Reflection on "helping" by Jim Coopers

Jim Coopers in his essay “Helping” states a particular situation he encounters with the Puerto Rican students, he explains that cheating in a test for them was called helping. He believes that this happens because the Puerto Ricans were very united and cherished their groups and in the United States this didn’t happened because the students were very competitive. If we think about the culture of Puerto Rico we can understand this behavior, Puerto Ricans are very united and warm. Let’s move to the 21th century to see if this is still this way. Puerto Ricans are still very united and helpful, but in my opinion the students have enter unto competitiveness. Now the competitiveness do exist between students, every student want to get the better grade and wants to have the best job opportunities. I can’t deny that cheating does happen, but in a very different way than in the 1950’s, now a day students use technology as cell phones to cheat and help themselves. In another way students still have groups, but when it comes to group projects, no so many students like them. In Business Administration doing group projects is very common, but one of the reasons not so many students like them is because you are putting your grade in other people’s hand. This can tell us that much has changed since Jim Coopers was a professor at Mayagüez.

“When a student cheats is because the education system values more the grades than the knowledge” This phrase that I read once caught my attention, because after reading “Helping” I can conclude that this is what has added competitiveness in the student world. I believe that this is a bad kind of competitiveness, because is sadly true. The competitiveness that should be present on a student mind is the one that’s motivates the student to be better and to learn in a free way so that the he or she can enlarge their horizon.