The Slippery Slope to Cheating

Sometimes, all it takes is one small decision to set off a whole chain reaction of events that leads to unexpected and unplanned consequences. Sometimes these consequences are harmless, if a little weird—like when the decision to eat only food that can be consumed with a spoon (because you like spoons) ends with you asking your mom to stock the cupboard with organic baby food.

But there are times when your seemingly innocent choices can lead you down a dark path. Let's take cheating. You might say that you will never ever in a million years cheat in school. But the truth is that a few simple decisions can plunge you into morally questionable terrain before you even realize what you're doing. In fact, the slide into cheatdom can happen in just 10 slippery steps:

Step 1: You borrow a friend's notes after missing a day of class. While dutifully reading and copying them, you realize that your friend takes much better notes than you do.

Step 2: You start paying more attention to your friend than the teacher, observing her every move like a tourist on wildlife safari. What sort of writing utensil does she use? How often does she look down at her paper? How does she capture the ideas and concepts of physics so succinctly in her notebook (especially since your teacher is such a rambling mess)?

Step 3: You stop taking notes altogether. Instead, you rely on your really generous friend who lets you borrow her notes even when you haven't missed class.

Step 4: At some point, you decide your friend is simply superior to you in physics. Before committing steps 1-3, you probably would have taken this epiphany as a personal challenge to do better in the class. But now, you realize that the path to your A runs through her.

Step 5: You ask your friend to join a study group—just you and her. When you two get together, she brings the homework (mostly completed) and is ready to work with you on the tough problems. You show up with the cookies. You are completely baffled at how easy it is to take advantage of her hard work.

Step 6: As the semester progresses, you and your friend both have more after school commitments—meaning that your study group meets less frequently. You fall completely behind, to the point where you don't know a coefficient of friction from centripetal force. As a result, you begin to regularly borrow your friend's homework during a study hall period, copying her answers down without even looking at the questions.

Step 7: One day in class, the teacher calls on you to come to the board and work out a problem. Petrified, you feign an allergy to chalk, explaining that your "entire body will swell up like Violet Beauregarde after chewing that gum at Willy Wonka's." You escape, with your dignity bruised but your integrity intact.

Step 8: A few weeks before the semester's final exam, you have a panic attack. You consider your options: a) fake a serious month-long illness that requires you to retake physics (and every other subject) next year; b) disappear from the world completely; c) do the unthinkable.

Step 9: You ask your friend if she'd like to study together for the final. While you're working, you carefully—in a lighthearted way—mention that you always seem to understand this stuff better when she's around. Then you say, "Ha, just being in your gravitational range gives me a physics boost! We should totally sit next to each other during the test. Really."

Step 10: On test day, you find yourself peering over onto your friend's exam, which she has left wide open to your field of vision, completely unaware of your devious machinations. To make sure it doesn't look like you cheated off of her, you intentionally change a few questions. Who cares if you get a B (or C) as long as your teacher doesn't catch you in the act.

There you have it. In ten easy steps, you have succeeded in cheating. But at what cost to your soul? Meh...

Would you ever cheat? Have you ever been tempted to?

Related Post: How to Waste Time in Study Hall