By Charles Layton
The Harvard cheating scandal was in the paper again this morning. Every time I read about this it reminds me of my own career as an academic cheater.
Like the cheating at Harvard, mine was complicated. But here’s the difference: my cheating turned out to be one of the high points of my life as a student. Let me explain.
I wasn’t much of a student in high school. My early school years had been too easy. I had pretty much gotten by on glibness. So when I reached high school I had no idea how to study. And by then, I was at a point where I could no longer finesse my way through a test. It was study or flunk.
This became apparent in Miss Barkley’s American history class, where, at the end of the first semester, we faced a massive final exam, which would determine the greater part of our grade. And because I had (as usual) goofed off in class, I wasn’t at all prepared.
So I decided to cheat. And not in a small way. I was going to cheat on a colossal scale. I enlisted my friend Bobby, another goof-off, in the enterprise. We got excited about it. We were going to be the best cotton-pickin’ cheaters that school had ever produced.
We spent the better part of the weekend preparing elaborate “cheat sheets,” which we intended to smuggle into class on Monday morning and consult secretly during the exam.
We poured our most devoted energies into preparing those cheat sheets, which were to be miniaturized so we could hide them up our sleeves. We condensed the semester’s material into a shorthand outline, which we then painstakingly copied out in tiny lettering on long, inch-wide strips of paper – just enough info to answer a “what was” type of question.
“Whiskey Rebellion, 1791, grain farmers, tax.”
“Louisiana Purchase, 1803, Jefferson.”
“1st bank of the U.S, chartered 1791, Alex. Hamilton, Secy of Treas”
We wrote on both sides of these paper strips, and then we Scotch taped all the strips together to make one long strip, maybe four feet long. Then we rolled these long strips into double rolls, so that, with a deft flick of thumb and forefinger, we could scroll them this way or that way to retrieve the facts we needed for a given question.
Having accomplished this, we practiced looking up those various facts. Bobby would say to me, “XYZ Affair,” and I would scroll the strips until I found the notes on that.
“War of 1812,” I’d say, and Bobby would scroll to that spot on his sheet.
By Monday morning we had it down. We were pumped. We were confident that we could find any fact, quickly, and inconspicuously enough so as not to get busted. We were really going to put one over on the hawk-eyed Miss Barkley. Oh boy.
The bell rang. In we went to class. The tests were passed around.
“Begin.”
I answered the first question just fine, without resorting to my cheat sheet. Then I answered the second question – again without consulting the cheat sheet. I remembered the pertinent facts just from having copied them down so carefully.
And so it went. I ended up going through that entire test without a single peek at my beautiful cheat sheet, which remained coiled like a sleeping worm just up my sleeve.
As I handed in my test paper and walked out the classroom door, it struck me that while I had thought I was preparing a clever way to beat the system, what I had really been doing was studying. Yeah. So that’s what studying was.
I had distilled the relevant information from the textbook, I had sorted and organized it, written it down, reviewed it… Totally by accident, I had discovered how to cram for a test. By hook or by crook, you might say.
I felt like a total idiot of course. Because instead of being the devilish, romantic outlaw I had set out to be, I’d turned myself into a studious nerd.
I used that stumbled-upon method of study, though, for the rest of my days. Omitting, of course, the part where you compress the information into a small paper roll and hide it on your person. That part – the unethical part — was the one step in the process that turned out to be a waste of time.