Cheat or think outside the box?

Like most people, I have some ethical questions about things I did when I was younger, and the biggest one is cheating at school. I don’t have kids and the only advice I would give if I did is if you get caught you’re asking for trouble so I would advise against it. I should probably be saying the company line that “you’re only kidding yourself”, but my problem is, right? I wish I knew the answer to that question, but I don’t. I only cheated a few times in high school and grad school – I never cheated as a college student, hurrah, and I’m not entirely sure if what I did was wrong or in several instances I actually cheated. For all I know, I could call myself an innovator and think outside the box if I did similar things at work today!

In high school, I was smart enough to realize that one of my teachers gave us monthly exams taken strictly from the Teachers Edition textbook, which meant I didn’t have to prepare for any exams. The tests themselves were quite difficult and I studied diligently for the first test and only got a C- for all my effort. I didn’t see a positive ending in sight, but then, like Beavis and Butthead, I had a “light bulb idea” and thought why not see if I could buy the Teachers Edition? If the teacher didn’t want to take the time to prepare his own test, why shouldn’t I see if I can order the Teachers Edition textbook with the tests in them? I contacted a bunch of bookstores and even though I couldn’t order the Teachers Edition with the exams, I did my best and ordered the Student Auxiliary textbook with similar type study questions but not the exact exam questions . This resulted in me knowing exactly what to study and getting A’s or A-‘s on every test and the girls in my class looking at me in awe because they thought I was pretty stupid! Neither the teacher nor anyone else knew that I had the book and it took me a long time to locate and order it. I don’t know if this was actually cheating or taking advantage of a situation that came my way because I thought about it.

The only other time I cheated in high school was on my math final, a variation on the above situation. I know what I did was ethically wrong and clearly cheating, but I always rationalized it because my math teacher was a lousy teacher and a lousy person. I had a B average getting to the finish line for the last 2 months or so, didn’t understand what he was teaching and didn’t help me when I asked. He was also lazy and gave us tests taken directly from the teacher’s edition of the textbook. Since I had been doing fine on my own before the last 2 months, I never tried to see if I could get the auxiliary textbook. A friend of mine was in the same boat and for some reason it turned out that there was no auxiliary textbook but there was in fact a Teachers Edition with the Finale. Somehow we managed to sort it out, I still don’t know how, and we both got A’s. My friend like an idiot told someone else that he told someone else and by the time we were done about half the kids in the class had the answers to the test or at least thought they did. We didn’t get caught because we agreed to give someone else the multiple choice answers and some of them were wrong. They in turn changed theirs and so on. The result was that the boy who understood it last got D’s! I shouldn’t laugh, but I think he’s funny!

I didn’t cheat in college at all, but I did cheat once in grad school. I had to take a required course and the professor was teaching the course by calling random people all the time. I found this intimidating and I didn’t learn anything this way and since he didn’t know my name I cut all my classes because I couldn’t deal with it. Our entire rating was based on one thing, one finish. I studied and studied, but nothing I could do really brought me down. I was very worried and 3 days before the final, I realized that I was going to fail unless I figured something out. So once again I had my Big Beavis and Butthead idea and I noticed that the classroom was empty at least two hours before Finals and I went in and wrote in pencil on the desk crib notes on the desk and as a result I managed to pass the test and used my palm to erase what I wrote on the desktop.

What is the moral of all this? The problem is that I don’t know!