Dear Stuyvesant High School Students

Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. Can we talk a sec? Because the New York Times just looked into your school and found a whole bunch of cheaters.

Cheat on a test in school, and that's kind of a bad thing. Like a really, really bad thing. Don't do it, even though a bunch of your alumni have. I know Stuyvesant is a tough school. I get that. I know the bar is set high and that good grades in a school like that results in Ivy League acceptance and all sorts of future perks.

But there's a reason the school's got the reputation it does: because the alumni later show themselves to be as smart as their grades show them to be. If you all start cheating, and helping each other cheat, and sometimes pressuring each other to help each other cheat, that may inflate your grades, but when you get found out- and hi, a random dude in Wisconsin's writing about you, so yeah, you've been found out- that simply deflates everyone's diploma. It makes it less valuable. We have quite enough cheaters running things in the world. We don't need to be instilling the value that you have to cheat to get ahead.

And if the value of the high school diploma's deflated due to the place being overrun with cheaters, what Ivy League school is going to want that? Or, if they find out you were one of the cheaters, future employers?