Competition is an unavoidable component of society, as limited resources make people strive for the very best at their own benefit. As an ingredient for human advancement, competition brings the incentive to go above and beyond in order to excel in skills, techniques and accomplishments. Construing the backbone of student education, it not only creates the environment for better learning, but an unusually large focus for winning and success. The desperate strive for success can be overshadowing, in the sense where students lose perspective on self-development, as they channel their minds to produce innovative yet unethical means to advance themselves in a highly competitive environment. Performance-enhancing drugs, like Adderall, portray a perfect example as they have notorious predominant use within the academic domain of schools. Nonetheless, they also have detrimental implications in both the social and physical aspects of a student’s life, as they blur the lines of what is and isn’t conceived to be cheating within the context of academic integrity.
Adderall, predominantly known as an attention deficit hyperactivity prescription drug, is used primarily to treat patients diagnosed with ADHD and narcolepsy and works by enhancing concentration through stimulation of the dopamine and norepinephrine production within the brain.1 In other words, it gives person the ability to focus better on one task without being easily distracted by multiple other things. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a neurobehavioral disorder that results in not only just a delayed learning ability, but also impacts academic achievement and social development skills.2 Despite the fact that a vast majority of students experience these common symptoms when trying to study, ADHD patients have a more severe case that physically affects them in other aspects of life. Adderall, just like other drugs, have specified reasons for its use and can easily result in abuse when people who do not have ADHD have a regular intake since it overstimulates the brain.1 Adderall is designed specifically for those with severe attention deficit problems, and if used by those without this medical diagnosis, the later impacts could be detrimental.
For many classes, students face an issue of memorizing and learning a surplus of information in a short period of time, especially before an exam. Procrastination and social media are just a few examples that deter a student from studying to their full potential. Rather than visualizing the goal of a course as learning important information, they see their main objective as acing an exam. The objective of attaining an ideal numerical assessment is the point at which Adderall arrives into the picture, where students suddenly envision this drug as the shortcut to achieve their success. Much to people’s dismay, Adderall is easily accessible to college students, where they can just simply enter a health clinic on campus and acquire a prescription for Adderall after an ADHD diagnosis by a healthcare practitioner.1 Although this might seem like a very complicated process to undergo, students have two different motivations to obtain a prescription, one being for academic performance and another for profit by reselling it to other students. With such easy and simple means in a growing black market, Adderall abuse can become unprecedented since media doesn’t seem to take it into concerns of a drug epidemic. Its misuse can have a number of side effects, yielding the risk of difficulty sleeping, seizures, loss of appetite, hallucinations, and uncontrolled shaking and body movements.1 With such a short-term goal in mind, students usually take these drugs at times of desperation, not taking into account of what these long-term side effects can do in the long run.
In all form of competition, there are rules to abide by to maintain fairness amongst the playing field. Academic dishonesty is largely discouraged, as it is the use of deceptive means in improving one’s performance at a strong advantage during an evaluation by a third party. While to most students’ perspectives, only plagiarism and cheating would necessarily fall under academic dishonesty, they don’t seem to acknowledge performance-enhancers as another qualifying entity. In college, exams are an integrated assessment addressed by the school to test a student’s aptitude and ability within the class. For students who take performance-enhancers, they are able to reap the benefits of super-enhanced concentration from the use of Adderall while taking exams, while non-using students, on the other hand, don’t reap those same benefits.1 With this physical advantage, there’s a large contrast between those who didn’t use Adderall and those who did in the means of grade distribution. In addition to this, the students who are misdiagnosed with ADHD not only reap the advantages from Adderall, but they also receive the benefit of having extra time to finish their exams compared to their classmates.1 This extra time provides a large lead for students that are misdiagnosed with ADHD, in the sense that they don’t suffer from the consequential symptoms. This incentive can cause Adderall usage to become more common, with an increasing amount of pressure for people to use enhancers in the event of competition. With more and more students on the rise of using Adderall, less people would want to be at a the bottom disadvantaged when it comes to their collective goal of success.
In a study conducted on a student’s opinion of performance-enhancing drugs, 1,200 males within their freshman year of college had participated in a questionnaire that included two types of scenarios: one being an athlete who misused anabolic steroids to win at a sporting event and another being a college student who misused Adderall to help him do well on his midterm exam grades. These are two completely different circumstances that are involved in an academic setting, both of which involve the use of performance enhancers in order to achieve the highest title. Within the survey, the college students rated the extent in which they believed the student in the scenario had cheated, and the extent to which they felt the use of performance enhancer was necessary. The results showed participants more actively conceiving the athlete as more of a cheater, while they saw Adderall more necessary for success.3 The reasons for this vary, but it is primarily because in the athletic competition, one’s success does come at the expense of other participants. An athlete must perform at a standard that would surpass his or her competitors, where their use of performance enhancers provides them with a large, unprecedented momentum. Nonetheless, in the academic domain, performance enhancers also gives an unfair advantage, but not as much at the expense of others since a large number of people can share the same amount of success. Everyone within the class can collectively high marks on their exam scores, rather than it being just one. One person’s ability at success is independent of another individual’s ability to achieve that same amount of success. The only issue here within the academic domain would be the grade distribution, as one’s student’s grade comes at the expense of a possible curve for another.
Societal pressures include the need to overcome challenges in order rise to the top, especially in high-competitive environments that have limited resources. Schools are a perfect example, where even though the competitive environment may feed the urge to strive and work harder to become more successful, it ultimately steers attention away from the ultimate value of education, which is actually learning content rather than focusing on the numerical assessment. In such situations, students have reformed to using performance-enhancing drugs, such as Adderall, to heighten their sense of ability to easily achieve the standards they believe will coincide with one’s success. Nonetheless, the use of Adderall does create an uneven playing field, in which one’s higher grades at an unconventional means does come at the cost of another non-using student’s by affecting the overall grade distribution. In addition to such, Adderall is also a drug in which it’s misuse can inadvertently lead to a lengthy amount of side effects and abuse amongst a health student population, merely for the purpose of numerical evaluation of a person’s intelligence.