I used my older sibling’s test to study and now my friends are calling me a chea
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Back to the OP’s newest question – I’ve found the best way to admit things is to just be factual. Don’t try to shift the facts to make yourself better, don’t try to pile on explanations or make emotional appeals for sympathy. Just keep it as factual and objective as possible. Just – this is the situation, this is what happened.
So – I think you tell your teacher that your brother had held onto all his materials from last year. You used them at the beginning of the year in good faith as study guides, assuming that the tests would be altered this year. You realized after that first test that nothing had changed and they were the exact same tests. You have hesitated to come forward initially, but you are now, and you have stopped referring to any of your brother’s past tests going forward. What do you (teacher) want to do to address this situation?
And even if your parents aren’t willing to go talk to your teacher, I’d at least let them know what you’re going to say.
And tell your friends you’ve stopped using the tests and are taking them fairly just like they are all, and you want to move on.
I don’t know if that will repair your reputation with them, what’s done may be done. All you can control, both them and with your teacher, is what you do going forward.
Stop cheating and be honest, and that may shift opinions of your integrity back into the black, or at least help.
Unless your brother took home or copied materials he wasn’t supposed to, this isn’t actually cheating. It’s the teacher being lazy. Prof should know better (and may be expected to do better) than to reuse the same test word-for-word. Every high school honors, college and law school class I ever took had a “test bank” where prior tests were kept to help students study. Ditto for each state’s bar exam that I have ever taken. And, in every case, studying prior tests was encouraged. It was understood the teacher/professor was savvy enough not to repeat every year.
No, this is cheating.
If the OP realizes the tests are exactly the same and they are using them to get the answers beforehand, it’s cheating. Its not the same as studying off past tests that have covered the same concepts but that will ultimately differ from the test you take.
It’s *also* professional poor form on the teacher’s part, she’s just begging for this to happen, so hopefully she gets a wake-up call here and doesn’t take it too hard on the OP.
But, the OP knows the answers before the test, she knows she knows them, and is getting good grades because of it.
Yeah, I’m a professor, and this situation is literally written into every honor code/student code of conduct/what have you that I’ve ever seen. It’s cheating.
The first time wasn’t cheating going in. When she realized it was the same test it became cheating and she’s been doing it all year. OP this is a big deal and you need to talk to your parents. If you’d done it and kept it to yourself I would just tell you to stop and study differently in the future. That’s not the situation. The situation is you told multiple people and helped another cheat also. If this comes out the wrong way you could be in some deep shit. Tell your parents—tell them all of it including that your friends are calling you a cheater because that’s what really makes me think someone is going to tell or overhear. Your friends know, they’re pissed, they’re talking about it, and they’re not wrong. You’re in honors classes, kids are competitive, you’re cheating, and they know it. You’re on borrowed time.
This is cheating. I get that there are “test banks,” but the idea there is not that you have the exact test that’s going to be given so that you just memorize a set of answers to one particular test and don’t really learn the material. The teacher being lazy also doesn’t make this not cheating. What makes it cheating is the LW is knowingly using the exact test that’s going to be given and memorizing it. Again, the first time that happens, it’s not cheating. After that, it is.
“And this hasn’t really been addressed by anyone but what do I do about my friends that have called me a cheater? I think their right so I’m not gonna deny it or anything so how do I handle it next time they call me a cheater.”
I actually did address this. You stop cheating. You stop talking about it. If your friends bring it up, you say you realized after the second time that the teacher didn’t change the tests from last year. So you brought it to her attention, and she did.
If you’re asking how to keep cheating AND address your friends calling you a cheater, come on. They’d be rightly calling you a cheater. You could be like, yeah, well, I offered you the same test. And they could be like, well, I didn’t take it because I’m not a cheater.
Like if someone is leaving money lying around or dropping it, you tell them. You might take that bill the first time you see it on the ground and no one’s around, but once you figure out its this person’s money, you need to be like, hey, I notice you’re dropping money, maybe there’s a hole in your pocket.
Or if you notice a payroll mistake in your favor, you bring it to your boss’s attention. Even the first time.
High school teacher here – my school would absolutely consider this cheating. Just loop your parents in and sit down with your teacher and explain. Most teachers will understand and appreciate that you are trying to do the right thing. Someone else had a good suggestion to ask to retake a new version of the test. I have seen about a thousand high school girls tell on their friends when they’re frustrated with them, so I suspect something will get out anyway if you don’t get ahead of this. And try to understand how uncool that was socially to brag to your friends that you had answers given to you that they had to work hard for.
When I was in high school, the teachers used to hand out previous years tests as a study aid. They created a fresh test every year.
When teachers repeat exams they make a mockery of the honor code. The students are confronted with the choice of ‘cheat’ just to stay even with kids who have access to the files of past tests or play it straight and be at a disadvantage to perhaps a third of the class. Why does this teacher think this lazy behavior is satisfactory? Clearly, it isn’t.
