With a little help from my friends
This next deal is not my favorite story to tell. I'm not exactly the hero of the story, but maybe by telling other people I can feel better about all of it.

You see, when I got to college all the classes were online. That's one of the biggest differences between high school and college. In high school a few teachers had web sites and stuff but mostly they didn't know about that. Then in college they have this system where everybody has a page and all your classes are there with all the handouts and notes and all. So if you miss class you have to go to the website and get stuff from there. A lot of time they do tests there too which is pretty cool because you can take the test when you're ready not when the class is scheduled. Some teachers don't like that though and you have to take the test at a certain time when the class is scheduled.

At the beginning of the year I'd study the problems and study stuff that the teacher had on the web site a bunch right before taking the test and then go to it before anything fell out of my brain, if you know what I mean. You couldn't see that stuff while taking the test because the test locks your computer and makes it so it's the only window open. But then I found out some other people were tricking the system and talking to each other about the answers--taking it together, basically. I'm not a cheating kind of guy but the problem was that everyone else in the class was doing it and my scores were way too low compared to all of them on the first tests. So some buddies of mine offered to help me out and help me do better. I said okay, just on the hard ones that are practically impossible, so I'd text them the question and they'd text back the hints I needed to get the answers. I didn't get a hundred or anything but it put me back into the average with the class.

Then halfway through the semester the teacher must have gotten tipped or something cuz he freaked in lecture about cheating and set up a big review test and did it in the class on paper. If we got scores way lower than the scores we got before he said he'd give us zeroes for cheating. I thought I would do okay cuz I only got help on the hard ones, but when I studied I realized that the longer the semester went on, I'd gotten help on more and more of them. So I didn't know any of the stuff he was doing the review on. I failed it bad and he gave me zeros on tons of assignments and I failed the course.

Now I'm retaking it and it would have been so much easier if I'd just not cheated.

Don't believe it? See for yourself:

Brockenbrough, Martha. "Cheaterpants!" MSN Encarta. 2008. Microsoft. 30 March 2009. <http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/Features/Columns/Default.aspx?article=MarthaCheaters>.