacle.

Now that I’m a junior, life has changed for me. I’ve started working against the idea of extra AP’s and GPA-raising for college. I’m putting effort into making friends, connecting with others and relearning how to enjoy Gunn High School. The reasons I had for despairing—that I wasn’t good enough—are being replaced with self-confidence in my abilities and acceptance of my current position. In doing so, I’ve felt glad to be here with everyone I know. While some days I feel alone and left out, and others I despair at how composed everyone else is, I keep going on, knowing that my goals of balancing happiness and grades are still quite possible, unlike my earlier ideas of being perfect in everything. I’ve talked with friends, and I’ve seen that mantra perpetuate itself in everyone. No one’s perfect, and no one should ever require perfection from you.

As for finals, I offer all of you the consolation that these tests aren’t going to matter five years from now. Your grades don’t reflect you as a person, whose quirks and qualities make you different. It’s your personality, your attitude, your character, your happiness that will matter most.

It’s test day. You’re sitting at your desk, nervously tapping your pencil. You’ve prepared to the best of your ability, but your anxiety increases as you open the test booklet. One problem in particular is worth a lot of points, but you don’t know how to do it. You need to do especially well on this test to maintain your A in the class.

The teacher exits the classroom into the back of the science department’s atrium to converse with his teaching assistants. Do you pull out your phone to Google the answer?

Senior Gregory Duvall (name changed to protect the student’s identity) answered yes. “If you ask around, everybody’s getting such high grades and high SATs and things,” Duvall said. “You just feel the need to be better or be at least as good as them.”

Duvall, then a sophomore, calls the incident his most egregious act of cheating. “I feel pretty bad about that, but I got an A minus in that class and barely an A minus,” he said. “If I hadn’t looked up that answer, I definitely would’ve gotten a B plus.”

Definitions of cheating

In the beginning of the school year, students attended an assembly that analyzed various results from the 2015 Challenge Success Survey about student life. The survey revealed that only 13 percent of students had not cheated in any way in the past year. Various forms of academic integrity violations included copying someone’s homework, collaborative work without permission and passing on test questions from someone who had already taken it. The results also gave data on students’ own cheating habits, such as using cheat sheets, plagiarizing and using others’ work as their own.

According to Gunn’s academic policy, “cheating is taking (or lending), at inappropriate times a person’s work, information, ideas, research, and documentation, without properly identifying the originator, and/or acting dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage–a deliberate act of deception.”

If 87 percent of the 2000-student population at Gunn has cheated, then the underlying question of it all is: why?

The more clear-cut reasons

Cheating occurs for a wide range of reasons. While a less observable cause is rooted in the community mindset itself, a number of distinct issues lie within the structure of our school.

Principal Dr. Denise Herrmann says several general motivations exist for cheating. “I think that most of the time, it’s because they haven’t managed enough time for them to be able to do the work, the high quality work or learning, themselves,” she said. “Sometimes they just have too much on their plate, sometimes they have been afraid to ask clarifying questions in class, sometimes they think they understand it but they get home and they don’t.”

One of the most common forms of cheating at Gunn is copying answers from a peer’s assignment or the solutions manual. Senior Maritha Wang often observes students comparing and exchanging answers before big lab assignments are due in science classes. “I don’t think people cheat because they don’t think they’re capable of doing the assignment,” she said. “I think they just run out of time, and I feel like homework is easy points, so you kind of just feel dumb if you don’t end up getting an A in the homework category.”

Gunn’s cheating culture is further perpetuated, says sophomore Clara Kieschnick-Llamas, by an unequal emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) classes over arts and humanities courses. “Because we’re in Silicon Valley and we’re surrounded by people who do math and science, people think that those subjects are the most important to be learning,” she said.

Kieschnick-Llamas says she never sees cheating occurring in math or science classes but instead finds students cheating in classes that are “less important like language classes and history.”

Another contributing factor is miscommunication between teachers and students. In sophomore Elizabeth Miksztal’s class, students were told that they would not need to study certain material for a quiz. “It turned out that the things that [were] not going to be on the quiz were on the quiz,” she said. Since the quiz was taken on a laptop on Schoology, students were able to easily open an additional tab and search up the answers.

Because her teacher misspoke about the content on the quiz, Miksztal believes that her cheating was justified. “I talked to people after the quiz and about 40 percent said that they had cheated not because of stress, but because of the fact that they thought it was completely unfair,” she said. “They felt that they didn’t have to have their grade suffer because of a teacher miscommunicating something and not being held responsible for it.”

A bigger issue is Gunn’s broad and overarching definition of cheating, senior Ben Lee says, which he feels is incorrectly applied on campus. “I feel like cheating at this age just naturally occurs, just like other things in life like stress and bullying,” he said. “Cheating is not asking someone for help or asking someone what they thought of the test. Cheating is taking someone’s test and using it for your own test.”

Using such an umbrella term, Lee says, is a disservice to students. By Gunn’s definition, a number of real-world businesses should be facing consequences too, but Lee notes that ramifications for the corporate industry do not exist. Companies constantly build off each other and essentially “cheat” to create new companies with similar services, Lee says. “Lyft, Uber and Wingz are basically the same thing with tiny changes and you can argue that they copied each other. They’re companies and they have certain rights,” he said. “But [the administration doesn’t] look to companies and accuse them.”

Psychology teacher Warren Collier believes students consider cheating when they become desperate. In Collier’s experience, when it comes to deciding between moral or utility values on the spot, one is not compelled to to be honest. “When we are in that desperate situation, the moral issues usually don’t become the main motivating factor,” he said. “When I’m sitting in that test, and I have no idea how to answer the question, I don’t usually think. ‘What is the right thing to do?’ I think, ‘I need to get this right.’”

Collier has witnessed students cheating in his classroom, and followed necessary guidelines set by the administration. Though he does not handle direct ramifications, the relationship between the teacher and student shifts. “For the teacher, it’s hard not to think, ‘Why doesn’t this student care about my class,’” he said. “Things get awkward because I’m emotional about it and the student is emotional about it.”

Collier did cheat in high school, and he carries the attached guilt to this day. “In the long run, you just feel dumb about making a poor choice. It’s important to have integrity as a person and I don’t think it’s worth sacrificing your integrity just for a couple more points,” he said. “The test or project will be gone by next month, but the fact that you cheated will be remembered for the rest of your life.”

What research shows about cheating

The reality is that we have lots of human values; honesty is one of them. “Conflicts arise every time human values collide with each other, and of course they collide with each other when we think about politeness,” Duke University Professor of Psychology Dan Ariely said, pointing to white lies. “But when it comes in collision with success, I don’t think people would thoughtfully say, ‘I want a life of flying over a life of honesty.’” People do it one time, find themselves on a slippery slope and do it again and again and again, Ariely says.

Studying and cheating, however, are not mutually exclusive. One can study and still cheat or cheat and still study. It all comes down to one’s conflicts of interest, says Ariely, who wrote “The Honest Truth About Dishonesty” about his research on dishonesty.

In society, students are naturally pushed toward getting good grades, Ariely says. This is reinforced by parents who treat students differently when they receive good grades and by the working world’s message that only the educated are hired. Naturally, then, a conflict of interest develops: sacrifice honesty or sacrifice good grades? 

We see the world through our conflicts of interest, Ariely says. If you have a conflict of interest, you’re likely to feel motivated in the short term to gain in that way. “It’s certainly not a necessarily planned thought,” he said. “The students probably don’t think of themselves as villains; they just at the moment have a sense of wishful blindness—‘I don’t want to think about it this way and I really want to get a good grade.’”

The pressure to succeed only creates a higher conflict of interest. If students think that people around them are dishonest, that makes it easier for them to be dishonest as well.

Cheating as a necessary evil

If facing the same dilemma in college, Duvall doesn’t believe he will choose the same route. “In college, the stakes are a lot higher,” he said. Most students, he says, see good grades as a pathway for college, college as a pathway for a stable job and a stable job as the ultimate pathway to a successful life.

For Duvall, his decision to cheat on his test was a preventative measure—to avoid punishment from parents.

It is true that in Palo Alto, some parents exert a certain amount of pressure on their children to do well in school. Superintendent Dr. Max McGee reminds students, however, to be aware of the clash of cultural interests in the community. A number of parents in Palo Alto grew up with parents who survived the Great Depression and raised their children to value economic security. Because of this, Palo Alto parents may tend to place high importance on stability, which to them is best achieved through education. Some parents even immigrated into America in hopes of raising their family in a more promising environment.

Students, however, see things from a different perspective, and McGee believes open dialogue needs to occur in order to bridge the gap between parents and students. “We first need to understand cultural powers and pressures,” he said. “Then we need to work with parents and faculty on how these cultural factors impact students and how we can help kids manage the pressures.”

Cheating was also a practical matter for senior Aubrey Laurent (name changed to protect the student’s identity). In one of her classes, the teacher gave quizzes every week, but Laurent says the teacher never adequately prepared students in class for these assessments and instead assigned a large amount of outside work. “I do remember we brought up the amount of work with her in class once,” Laurent said. Her teacher replied that she needed to keep students busy so she could stay busy, Laurent says.

To pass one of these quizzes, which were more frequent and easier than tests, Laurent would have to study for one to to two hours while neglecting other schoolwork and activities. “As everybody in this class started to realize how ridiculous these quizzes were and how they weren’t really testing your knowledge—everybody was just power-memorizing the day before to get a passing grade—a lot more people turned to cheating,” Laurent said. She was even caught cheating once, but her teacher did not report her and there were no repercussions.

The majority of Laurent’s grade relied on scores received from these quizzes, she says. Though her cheating behavior began as a way to maintain a good enough grade without overburdening herself, at a certain point she became so used to cheating that she just kept doing it. “Why keep studying when it’s so easy?” she said. “When students are feeling way too overwhelmed, you have to give something up.”

Underlying pressure and expectations

Gunn’s academic environment is not isolated. According to a study conducted by Challenge Success, two-thirds of 6,294 students at 15 high-achieving schools reported not regularly being “fully engaged in their academic schoolwork, often associating absence of engagement with more frequent school stress, higher rates of cheating and greater internalizing, externalizing and physical symptoms of stress.”

Laurent says a lot of students feel that to be happy you have to make money and to make money you have to go to a good college, and that starts with high school—getting good grades. “That’s a lot of people’s mindsets, and I think unfortunately that’s also a lot of parents’ mindsets, too,” she said. “When everyone seems successful around you, you feel the pressure to be successful, too.”

After all, it is human nature to compare oneself to others, Duvall says. “I don’t see that changing because you’re always going to be curious about how other people do on a test, how other people do on an essay,” he said. “There’s no changing that.” Even if a peer is stretching the truth about a particular test score, such comparisons increase the inherent need to try harder and do better in school so one can “catch up.”

Wang also believes that students themselves have high standards. “Maybe it’s just growing up in the Silicon Valley, where everyone’s already so successful,” she said. “You have startups everywhere; Stanford is literally three blocks down from the street. When you’re in a culture of such excellent people, excellence becomes normal.”

Students face another issue when discussing colleges, most often hearing about prestigious schools like Harvard and not smaller liberal arts colleges. The same goes for the technology industry, Laurent says. “We hear of the parents’ companies that really took off and sold for millions of dollars, and that’s the issue,” she said. “We’re hearing this one-sided opinion of everyone becoming super successful [in their terms of success], and we’re never really hearing about the other 90 percent.”

Though asking for help from a teacher has become less taboo in the last few years, Duvall says peer pressure still contributes to a fear of requesting assistance. “Because there are so many high-achieving students at Gunn, it would seem like you’re weak if you went over and talked to a teacher,” he said.

The alumni Laurent speaks to often talk about how nice it is to be in a noncompetitive environment where students don’t compare grades or scores and peers take time out of their days to help you with your work. “Slowly, we have to become more aware and try our best not to be so grade-focused,” she said. She believes teachers must play a role in raising awareness and realize when they are assigning excess or busy work to help alleviate stress.

Parents, too, can play a role in diminishing students’ competitive mindsets, Duvall says. If parents can instead emphasize collaboration and openness early on in a child’s life, then students will be able to thrive in a healthier environment, without the constant pressure of having to do better than their peers.

Steps toward solutions

To start affecting change, McGee believes conversation must begin in the classroom. He points to the model of a freshman reflection seminar at a national university. These seminars are run by faculty and identify a hot issue related to student life that needs to be addressed. “We need to think about how we can create conditions for that kind of dialogue,” he said. The best outcome will only occur through full and complete honesty. McGee says if a teacher takes action against students who speak of a cheating experience in a space of open dialogue, it will not be tolerated.

Gunn administration is already planning to hold student focus groups in January to start drafting ideas to alleviate cheating. “Some of the possibilities would be to revise some policies in the student handbook or more opportunities for students for retesting and requizzing,”  Herrmann said. Another idea she hopes will take root is the creation of a peer court, where a group of peers evaluate one’s actions and determine the measures needed to earn back the trust of teachers and classmates.

“Some of the possibilities would be to revise some policies in the student handbook or more opportunities for students for retesting and requizzing.”

—Principal Dr. Denise Herrmann

Nonetheless, an internal shift needs to occur, too. “[Students] think that just because they don’t get it right away, they’re not going to get it. If after some initial attempts at learning and they’re not getting it, they’re likely to slip into some poor choices,” Herrmann said. “We want to build on the idea of helping students develop a growth mindset, that it’s okay not to know something and that it’s okay to ask for help and it’s okay to be thinking over assessment over time.”

While some degree of cheating will always remain on campus, we must also realize that we are already quite honest. Ariely says what administrators can do to discourage cheating is create a strict, specific set of rules for behavior. When somebody says, “Don’t cheat,” it’s too broad and not enough to stop someone from behaving dishonestly. What we need are guidelines that clearly define what people are expected and allowed to do and not do. “We can make dishonesty harder,” he said. “We can remind people that a betrayal of honesty is a betrayal of a social good, and we can remind people of the importance of honesty.”

McGee goes a step further and asks the community as a whole needs to look at success from a more multidimensional angle. “When students feel like their ultimate final exam is what college they go to, they may be more inclined to cheat,” he said.

But life is about more than that, and your grades don’t define who you are. “The deepest satisfaction in my professional life is hearing from former students and how they impacted other people’s lives based on lessons they had learned in my classes,” McGee said. “That is my final exam.”