Cheating in High School
Thomas JohnstonMedium · thomas-sky- Original URL: https://thomas-sky.medium.com/cheating-in-high-school-2922dc64dd90 - Medium post ID: `2922dc64dd90` - Published: Sun, 31 Jan 2021 10:14:06 GMT - Feed updated: 2022-11-03T06:58:35.842Z - Images and tracking pixels intentionally omitted from this offline-readable copy.
Cheating on the SAT
I cheated a lot in high school. Not because the material was difficult but because I was apathetic and probably depressed and didn’t really care about anything but for some reason I knew that I had to get good grades. Thankfully somewhere along the line someone ingrained in me that I should keep my grades high so I could go to college (although that notion could’ve fucked me over big time if I didn’t get a scholarship and went anyway because college is actually not worth the price in 2020 at all), so despite my apathy that’s what I did.
Cheating was the path of least resistance, and I felt confident in my ability to do it, so I did it all the time. I probably cheated more frequently than any other student in that school. By my senior year I would be surprised to be taking a test and not be cheating, because who has the time to learn anything? Most people have probably forgotten how magnets work by now, while I never learned in the first place.
I’m not even ashamed of my cheating because I did it with such finesse. I was hatching schemes, envisioning pitfalls, enlisting subordinates, honestly operating like a little mobster. I was buying and selling answers and paying people to keep their mouths shut about things that did not need to be known. I cheated my way to the Valedictorian podium and into a \$300,000 scholarship to USC. I even cheated on the SAT.
Is it wrong to cheat because it’s unfair to the people who actually learned the material and “deserve it?” What do they deserve? To be recognized for their ability to absorb and regurgitate information better than the tired, dehydrated kid sitting next to them? To live out the dreams of their helicopter parents who have been coaching them their entire lives to replicate their financial success? I didn’t have a computer. I didn’t have a smartphone for most of it. I didn’t have a printer and my parents, while caring, could not help in any meaningful way. They would’ve been proud of me for finishing with C’s and going straight from graduation to wage slavery. I got to use a computer, in the year 2016, for 30 minutes a day at lunch time in between classes. Where would I be if I didn’t spend all 30 of those minutes cheating?
Sometimes I even enjoyed the process.
In a class where the teacher kept copies of future exams in her desk drawers, I hid inside the cupboard undetected as everyone was leaving, and sent a friend to get lunch with the teacher outside the room. When she left, I emerged from the cupboard and snapped pictures of all of the exams for the rest of the semester. I never told anyone else in that class how I was acing the exams and they all assumed it was just because I was “smart.” That scheme saved me several hours of studying and probably several tenths of GPA points.
I would pretend to be sick so I could stay home on the day of a test I wasn’t prepared for so my friend could snap pictures of the test and send them to me for me to work out on my own and come in with them memorized the next day.
In situations where I couldn’t get access to the test beforehand, I sometimes took advantage of the teacher’s good will. Often during exams I would write down all the questions I didn’t know the answers to on a small, indistinguishable sheet of paper, slip that piece of paper into my pocket, and ask the teacher to use the bathroom. I would take care to act approximately 40% of the way into the allotted exam time, increasing the odds of avoiding the possible “just wait until the test is over” retort. In the bathroom, I would google the answers, either force them into my short-term memory or write them down, and return to the classroom.
When I didn’t have a smartphone, I would do the same thing but instead of going to the bathroom I would speed-walk across campus to the library to use a computer. The people in the library didn’t know where I was supposed to be and they trusted me because I never got in trouble and possibly because I was white. Google the answers, write them down, return to class.
Seeing people cheating by looking at other people’s papers pissed me off because it was lazy and risky. I had a couple emergency situations where I had to pull out the phone between the legs in class, but such barbaric measures were only necessary when all other resources had been exhausted. I usually planned out every move in advance, down to my position in the room.
I even gamed the SAT. While reading about college admissions on a forum-esque website called collegeconfidential.com, which hasn’t crossed my mind in years, I noticed that many users would routinely discuss the exam answers on public forums after they completed the 4-hour long test. Fortunately for me, I lived in Hawaii, where we took the exam 6 hours after kids on the East Coast did. And because the test is “standardized”, everyone who took the test that day got the same damn questions.
So, for two hours before the Hawaii exam began and after the New York private school nerds finished, I was treated to the spectacle of hundreds of neurotic kids on the East Coast discussing and debating the answers to the exam I was about to take that would directly impact my chances at elite college admissions and scholarships. I would refresh that forum like a madman, storing the users’ decided answers to the most hotly debated questions in a personal document. I associated words with numbers and other words that, if remembered when I come across that question on the exam, would save me time and effort and lead me right to the community-agreed-upon answer. I couldn’t cheat on the whole test, of course, but I’m confident this practice helped me achieve the score that I did.
Do I feel bad? No. The only person who I cheated is myself. Like I said, I don’t even know how magnets work.
1/06/21