someone's uptight mother.

Picture this: a giant, university lecture room with seating for 100, less than half filled. I'm sitting in the next-to-last row, head bent down over an impossible physics exam (as if there were any other kind of physics exam). My friend is sitting next to me, looking equally confused and frustrated. The professor, seated at a stool at the front of the room, gets up and walks out of the classroom. In an instant, my friend springs into action, grabbing her physics textbook out of her bag and flipping expertly to the correct section. I stare. She glances through it quickly, then offers the book to me. I attempt to shake the shock out of my expression and look cool and confident as I refuse the offer with a slight shake of my head. I go back to my test, my eyes still wide in amazement. I want to say in the scandalized whisper of the ten-year-old that is somewhere deep inside me, "But that's cheating!"

I don't like cheaters.

I cheated once, taking a test in my fifth grade AG class. We'd been doing this long study on whales (which must have been a favorite topic of the teacher, because I see no other reason for us studying it in such depth), and we were having our final exam on the topic. The class was in a small room with two tables where the students sat. During a test, we would stand slightly-opened books up between us to discourage us from glancing at our neighbor's papers. I had my Trapper Keeper standing up between me and the girl next to me, the same Trapper Keeper that contained all my notes for the class. So I used my notes.

The really stupid part was that this particular test had a brain dump section for extra credit. Basically, you just listed everything you could think of about whales that hadn't already been tested and you'd get bonus points. That was where I used my notes. I ended up with 156 score on this test, and that is on the traditional 100-point scale, mind you. Another girl in the class ended up with 175, but I think she just studied.

Cheating seemed really pointless after that to me. Trust me, there have been some times when cheating would actually have been beneficial to my test scores rather than just overkill, but I never did it again. There have been times when I've been handed back a dismal result, but my thought was only that that's what I got for not studying harder.

I never let people cheat off of me, either. That sort of thing was rampant, particularly in high school. Kids wouldn't do the homework, and then in the morning before class, they'd borrow a buddy's paper to get the answers. My friends, even some of my closer friends who only found themselves in that situation once in a rare while, didn't even bother to ask me for my paper. They knew they could get the same answers elsewhere.

I take that back: I let my best friend Amy copy a worksheet for French class in college. I don't remember why she didn't have hers, but it was a pretty good reason. Plus, these worksheets were kind of silly, basically fill in the blanks of sentences taken almost word for word out of the accompanying textbook. I knew perfectly well that she could do the worksheet, she just hadn't, for whatever reason. I don't feel bad about that one.

I was always very protective of my answers, too. I was expert at covering up my paper from any roaming eyes. Once, I sat right next to a kid who was a well-known habitual cheater. We were taking a quiz, and I knew, knew that he was attempting to look at my answers. Fine, then, we can play that game. I wrote down the wrong answers. Then after he was finished, he turned in his paper, and I erased my paper and wrote in the correct ones. I will never forget the priceless confusion on his face when we got our quizzes back as he looked at the rotten grade on his paper and the perfect score on mine. He took to sneaking glimpses at his notes after that.

There are unfair, ridiculous tests out there. Fine, that's the way it goes. Take comfort in the fact that the exam was unfair and get over it. But more often than not, cheating is just desperate act of the unprepared. I should know: I've been unprepared before. In that case, I see it as your own fault. Unfortunately, cheaters do prosper. Half of the students in my senior high school class saw borrowing answers as a fact of life, and, folks, these were the honors students. These were smart kids were just too lazy to actually put in the time and study, and so I have no sympathy for them if their system fails them. They got away with it, got scholarships to college and probably have good jobs now where they still probably don't have to do any independent thinking.

But enough. I'm done ranting. I feel like someone's uptight mother. Someday I probably will be.