I cheated on a trigonometry exam in eleventh grade. I was sick for two of the days in the week before the test, and I just hadn’t memorized all of the obscure formulas. So I plugged the formulas into my graphing calculator. I don’t think I actually referred to them during the test (in fact, the teacher might have included them on the form itself), but I had intended to use my calculator to an unfair advantage. That’s cheating.
But I didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty about it. I did what I thought was necessary to advance my academic career at the time (turns out that my expectations for myself FAR exceeded what was necessary to achieve my goals). I knew that this particular knowledge (regarding cosines and cosecants and such) would be of no value to me after high school, and the test was not graded on a curve, so it would impact no one else in the classroom.
I never cheated after that in high school or college, but it bothers me how easily I was able to rationalize doing something that is inherently immoral. And it’s not like I’m atypical. Most of the studies I read about this the first time I failed at grad school (see note 1) indicated that a majority of high schoolers have either cheated or facilitated cheating by others.
I just think it would be enlightening to hear stories about all the ways people cheated. Especially the ones you never would have suspected as cheaters. I’ve seen serious academic studies, but I haven’t seen anything written in a more narrative format. So any of you who have studied pedagogy or educational psychology who might know of a good source… let me know.
1: I actually wanted to do my thesis on cheating methods at Ball State University, but my advisor thought I should push for a weightier topic. This is why I have thirty pages of methodology describing how to perform a content analysis of the American history textbooks in use in northern Indiana high schools in 2000. Solid abstract, well thought-out methodology… no results. Story of my life.
