The start of the school year has already brought a myriad of changes to the University Prep community, from a new head of school to new students. However one other change has started that will be hard to ignore: The broadening of the mandatory laptop program to include required tablets as well.

Even before the program was instituted, there were clear arguments for or against the policy, however after a year of mandatory laptops, some relatively unforeseeable factors, such as cheating and distraction have surfaced as well, especially among students who have witnessed how these factors played out in their classes.

While people hope that the honor code would be enough to stop students from cheating in class, recent alumni Nate Barrett-Wilsdon witnessed fellow students taking advantage of the laptop policy to cheat.

“If teachers let you use it on a test, then definitely kids are going to cheat,” Barrett-Wilsdon said. “A lot of kids asked if they could use their computers to write essays on, and they’d just leave their internet on so if they needed to look something up they’d just Google it.”

Recent alumni Olivia Thomson witnessed similar instances of cheating in class.

“On tests where people are allowed to have their laptops out to write an essay or something, people already had notes, or had notes in front of them or they had something written out already,” Thomson said.

Barrett-Wilsdon saw cheating made easier by way of laptops, however he doesn’t necessarily think the number of cheating students has increased.

“The kids that were going to cheat were already cheating, it’s just easier now,” Barrett-Wilsdon said.

While some students feel that the laptop program makes it easier to cheat, others think there are monitoring systems in place to make sure it doesn’t happen.

“I don’t think [it’s easier to cheat] because whenever we have in class essays or research projects, usually the teachers monitor the classroom,” Senior Esa Tilija said.

Even though the opportunities to use laptops may not have increased the amount of students who cheat, the policy definitely makes it easier for students to get distracted.

“In the classes that [having a required laptop] actually helped me for I was already using it. They kind of forced it on things like English classes, so it ended up kind of distracting me,” Barrett-Wilsdon said.

Although it may be easier to become distracted, according to Thomson this usually doesn’t negatively affect the students paying attention.

“It’s everyone’s individual responsibility to get their work done. [Nobody is] hurting anybody else except themselves… if they’re not paying attention in class,” Thomson said.

Tilija sees the increased ease to get distracted as an opportunity to teach time management.

“[The required laptop policy has] taught us to manage our time more efficiently because if you use your time in class really well, you can be really efficient and have less homework to do,” Tilija said. “But if you just choose to get distracted on Facebook or something you’ll end up having a lot of work to do.”

Tilija sees more benefits to the entire class having laptops, besides improved time management skills.

“It teaches us to be more collaborative in class, and it also makes the classroom dynamic much faster because everything is at the tip of our fingers,” Tilija said. “Classes have become more interesting in a way because of the technology.”

Many benefits to both the classroom environment and real-world skills have come from the laptop policy, however there are drawbacks to the system as well for every student.

Junior Story Bernstein feels that the dependency on technology to work all of the time has led to trouble when the technology malfunctions.

“We became so dependent on laptops [last year] that if you had an issue you were kind of done for the day,” Bernstein said.

Even with the problems of being so dependent on technology, Bernstein sees a lot of potential for the program to grow and thinks that the devices will improve the quality of the curriculum.

“It kind of is a learning process for us and the teachers. They don’t know all of the technology that’s available to us right now, but I think the longer we have this policy in place the better it will get and the more helpful,” Bernstein said.

Even with the gains and flaws of the laptop policy, and the inevitable new benefits and disadvantages coming with the addition of required touch-screen devices, Thomson questions whether it is all completely necessary.

“When I toured colleges this past fall, I didn’t see many people using their laptops. People still were taking notes in notebooks, so I don’t know if it’s going to help us in college so much,” Thomson said. “I think that all the work that we did this year could have easily been done on pen and paper like it used to be.”

By: Kai Milicii