Monday, October 12, 2009

Idiot Freshmen

Let me tell you a little story.

First off, a bit of background.  For those that don’t know, I just changed my major to Management Information Systems this semester, which means that I’m in a lot of intro classes again.  This means a plethora of freshmen everywhere.  Usually leads to good stories.

Anyway, for our Macro Economics class, we have a strange but effective testing procedure.  Since it’s a big classroom of 220 people, the professor will hand out a test to you as you walk in, and that test includes your seating assignment.  You are guaranteed to sit next to someone with a different copy of the test than you.  I should clarify that a bit more… we all have the same 20 questions, they are all in the same order, and all the questions have the same answer options.  However, the answers are in different orders, so copying off of someone’s bubble sheet won’t get you very far.

Anyway, I sat down in my seat (Center D8) on Friday to take my 4th Macro test.  I was well prepared, had studied more at work that morning, and was ready to go.  A cute, blonde freshmen girl sat down next to me.  I said hi, got her name (Jenna), and then started looking over the test to see which questions I could get out of the way.  As I went through the test, there were a small handful of questions that I was struggling with, and so I would go back and make/change an answer throughout the entire test time.

It was about 10 minutes into the test that I realized that right after I changed an answer, this Jenna girl would suddenly flip her booklet pages and circle and answer or change her existing answer.  I slipped a peak at one of these instances, and realized that she was changing the exact same question I had just done.

*GASP*  Cheater!

Not getting upset (I figured it could be random coincidence), I changed another answer.  And another.  Both to the same result.

Oh bitch, it’s on.

Now, I’ll admit… I’ve been in school for… what, 17 years?  I’ve cheated before.  I’d be willing to bet that most people have at one point or another.  But I have not cheated on a single test since I got into college… college is “THE BIG DEAL”, and I don’t want to do anything to mess up my chance at getting an education by getting caught cheating.

And believe me… these Macro tests?  They’re tough.  If someone didn’t study (or decided not to study), I could understand the desire to cheat.  But that’s something that you just don’t do.  No no no.  And ESPECIALLY off of me.  Because if I catch you, I will turn you in.  And if possible, I’ll mess with you before I turn it in.

For example…

So I realized Jenna was cheating off of me… and decided to have a little fun.  I took whatever answers I had, shifted either down or up 1 (depending on what letter it was), and circled that answer.  I did this with about 4 or 5 different answers, and watched with glee as she circled the same ones on her booklet and marked them down on her bubble sheet.  Meanwhile, I was marking the proper answers on my bubble sheet, which I kept well hidden.

After about 25 minutes, our professor collected the bubble sheets, and then we kept our booklets in front of us in order to grade and get instant feedback on how we did.  My result?  18/20.  Her result?  Something like a 14 or 15.  I could just see her look over at my booklet in disbelief (as I went through and changed my answers back to what they should be) as I marked mine correct and she got them wrong.  She seemed happy about her result afterward, though, which leads me to believe her getting a low score was a common occurrence for her.

Of course, this was the point that I told the professor what had happened.

I waited till everyone was gone (Doug was still hanging around, since he didn’t have class afterward), then went up and talked to the prof.  This is how the conversation started.

Me: “I caught someone cheating off of my test…”

Prof: “*sigh*”

Me: “…but I messed with her so she did bad on her test.”

Prof: “Nice job!” /high five

Quite possibly one of the funniest/most rewarding moments in my college career.  Extremely satisfying too.

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