The SAT Cheating Scandal

Being a high school junior, taking the SATs and applying for colleges will definitely require a lot of time and dedication for the next year or so. That is why I was rather interested in this article. Well, it turned out to be two letters to the editor regarding a recent article about kids on Long Island who have cheated on the SATs. I read the article as well as the two letters. The article was very upsetting; rich kids have been hiring stand-ins to take the SATs. One boy even took the test for two girls, without getting caught immediately. After all the rules and stuff we have to go through when we take standardized tests, people are still cheating easily for a fee. The article says that stand-ins are like drugs. They are easily available and it is merely a question of whether someone wants to use them. Personally, I don't understand the ultimate goal of cheating on the SATs. Do you really want to get into a college that you aren't smart enough to get into? Where everyone else in school will be smarter than you? There is a college out there for everyone, and people should go to the ones where they fit in.
The first letter to the editor was very good. A woman relies on ethos and pathos to consider the underlying problems that have caused the cheating. She thinks that, in part, parents are responsible. Being a parent herself, the article is persuasive because she knows what she is talking about from experience. Parents, she suggests, put pressure on their children to succeed rather than do their personal best. Children should want good scores because they want to be proud of themselves, and if this was true cheating would be pointless. I agree with this parent, and think it is good advice for the parents of any child.
The second letter was from an alumnus of the school in question, who was upset at the way the school was portrayed in the article. She uses ethos, being an almunus, to persuade people that the school is not as corrupt as the article suggests. She claims that there are plenty of struggling families as well as rich ones, and usually students succeed through hard work and dedication rather than cheating. I think this letter seems true because the woman who wrote it is discussing her personal experiences, and I agree that articles frequently paint an unfair picture of the things they discuss.