Nope, no cheating here that I can recall. Someone once offered me money to take her SATs for her, but I declined.
We had an insanely bad algebra teacher–for example, she taught using an overhead projecctor, but she stood in front of it so it projected onto her chest, and she muttered, and she never took questions, and so on. The class was a Kafkaesque joke. So we cheated on the tests. I think that was the only time.
I’m 53, so any statutes of limitations have long since expired. I never cared if someone looked at my paper during tests. “Not my job” sort of attitude.
In college I sort of tutored a girl in physics. Coincidentally, I was in an Organic Chem class her father was teaching. She gave me “an old final exam” to use for studying. When I took the final I discovered that she had given me THE exam.
I felt very bad about it, but I don’t know if I would have passed otherwise.
My daughter has a favorite story she relates. In her last year of high school she was subject to a girl who always cheated off my daughters test. On the last exam my daughter let her paper be easily seen to this other girl with all the answers purposely wrong. After the girl finished and handed in her paper my daughter stayed and corrected all her answers. The following day when test scores were revealed she said the look on the cheater was complete astonishment! Revenge is sweet!
Fuck no. First, I’d say, “Do the work your damn self,” and shortly afterward that person wouldn’t be anyone I associated with anymore.
Are you going to cover for some useless piece of shit on the job too? Want to go to a doctor who should have failed a course, except for his buddy letting him have the answers to the exam? Would you like to have a lawyer who fucked her way through law school?
Cheating isn’t just about passing an exam or course, it’s about character. More practically, it’s about the knowledge you’re supposed to have to graduate. If it’s high school, it’s not as egregious as letting someone cheat at university, where they might, someday, be in a position to let someone die, go to jail, or lose their job because they’re incapable of doing their own goddamn work, but it’s still a shitty fucking idea.
If you don’t know the answers, then fuck you, you should have studied. If you studied and still can’t answer the questions, then fuck you, I don’t want you working in that field.
I never had a boyfriend in school either, and no one I knew well enough ever wanted to cheat. I have a faint memory of being very young and the school’s bully (red-haired little fucker) making me let him cheat, but that’s not the same thing, is it? (He already picked on me plenty).
When I got to college, it was actually pretty hard to cheat by looking at someone’s paper. We were well-spaced out and my grades were no longer top of the class (still good, but not good enough).
I completely misunderstood the question and thought it was about allowing your SO to sleep with someone else. You should add that option to the poll too.
I didn’t see it as my job to judge people or to teach them ethics. If someone needed my help, I helped them.
Cheat? You mean “help”? Yup.
He never asked for it, but a guy on my team in one of my programming classes got help from me all the time. I was in college in my 40s; had been a computer programmer since my 20s. The stuff we were expected to program was intro stuff. I would do the assignment in class the day he assigned it; and email it to my buddy in case it might be able to help him. I don’t know if he used it, but I assume he did.
The people who are copying answers in school have already decided they’re passing on a real education. They’re not going to go on to be a doctor or a lawyer.
Not exactly a friend, but a classmate in high school copied my vocabulary assignment nearly every week. I study languages now; no idea what she’s doing. Then again, we were doing vocabulary assignments in 10th grade, so take from that what you will.
In college I happily edited friends’ and boyfriends’ essays to ‘A’ quality, regardless of their original writing. I did a bit of rewriting, but mostly it was spelling/grammar correction, and some incisive questions about their argument. I absolutely refused to write their essays from scratch, though, because that would have been way too much work.
Or maybe they forgot about the test and are so brainwashed by this kind of academic nonsense that they feel they have to cheat to avoid a single bad mark. I don’t really believe there’s anything even immoral going on in these cases in high school. I was never asked if I agreed to the terms the school had stipulated. Stupid rules, stupid system. The students get cheated out of a real education as a result.
I once wrote a final paper for a friend who was overwhelmed with 3 exams and 2 final papers during finals week. My classes all had final papers and I had finished them already. I had to stick around for finals week anyway because she was my ride home for the summer, so I had nothing to do. The paper was for a class in my major but not her major, so I figured why not.
I would never have let anyone cheat off me, or written a paper for any class we were both in - I was too competitive for that.
She got an A on the paper - her first A in her undergrad career. She cried and felt a bit like a loser.
Yes, I let friends cheat off of me and in exchange they would give me answers if I needed them. What are friends for?
It wasn’t a regular occurrence, just when people were having one of those, “holy crap I’ve read the chapter 5 times and I still have no idea what I’m doing” moments. Within my circle of friends we would generally try to understand the subject by helping each other study and maybe a little unofficial tutoring but sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures.
I said “No” but I was thinking grades 1-12. In retrospect, I wrote a girlfriend’s Art History paper for her once while I was in college.
Reading this reminded me I’ve done tons of homework for students taking programming classes. Maybe it’s my fault there’s a lot of lame programmers out there.<shrug>
I did a couple of math assignments for a friend who really struggled with calculus limits (her degree wasn’t related to high math at all). There were a couple of concepts that I’d tried to teach her with regard to limits, and she tried really hard but just couldn’t grok them. Since it was merely a required class that she’d never have to build on in her academic future (and it was completely irrelevant to her degree), I rationalized it as ok. She ended up passing the final/class with a C-minus, which seemed fair for her mastery level.
I’ve never taken a college exam it was possible to cheat on, though. They gave out different forms and you never knew which form the guy in front of you was using. It would have been as pointless to copy someone else’s scantron as it would be to fill out random letters for all of your answers.
This is how much of a goody-goody I was.
In 10th grade history we were having an open book exam and the teacher left the room. I let a close friend copy my answers.
Then I felt so guilty, I turned myself in when I handed in my test. I wouldn’t say the name of my friend though. My history teacher just kinda rolled her eyes, patted me on the head and sent me on my way.
I’m 29.
Yeah, we cheated every so often. Sometimes I’d forget to study for a quiz, so I’d have one of my friends help by passing me the answers using hand signals. Other times, it would be the other way around. We had a “study” group in which we’d spread out assignments between four of us, so if there was a calc assignment with 20 questions, we just did 5 each and copied the rest off each other. I didn’t care then, and it doesn’t bother me now, either, being older and wiser. We all knew how to do the problems; it was just busy work to us.
ETA: This was in high school. College was a bit different, and we didn’t get so much busy work to make this a useful approach to tackling assignments while still learning the material.