<p>Hey everyone,</p>
<p>Could someone take a look at my extended essay and give me some feedback? Thanks a lot.</p>
<p>Essay Option 1. How did you get caught? (Or not caught, as the case may be.)
Inspired by Kelly Kennedy, a fourth-year in the College.</p>
<pre><code>The boy filled in the final blank on the social studies test on the American Revolution and placed his pencil back on the desk. He sighed. He had done it. Defied the odds. Beat the system. With a spring in his step, he grabbed his test and bounced to the teacher’s desk, placing it carefully in the Hand It In basket. And then…nothing happened. The sky did not fall. The devil did not rise from a crack in the floorboards. He felt no guilt, no remorse. He had done it.
The next day, the boy went back to his social studies class. The teacher was talking about the Industrial Revolution: cotton, the water frame, the Spinning Jenny. The boy scribbled some notes down in his notebook. He was good student, the boy was. Always did well in school; teachers said he had a natural talent for learning. Of course, yesterday, the boy had done something that smart kids don’t usually do. He had tried to rationalize it, naturally: he told himself that he would only use it if he really didn’t know the answer; he reasoned that most of the kids in the class would be doing the same thing. Deep down, he realized that none of those rationalizations really rang true, but he had to tell himself something. Suddenly, the teacher’s voice snapped him out of his daze. Yesterday’s test was being handed back, and the teacher was holding that single sheet of paper right in his face. He grabbed it and smiled. A perfect score. Naturally.
Immediately after the bell rang, the boy gathered his things and walked to the door. The teacher’s voice stopped him. She wanted to talk to him about something. The boy froze. It couldn’t be…or was it? Panicked thoughts ran through his head, but his exterior remained cool. He calmly walked to the teacher’s desk. The teacher beckoned him to sit. He obliged. She regarded him sternly for a moment, as if trying to size him up. The boy had never realized how narrow her eyes were. Barely breaking her stare, the teacher reached into one of her desk cabinets and pulled out a crumpled napkin with blue writing all over it. The boy could have sworn that his heart froze for a moment. He recognized that blue writing; it was his distinctive scrawl, and it was shaped into letters and words that described various facts about the American Revolution. He looked back up at the teacher. There were those eyes again, piercing him, willing him to confess his crime. She asked him if he recognized the handwriting. He lied. She bit her lip. She knew he was lying, but didn’t want to say it outright. She leaned back in her chair and asked the boy what he would if he was a teacher and he found this crumpled napkin cheat sheet in a desk. The boy mumbled something about sending the offending student to the principal’s office. Then the teacher leaned towards him, and asked the boy one last time: was this his cheat sheet? The boy weighed his options: should he confess and face the humiliation of a zero and endless reprimands from his parents? Or should he make one last, feeble attempt to lie his way out of this hole that he had dug for himself?
He chose the latter. He denied making a cheat sheet. He denied that the handwriting was his. He denied that his perfect score was anything but genuine. The teacher looked at him; those harsh, piercing eyes were gone, replaced by a look of sadness and disappointment. Alright, Sam, she told the boy, motioning for him to leave the classroom.
As the boy walked out of the room, feelings of shock and bewilderment surrounded him. He felt as if he had handed the system a decisive blow; he had cheated and successfully lied his way out of punishment, keeping his pristine perfect score intact. He couldn’t help but smirk; all those morality lessons his parents taught him were lies. He had cheated with no consequences.
The next day, the boy walked into class and took a seat. The class was having a circle discussion today. Now was the boy’s time to shine. He always did well in these. He had a natural way with words that never failed to impress his teacher. The class gathered, and started discussing. The teacher asked the class to describe the idea of a trade union. The boy raised his hand, offered an astute explanation, and readied himself for the teacher’s glowing praise and sparkling look of amazement. But it didn’t come. Instead, all she could offer was a passing acknowledgment. The boy’s face fell. Something was different. It was as if she didn’t regard him as highly anymore; she seemed disappointed, even.
And so it continued like this for the rest of the year. The boy never did regain that teacher’s respect. To her, he would always be that boy who cheated. It didn’t matter that he had only referenced that cheat sheet for one question, or that he had never cheated before. No, that single crumpled napkin had cost him a person’s trust, and he would never get that back. And it was this experience that made the boy realize: this was the consequence of cheating. All that goodwill, all that trust; it disappears, and people never look at you the same way again.
That boy was me, and I have never cheated again. More than any parental lecture, this experience taught me the value of honesty and integrity. Whenever even the slightest thought of cheating crosses my mind, I remember this moment. I remember the humiliation and shame that I felt, sitting in that 5th grade classroom, and knowing that my teacher would forever regard me as a cheater. That is a feeling that I truly never want to relive.
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