Cheating

Cheating in school is a very common activity that kids and young adults do throughout high school, and most of the time they don't get caught for it. But when a child or young adult is caught the consequences are very high. "Cheating can rise to the level of a legal violation when students steal other people's copyrighted work. For example, a student who lifts excerpts from someone else's paper and then uses them in her own published paper has committed copyright infringement. She could be sued by the creator of the work for any financial damages the creator suffered as a result of the infringement. Most cheating in college does not rise to this level, but it is still a possibility." (Seattlepi.com). 

On the other hand students shouldn't be punished for cheating as harsh as they should be due to the condition that the teachers put the students under or what they do for the test. "In an ideal world, professors could hand out take-home tests and know that their students would not cheat; this would save class time for lectures instead of exams and preserve the integrity of the university. Universities should expect all of their students to live up to a standard of honesty, but that is unrealistic. Everybody cheats, and if they haven’t, they probably didn’t treat a class with as much consideration as it deserves." (Thetartan.org) 

I think that the more they have done the cheating and how much it's worth cheating should determine the punishment, not just a harsh one from the start since every kid does cheat in some point of their life time.