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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Friday, March 29, 2024

The Secret Life of...a school cheater

Gertrude* estimates that, by Tufts standards, she has cheated in about a third of the classes she has taken throughout her tenure here, whether by copying problem sets, studying from old tests, "collaborating" with fellow students or keeping formulas in her calculator. But she would not call herself a cheater - she prefers to be described as "one who cuts corners."

This senior has "cut corners" throughout her Tufts career, but she credits her 3.75 GPA to her hard work - not others' hard work.

"At the end of the day, I do study for the exams and I do well," Gertrude said. "I study and get good grades regardless of whether I cheat."

Gertrude began cutting corners well before her Tufts matriculation. "In high school, chemistry was one of the subjects that was the hardest for me," she said. "So in that class I cheated the most."

Gertrude's high school used Scantron (an electronic scanning system that relies on fill-in-the-blank answers) for all the tests, so she was able to copy straight lines of bubbles from her best friend, the school valedictorian.

When she came to Tufts and began taking economics classes with other friends, she realized that it would be useful to study old problem sets and exams.

"Cheating is easy because many of the professors don't change their tests and problem sets, especially in economics courses," Gertrude said.

"In many of my econ courses, myself as well as other students have collaborated during exams [and] shared answers," she continued.

"The way I have been able to cut corners in college is by getting old problem sets or old tests in order to study for exams or replicating old problem sets," Gertrude said. "If the teacher's not going to change their tests and problem sets from year to year or semester to semester, then I don't think it's necessarily cheating if the student uses all the resources at their disposal."

Gertrude says her relationship with cheating is not chronic. "I don't cheat in every class," she said. "I'm very intelligent, but I'll cheat to give myself that advantage, put me over the edge."

In fact, she sees herself more as a lazy opportunist than a dumb cheater. "When it comes time to take the test, I learn it," Gertrude said. "That's where I think I'm different. Some tests I won't have the opportunity to cheat, so I always need to prepare."

Another reason for her relative success is that she is calculating in her decisions. "I always weigh the risks before I cheat," she said. "Basically, I never do anything that would result in me getting kicked out of school if I were ever caught."

"I don't consider a lot of the stuff I've done cheating, but I know that copying off someone is cheating and collaborating during exams is cheating," Gertrude said. "But I don't consider getting old problem sets or tests cheating."

Gertrude believes her behavior is similar to that of many students at Tufts. "Every single person has cut a corner at one point in their career here," she said.

The list of actions Gertrude will not take includes stealing a test or "plagiarizing a paper straight from Google."

Unfortunately for her, those precautions cannot safeguard her completely. In an introductory-level econ course, Gertrude "got a problem set from a student who took the class the semester before." Since the professor had neglected to change the problem sets, she was able to use all of the correct answers.

When her recitation received back their problem sets, Gertrude's grade had been replaced with a dreaded, "See me." Her teaching assistant thought her answers were peculiarly perfect and questioned Gertrude as to how this was possible.

"I said that I did the problem set and did it very well," she said. "I told her I looked over the old problem set and I used it to check my answers - and when mine were wrong, I took the right ones. I left that out."

Gertrude was lucky in this instance. The TA understood that she had checked her answers and not stolen an answer key, and gave Gertrude a 90 on the assignment. "It was a 100 that I really deserved," she said.

She had one other close call - the scariest. In a Spanish class, she was asked to keep a journal, with the last entry about a movie shown in class. "I unfortunately fell asleep during this movie and couldn't write the entry," Gertrude said. "So I went online and researched the movie and used a lot of the information from the website, not really realizing that I used a lot of the wording from the website."

Gertrude said that it is difficult to rework a sentence in Spanish, particularly in an introductory class that has not taught synonyms yet. "The teacher had apparently used the same exact website," she said. "She called it plagiarism."

Her professor said that she would bring this to the deans, but later called to take that back. Gertrude received an A for her efforts in the class. She remains confident that she could have explained herself sufficiently to the deans.

"That was the worst that ever happened," she said. "But in the back of my head I always knew that the worst outcome would never be me getting kicked out of school."

"Combining your talents as well as cutting corners always results in a more successful person, in college as well as in life," she said.

*Name has been changed. The identity of this individual and the veracity of her statements has been confirmed.