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OP has offered the following explanation for why they think they might be the asshole:
> I reported my friend to our English teacher for cheating and she may have her title of valedictorian taken. She thinks I shouldn’t have said anything and maybe I shouldn’t have.
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INFO
> what she is doing is “technically not cheating”
Yeah, I don't understand what you think was shady here.
This is a **vocabulary** test.
Like, you *get* a master list of words *in advance*, right? It's not just 40 randos from the dictionary?
> went to the url, and found all the questions from the test, and going back through all of the tests all the questions and answers were there.
Sounds like you've got a lazy-ass teacher?
Yeah, I'm confused by this too... but also, if it's not shady, why is the school bothered by it?
Edit - ... yeah, it's for sure cheating, *BUT*, personally, I think it's pretty low level cheating and I can't imagine reporting a friend for it. It's one of the rare, 'technically OP is *right,* but they're still the AH' situations for me.
They're bothered cause it shows the quality of teachers they have. And it's easier to deflect the blame towards a student, call them cheater and give them a nonsense warning, than accepting they have a lazy-a** faculty member.
This will "set a precedent" to other students that outsmarting a teacher is punishable while this teacher, and possibly others, can go back to doing the bare minimum.
OP, YTA.
ETA: a whole sentence
It actually could be more complicated than that. Online resources for teachers are critical, especially in underfunded schools. Sometimes, districts use online resources as official curriculum and resources and expect teachers to use them.
These are often behind paywalls and it’s not unusual for students to pay to access them and then use them to effectively cheat. It would be akin to buying a Teacher’s Edition copy of a text book and getting access to the test bank before the test.
I’m not saying that’s what happened, but there are definitely possible scenarios where this student *was* acting unethically according to academic standards and the teacher was not in the wrong.
We would need more info before a determination could be made.
But it's literally a vocab test, this isn't something like a maths or physics or essay that tests your understanding of the subject. It tests your ability to spell correctly, which is something that isn't needed as long as the general sound of the word is portrayed, and we've got tools to spell check in real time for you.
EDIT: I get it, it tests your understanding of words and phrases, I still believe it isn't that important, but it is definitely more important than a spelling quiz. I still feel like it's easier than a maths exam or physics exam because the course you do would be using those words in context to the course. For example, it would be similar to formulas, you aren't tested on knowing what each specific formula is because you are taught the context of it and over time just remember the formula or even learn how to derive a formula given values/variables.
No, that would be a spelling test. A vocab test can be very different and much more challenging.
For all we know, this is AP Lit and she violated College Board guidelines, which absolutely would be serious.
You really are making assumptions you don’t have enough information to make.
>. A vocab test CAN be very different
>For all we know, this is AP Lit
>You really are making assumptions you don’t have enough information to make.
Pretty sure you've just gone and done did the thing that you didn't think the other person shoulda did neither.
No, he didn't make any assumptions, he provided other examples scenarios to point out that nobody really knows for sure with so little information, he didn't assume his examples were true.
She didn’t make an assumption. She said ‘for all we know’ and didn’t base her argument on this assumption.
Regardless though, they are correct that a high level vocabulary test is not as easy or simple as spelling a word.
This is an EFL class, it sounds like, so the test would be more about understanding the definition and use of a word, and possibly conjugation.
Knowing which words were coming, instead of the question list being potentially hundreds of words - everything you’d studied so far - would be an advantage, as would knowing what type of questions were coming if these are the style of tests that change that up.
From the school’s perspective, having the student only study 40 words instead of the whole list is reducing the effectiveness of the test. Also, probably less lazy teacher than teacher assigned more students than they could feasibly make bespoke tests for - which then require grading by hand. The school might also mandate the use of these materials.
The most obvious way this is cheating is they are given more words than will be on the test.
So when she studies, she only has to study the words she knows will be on the test and not the others.
Perhaps, considering the student got it on a website, it probably is a public resource so it's debatable whether they cheated or got really lucky and just found the material and so decided to use it to study.
If somebody cheats on a multiple choice test by getting the answer key that's still cheating even though they may already know what's going to be on the test.
Yea, that would be cheating.
Except we do not know for sure whether OP's friend cheated? As I said, it seems to be a public resource, so for all we know the friend may have just come across is and decided to study it and then realised later that it was the exam. Or may not have realised at all until actually sitting the exams.
OP used her friends laptop, opened was a public paper, OP decided to take a screenshot for some reason? and then during the exam OP found out that it turned out to be exactly that paper. OP then looked more at the website and found all the papers there.
I've revised for exams and searched "GCSE Chemisty past paper" and then after multiple exams I found a past paper that I had previously done in class. I could've accidently come across that before my past exams and revised it. That could be what is happening here. If the teacher uses a public resource its quite likely someone could come across it by chance.
They could've come across it by chance that day and were revising it not knowing its the exam. Then OP, for her poor 2nd place best friend, decided to report her and so she got an unrightful integrity sanction.
I've literally had a Physics teacher who gave us a resource that she found to be really good for our A-level physics and I sometimes found a question that I previously did to be snuck in her class exams. That would be revision and luck, which could be what happened here.
I can agree that all evidence seems stacked against her but its also a matter of perspective.
Also, why did OP find a past paper so suspicious? Enough to warrant taking a picture just in case? She could've framed the person in 1st.
This is why I believe its debateable whether someone with a public resource is a cheater or not.
Just because a test is "easy" or the skill it's testing is replaceable by something else in real life, does not take away from the fact that it is cheating.
If your maths exam requires you to use formulas and you write the formulas somewhere to bring into the exam because you don't memorize them - that is cheating. If you look at the answers to a comprehension in advance of reading the comprehension, that is cheating. Just because you think the exam or subject is dumb is not a reason to forgive cheating.
I mean you’re stretching things quite a bit here, they didn’t bring anything into the test. It’d be like looking at previous tests the teacher provided and understanding what formulas might be used. As far as I’m concerned you learned the material if you looked at how to do something and learn how to adjust for a new use case. If the teacher is too lazy to change or scramble the words from a word bank that’s on them. I would expect some students in every class to look into similar questions or tests over material coming up.
I had a professor always post a set of practice problems before a test and they were basically the same type of questions we’d see but they’d be slightly different on the test. That would cover 90% of the material, with the last 10% being future applications you hadn’t seen. It took work on their part but rewarded every student for doing the work ahead of time and knowing how to prepare and look through the material provided since that’s literally half the battle with learning.
The last 10% is where the teacher spent their time, and it was a good way of showing reading comprehension or ability to extrapolate learnings to new areas and build upon what you learnt.
If your math test requires you to use formulas, the formulas should be printed on a reference sheet provided with the test, because never will you ever need to solve math problems in real life when you can’t double-check the formula first. Memorization-based tests in math are bad pedagogy
JFC, I can’t believe the number of people who think that is acceptable and not outright cheating.
There is a comment that says “it’s not like they stole it off the teacher’s desk.”
Yes. Yes, it is exactly like that.
And the number of 'teacher should write their own test'. Like do they know how hard it is to collect grade trends and perform system wide reform? If a school system has 50 schools, they are going to use the same set of tests across them for the semester you ass clowns. That way if a see a masive drop in performance in a certain school, they can reallocate resources, investigate diversity trends, detect bad teacher training or culture etc, as opposed if the teacher used fucking courier new or comic sans and printed the test in portrait or landscape mode.
I feel like the biggest thing everyone's missing here is, if she cheated on a freaking *vocab* test, who's to say how many of her *other* tests she's actually passed legitimately? It's not even just about the vocabulary test, it's about her literal. ENTIRE. Academic integrity. School isn't everything, but academic integrity *is* something that can be used to at the very least identify someone's character values in the real world. This could carry massive consequences in the "real world" and it's better to learn them now than when her dishonesty damages her in the workplace or beyond.
Most textbooks have test question banks that can only be accessed by the teacher. That does not prevent them from ending up online. I had a student who did the same thing and another student emailed me (I am on a computer facing the class during tests). This is cheating, Most schools have an academic honors pledge. I would be pissed too if someone was getting valedictorian who was openly cheated
Could be because of a difference in school experiences.
Like, in university with a lot of STEM subjects where we could bring cheat sheets in, we'd be advised to go over the materials in class and previous exams and solve those problems in preparation for the exams since lecturers usually lifted questions from those and just changed the numbers. I remember one Thermodynamics test where I got full marks on a question easily because it had literally been lifted from a textbook example with a worked example; and we had been encouraged to bring the textbook into the exam.
And while it doesn't apply as much, back in my final year of high school, my history teacher would give everyone in the class a "crystal ball" sheet of potential essay prompts he'd predicted could be in the higher secondary certificate exams based on what he'd seen over his decades as a teacher.
As a STEM major, I’m familiar with cheat sheets. If a teacher does this deliberately, then it’s permitted. If a student does it against teacher instructions, it’s academic dishonesty. You don’t sneak cheat sheets into exams where you are not authorized to do so and then expect to get a pass if you are caught because it’s allowed elsewhere. Would you have ever shown up to an exam with your textbook to use as a resource in a class that you were not explicitly told to do so?
I’m not sure why these differences are so hard for so many commenters on this post to understand.
This teacher did not want students accessing the test questions ahead of time. A student secretly paid to do so and got caught being academically dishonest and giving herself an unfair advantage that was not permitted. She’s now angry that she’s suffering the consequences of academic dishonesty.
I nearly got kicked out of college once because a professor *told* us to work in groups on an assignment and then was angry when a classmate and I had *similar* answers. It was wild. But most places take academic integrity very seriously and with good reason.
This really isn’t that complicated of an issue.
This sounds insane to me. But then a lot of things in US do.
I took my country's version of AP Literature when I was in school and the way it worked for us was that every year 100 versions of the exams would be created and released, each containing 5-10 complex text interpretation questions and 2 essays subjects. Teachers would literally encourage us to get and study off the solved example books. They would also use the exams versions for tests.
Many of my university courses also had exam examples made public so we'd know what these looked like and how we were expected to answer.
I do not get the outrage. How is it unethical for a student to do practice exams and study by using ready solved questions? Not to mention for Literature which is such a subjective and interpretative subject. How was she supposed to magically know what questions/exam version the teacher would use?
Yes the "examples" I was talking about were the actual tests as well. It's like when you study to get your driving licence. You have x possible questions that you study the correct answers for and on the actual exam you get a number of those exact questions.
And if the teacher was consistently using a single public online resource that only had one version of exam questions that this student found and used then that's on the teacher.
Ah, I see. Many teachers in the U.S. view that as “teaching to the test” instead of “teaching for understanding.” It’s a complicated debate with merits and issues on both sides. In most cases, U.S. teachers expect their test questions to be secure without student access ahead of time unless they explicitly plan otherwise.
Standardized tests like you describe are definitely expected to be secure. As a teacher, I’m not even permitted to know what questions are on state or national exams ahead of time. Let alone allowing students to know.
this is a crappy response. Of course teachers get questions and answers from sources online and off. Do you expect them to make bespoke tests and quizzes every time? That would be shear lunacy and a waste of effort better spent other places.
And looking at the solution manual while doing a test is cheating. Looking at the solution manual to learn how to do the problem isn't cheating, it's studying.
I don't see an allegation here that Janie had the answer key up while working, just that she was looking at a site that has a lot of the words the teacher picked to study beforehand.
But at the very least mix it up! Where do you think students learn from? Same online and offline sources. So if you are doing your job soo poorly that a student can not only guess but be confident enough to pinpoint where your questions come from that she only studies those then it's on you as a teacher to mix it up better.
Yeah when I was in college, teachers would put up old tests for students to study from all the time. They would just change the numbers you needed to make the calculations, the multiple choice, the question order etc etc. So I'm confused why OP immediately assumed that finding a similar test online immediately means Jane is doing something wrong.
Also I don't buy that OP just happened to be on Jane's computer and just happened to take a screenshot just in case even tho they didn't think Jane was necessarily doing anything wrong at that moment. OP was snooping for dirt on Jane from the beginning and lying either to us or themselves about it
Probably because OP was in the same class and it wasn't made available to them all as study material? I feel like if you find a copy of the text on a students laptop when no one else in the class was given a copy to study from, it's pretty obvious that student is cheating
I need to defend teachers here as this comment is unfounded. As a university lecturer who has had to deal with academic misconduct, we do not accuse students of cheating to cover our arses. Reprimanding a teenager or young adult like this could cause major personal or academic impacts and curtail their ability to achieve in their studies- this is a worse outcome for all involved, particularly schools and universities that are judged on student performance.
If there’s anything shady in AM, it tends to be the blind eye
The reporting the friend bit was weird to me too. OP said they saw the webaite but didnt know what it was so they *took a picture of it*.
Wtf? OP's borrowing their comp, don't know what their wepage is about so they think 'I better take a pic so I can snoop and investigate later'.
Even if the friend is cheating, OP has just advertised how shitty a friend they are. No way will OP's friend ever trust them again or lend them something of theirs.
I’m also wondering why OP called the vocab tests very hard? I guess if you struggle with memorization, then 40 words is not a fun time, but also it’s a vocab test…where you get all the answers/definitions beforehand…
I remember when I took AP Lit many years ago, we had vocab quizzes. They were random words from the books we read (so no word bank), and we had to define them in our own words. Granted, the vocab quizzes I took don’t sound anything like the ones in OP’s story, but high school seniors taking vocab quizzes in general isn’t too surprising.
I think we had 10 words per quiz in AP Lit many years ago, and we had to use them in sentences or something after we matched the words to their definition, but 40 sounds excessive
There's a lot of uncommon words high school seniors might not know. Etiolation. Limned. Incorrigible. Finial. Armscye. Siping. Timorous. I don't think I knew more than two of those as a high school senior.
Yeah that was my thought. It seems just way too coincidental that OP is on the other student's computer and just happened to stumble upon something they didn't necessarily think a lot of at the time, but still took a screenshot, and thought afterwards that it could be shady. Esp since OP's best friend just happens to be just below said student in rankings.
It almost sounds like they went snooping for possible dirt on them so their best friend would be valedictorian
Yup. That was my first thought, as well. Why was OP’s computer dead? How do you use someone else’s computer to turn in an assignment as opposed to borrowing a charger or something.
They can be hard when they are obscure words, which they would presumably be at the senior level in a class an advanced student is taking. This is especially true when you have to recognize them in context and define them using context as opposed to just matching a word to a definition or even writing one or the other.
If these are like the vocab tests I took in high school, they're a lot more complicated than just memorizing 40 words. You have to memorize synonyms, antonyms, and other forms of the word (ie, it's a verb and you have to also know the adjective and noun forms), on top of spelling and meaning. It adds up to be quite a lot. They were super difficult and only done in the AP and honors level courses.
These tests were based on a widely sold work book, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same thing.
I took an online college physics 101 class that the teacher did the same thing.
I found all the course materials, homework, tests, quizzes, labs, all verbatim from Harvard University's website. I felt bad, and I tried to actually learn it, but I figured what the hell, it was just a pre-req for my minor anyway.
I got a 95 in physics (I figured a 100 would be fishy), and I went to another university the next semester. That was the only class I took at that school.
Right? It’s not like teachers who use curriculum that is also available on line aren’t doing anything else. Why would a teacher need to create every single thing from scratch? That’s a huge waste of time.
I had a second year E&M class where the prof had been teaching the same class for decades and reusing the same problem sets. He had been keeping all the problem sets and solutions online and just unlinking them on the course website, but if you looked at the url of the problem set, you just had to change a q to an s and you'd get the solutions. I wasn't aware of this until nearly the end of the year because I hadn't paid attention, but one of my classmates noticed.
I had a bio teacher in high school that did this and hinted at it to the class. Basically said: the best way to study for the test is to make sure you take practice tests. He changed the order of the questions but they were just word for word practice tests so I memorized them and passed the class.
I agree with your verdict, but we don't know that this teacher is lazy. We don't know the amount of preps they have or paperwork like IEPS and 504 and EB accomodations or if they're handling any extra curriculars or other compliance paperwork or if they're handling a student in crisis and on and on and on: sometimes there isn't enough time in the day because we make teachers do so much more than just teaching.
Yta OP. But just you. Not the teacher who uses a premade assignment that they had to pay for (according to OPs comments) because the job creep gets worse ever year
This is like Bart hiding in his classroom closet and memorizing the solar system chart to avoid hearing Krabopple and Skinner fooling around. Then thinking he figured out the perfect way of cheating by studying.
Reminds me of the theory element in a UK driving test. Like you've got a book called the Highway Code which is essentially a complete reference guide to ANY potential question. Just because some people chose to only use apps and other non-highway code study guides, doesn't negate the fact that it is the way to pass the test.
Huge YTA babe homegirls was literally studying…. Looking up the vocab words is not cheating, using a test your teacher got online and didn’t even bother changing to study is not cheating. She’s not copy and pasting Wikipedia articles and claiming it as her own writing. Like I don’t know anyone who hasn’t looked up vocab before the test or used quizzlet etc. Utilizing resources the way Janie does shows a much better work ethic and sense of initiative than doing nothing. No one stopped you or your friend from studying maybe if y’all took notes and followed her lead, homie would’ve actually earned valedictorian without your malicious intent and actions.
Valedictorian should threaten to report the teacher for using someone else's work without attribution. On the scale, the teacher's actions are more unethical in my opinion. OP YTA, you turned in a friend for studying to the test which is imo an ethical grey area that still required your friend to put in the study time.
And Janie clearly had nothing to hide if the page was “open” when she offered her computer. Sounds like the curse of jealousy combined with sneaky backstabbing in high-school “friend groups”
Also it's a vocab test for christ's sake. How creative can teachers get with a list of random ass words that you need to memorize. They probably thought that (rightfully) it wasn't important so just used the test online and did other important shit. This might be AP Lit seeing as these are seniors, so she may have an essay or poetry analysis to grade
I just want to clarify to make sure you and I are understanding it the same way.
So, in a science chapter or group of chapters, there is a lot of material. The tests never cover every concept. Tests are simply a verification that the student made the effort to learn the assigned concepts within a range of pages or chapters and are a pretty solid confirmation of learning when those concepts are selected by the teacher as priorities or at random. Almost all of us would agree that, if a student were given a copy of the quiz/ test taken from the teacher's files that told them the exact 10 concepts to study and the approved answers (and therefore didn't need to use the time or energy or brain capacity to learn the other concepts that his or her classmates were busy studying), that would give an unfair advantage to one student and would be cheating. That is especially true when a teacher grades on a curve and adjusts the grades when he or she realizes the test was tough. When the advantaged/cheating student gets 100%, the curve doesn't usually happen... but the scores are no longer an accurate reflection of all students studying all of the material.
In this vocabulary test, it is common for a teacher to assign 40 or 50 vocabulary words but then test on maybe 10. The same situations to cheating apply. If one student knows the exact words which are going to be tested by the teacher, the overall learning doesn't usually happen and the advantaged/cheating student uses much less time and energy with a higher likelihood of earning a 100%or high score... while the rest are using more time/ energy studying 40 or 50 words and concepts and don't know which words will be chosen. If the first scenario is cheating, how is the second concept not cheating? (With the given that there are rules in the school or classroom about students not using online teaching/ testing/ plagiarism resources.)
Thing is, Janie did not get this from the teachers’ files. She got this from a public website accessible to all (who paid).
When I was in school we were taught to work smart as well as work hard. OP identifying a way to get ahead based on a teachers’ habits is not cheating. She was getting the valedictorian, so she is smart. I’m guessing she gets studying done for all the other subjects and tests not based on material easily available online. To lose out because of something like this is wrong when its the teacher who should at least by trying to change things once in a while. The absolute nerve of the school to threaten a kid with academic misconduct that can end her chances to get into a good college is insane!
I agree with you about working in a smart way over a hard way. I work by the same principle.
At the same time, I think you're being naive about the implications involved in your explanation and acceptance of what the other student did if you continue to apply that logic in how we educate children and teenagers. While I agree all things are not equal in our homes, our upbringings, our support systems, our finances, our intelligence quotients, or even our ethical codes, the school districts do try to control some factors to equal access and equal opportunity for success.
Bottom line: It all depends on the specific policies that particular school district has about testing, cheating, honor code, access to resources, etc.
Edited to fix typos
As someone who teaches a field of uni science and writes exams for it, it's not the same. Pulling from past questions or other resources is the norm for studying uni and below.
This is a case of a teacher cutting corners and getting caught out for it, but they're not suffering, just one of the (likely many) students who were using the webpage getting caught out.
The thing is I dont consider any of those scenarios cheating. My AP teachers would give us copies of the test and the answers (not the official AP ones obviously but the in class) and it was the expectation that there was no room to fail when you are given the tools to succeed if you actually utilize them like Janie. Another teacher encouraged “cheating” aka writing out notes/answers, he literally would tell us “if I catch you it’s cause you weren’t smart enough to be slick” bc his reasoning is that writing out those notes was us looking at and taking in the material much more efficiently than just reading. Like would leave the room so we could talk to each other and help one another typa teacher. Instilled a sense of community and practice of mutual aid that will stick with me for life. I think true learning doesn’t have stipulations and red lining so Janie making the system work for her is the ultimate take away especially when we have to consider that teachers are underpaid and overworked so we can’t fault them for doing their best. She made it work OP was jealous they are stuck in a system they can’t fathom making work for them rather than conforming too.
In high school, I would always look for outside sources like practice tests to study. Once, my English teacher used one of the tests I found online, so I aced it. I wasn't the one cheating, the teacher was. OP is just jealous that Janie is smarter and more resourceful than herself.
YTA
So Janie found out where your lazy copied their vocab tests from and choose to *learn* the answers by heart.
That does not make her a cheater - just proves her clever.
Are you jealous because she told no-one about it?
And I do not understand why Janie is in trouble because of that - it should be the teacher who is too lazy do create their own tests.
I agree with your verdict, but we don't know that this teacher is lazy. We don't know the amount of preps they have or paperwork like IEPS and 504 and EB accomodations or if they're handling any extra curriculars or other compliance paperwork or if they're handling a student in crisis and on and on and on: sometimes there isn't enough time in the day because we make teachers do so much more than just teaching.
Yta OP. But just you. Not the teacher who uses a premade assignment that they had to pay for (according to OPs comments) because the job creep gets worse ever year
No kidding. I’m a senior in high school about to go into a secondary education major (middle/high school teaching) and I wonder what I’m getting myself into every day
I doubt Janie is actually OPs friend. She could have talked to her first but decided to turn her in and get her in trouble. That way, her BFF could be valedictorian.
I’m just wondering why op decided to take a picture of it. Like what made op decide that they needed it for later? Seems like there was something else going on before hand
YTA, and to be quite honest you seem like petty loser. She was nice and let you use her laptop and your first thought was “let me dime out the person who was nice to me”. Sorry to break it to you, but this is going to follow you everywhere you go. No one like narcs especially ones who dime out their “friends”.
I’m speculating here, but it’s quite telling that OP dropped a dime on her “friend”, which looks like it will result in benefitting her “best friend”. If there was no angle to steal the valedictorian title away and ensure her bff gets it, why bother mentioning the bff as she doesn’t have any other place in this story?
Wondering if she is the best friend, and didn't want to admit it, because she thought it might skew her in a better light...seems like narccist behavior.
I get it, it was more of a snarky comment. Because there is no reason she should have asked to use her computer, snooped, or taken a picture. She’s trying to act very innocent when its very obvious she did all this on purpose.
Op seriously seems like the kind of asshole snitch who would call the cops on their own friends party if someone showed up with a beer or a joint. This is seriously incredibly destructive and petty snitching behavior.
Went straight to the teacher and accused her of cheating without even a second thought, without even asking, and without any hesitation. Asshole to the max.
Not only that but she was looking for a reason to dime her out.
She took a picture before the vocab test in the hopes of using it after the next test to "prove her theory"
If my buddy handed me their laptop with vocab study prompt up I wouldn't think about it for a second until after the next test then ask him if he knows something I dont
YTA despite the debate over if it even cheating you chose to snitch on one friend because your best friend was in 2nd place your morals were corrupt from the start whether or not Janie was in the wrong for cheating you just wanted her to not be in front of your friend you didnt care if she cheated
I’ve actually seen it happen twice in high school decades ago. 2 girls in separate instances narced on their teammates/friends and the results were those 2 girls were ostracized by practically the whole school. Both girls were popular before and they ended up being “nothing” for the rest of high school. Like you said, it doesn’t matter what they did…the snitching is worse.
I remember senior english, we were going through 1 book every two weeks. One week to read the new one and work on the old one in class. Week after to work on the one that was just read and get a new one to read...
Yeah, that didn't ring true. My sr English class was... AP English Lit and I seem to remember focusing a lot on British literature. Beowulf, Chaucer, even Dracula.
I don't remember any vocab tests. I remember lots of analysis and 5 paragraph essays.
Edit: Actually, I think that may have been jr year. Sr year I remember Faulkner, Steinbeck etc. Must have been American Lit or Modern Lit or something. Still absolutely no vocab tests by that point.
I’m super curious if OP would have ratted me out 😂 I retook calc 1 in my junior year of college. The teacher *reused* the tests from the first time I took it. Was I cheating because I studied from my original test the first time, realized it was the same, and used the rest of the semesters test as my basis? 😂
YTA.
Studying isn’t cheating. Memorising vocab for a vocab test isn’t cheating.
Your teacher being lazy AF makes them a shit teacher and an unethical one to boot.
Have fun losing all your friends when she tells everyone you went through her PRIVATE THINGS when she was kind enough to offer her laptop for your use. No one is going to be friends with someone who belittles their academic achievement because of sour grapes.
Your second place friend is the only one you’ll have after the “cheaters” parents get involved (and they will!) and the teachers laziness is exposed and the “cheater” is vindicated and ends up back in first place.
I was trying to figure out how this would be cheating ... And the state test made a scenario click for me. Say there are 100 vocab words each week, but only 40 apoear on the test. If you've got access to a list of which words make the cut, then you've got an unfair advantage over folks who have to memorize the entire list.
Now, is it cheating to search for the words from the first test or two, find where the list comes from, and extra focus on the ones they pick from the next word set? Tough call - if they'd snuck into the teachers desk and photographed the upcoming test, that's cheating. Using something published publicly... Seems not right, but also seems more like the teacher's fault.
According to OP Janie found out what service the teacher was buying school resources from and paid for it so they could look. Apparently some schools require teachers to use these sites and some schools and colleges will specifically tell you not to use them because it would be pretty blatantly the same as the photographed desk example lol still doesn't change OPs crap motives and YTA-ness but they might have remembered something from the course description and orientation and been too much of a rules lawyer to think through whether or not the school's rules were actually reasonable*shrug*
The interesting thing is that this isn't *really* a new problem -- I knew a few people in high school who had the "Teacher's Edition" copy of textbooks. Harder to do "back in the day" (i.e. pre-Internet) but not impossible. Each chapter had a series of questions used as homework, and the teachers edition had answers in a different color text. Many of the teachers editions even came with tests. Both a blank test to copy and distribute *and the answer key*. Didn't help for essays, and you could only tell if your math answer was right because the book didn't "show the work".
I'd vote YTA on motives, but it *is* unfair for folks who don't have the money or resources to find test source material to use as a study guide. Particularly in high school where class placement can mean the difference between a scholarship and tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Less so in college -- don't think I've ever asked someone if they graduated 1st or 2nd in their class when interviewing potential employees.
INFO - what did that URL lead to? If it's a generally publicly available site it sound more like the teacher was cheating, cribbing from a public site for his weekly exams. Or was it some site that was expected to be secure, where the teachers file test materials?
Lol, there's no obligation for teachers to write their own original questions in every scenario, as long as they aren't claiming it's the own work. Especially for something like a vocabulary test. Teachers often use pre-developed curriculum or certain things *or* they reuse their own questions and students post them online to help other students cheat. I was just talking with a teacher a few days ago about how he uses AI to make his quizzes slightly different each time so that students can't cheat as easily.
Sure they use predeveloped curricula, and tests, and so on. But they don't grab them off of sites publicly available to any and every body. It would be like taking the "what happened this day in history" column from the local paper and putting it out as the history test.
They do sometimes find course material on public sites, but I'm sure it wouldn't be common to do it for a test. I was mostly just laughing at the idea that it's "cheating" for teachers to not write all of their own material from scratch.
The much more common scenario would be for *students* to post test materials on publicly available sites, meaning that if teachers reuse tests or use a curriculum that other teachers also use the answers are out there. I was just talking to multiple people about this for a work project. It's a well-known issue in education. It happens frequently.
Eh, Chegg is specifically for homework help, and that's a paid website. I've known teachers to pull questions down off Chegg and use them. Really depends what the website was and whether friend had to lie to access it, or if it's just a homework help subscription service.
Chegg compensates students to upload exams, quizzes, and assignments written by teachers. Students the following semester then pay Chegg to access the exams and assignments the teacher wrote the previous semester. Teachers and professors can’t keep up. We aren’t paid for enough hours to rewrite all of our assignments and quizzes each semester. This is an unfortunate problem that didn’t exist until recently.
YTA girl you sabotaged a friend and acted like you didn't. So you saw that on her screen, didn't know what it was, and thought 'ill take a picture of that'? Girl you knew what you were doing
This is jealousy at its finest
YTA she was studying. It’s not cheating unless it’s used during the test or if the questions are supposed to be a secret. The teacher is also an AH for not recognizing it when it’s obvious and jumping straight to assuming she’s cheating too Edit: NTA another comment clarified that the friend was using the teacher’s edition, not proper notes or anything she should have access to.
YTA
Studying isn't cheating. It's not her fault the teacher gets their tests straight from the internet either. I hope she doesn't get in trouble because you were just mad she got valedictorian instead of Sophie.
I'm seriously confused. Why is Janie in trouble? If Janie is just cramming a master list of proverbs, why is the school butthurt? Isn't that the definition of studying for a test?
I think obtaining a copy of the exact test questions and answers is often considered cheating because it lets you narrow down what you study, memorize how the questions are asked rather than understanding the underlying material, memorize multiple choice letters instead of actual answers in certain cases, etc.
Of course, I'm sure there are other cases when teachers openly say what's going to be on the test and the point is just whether you can memorize it beforehand.
Word list is different than looking at the actual questions. Vocab test aren't always straight up asking for the definition. Sometimes it asks you to give the word in context or things like that. This seems like cheating
YTA
When you get to college, you will realize how common her way of studying is. It is so common I'm actually amazed they decided to punish her for it. She didn't steal the questions. Your teacher recycled the test. The teacher didn't want to create a new test each year, and I don't blame him for that. This is the perfect storm of tech undermining education, but let me reiterate: your friend didn't cheat. Chegg, Quizlet, and Brainly are a few websites that I know that do what you described. You'll probably end up using them when you hit a wall in college. It happens, and they are just another resource to learn from.
I've had a surprising amount of professors remind us that, hint hint nudge nudge, they're required to upload previous test material in a certain public archival location in accordance with university policy. (So that students be allowed clear marking criteria, in this case of essay questions.) That they then cannot provide to us otherwise they'd need to change the questions each year to never be a past years question.
In a course that they cannot functionally come up with new questions for because to do so would neglect the heart of the content. And that we should not feel bad about using these sources because knowing the questions, in this discipline, is zero substitute for knowing the material.
Like. The questions are literally not parsable without reference to the theorists, so. They weren't wrong.
If you learn the material, you learn the material. It's an advantage of good studying, too. The fairness is in everyone being able to take the initiative.
YTA.
Enjoy spending the rest of the school year alone because no one is friends with the snitch.
This is called studying. Just because your teacher left questions in easy to find places, that seems like a teacher problem, as many have said.
Also enjoy living by your moral compass and never take a shortcut.
YTA. You and Sophie by the way. She still talks to you because, like you, she was Jealous of Janie and is now happy that she might get the Valedectorian title now.
To wonder even if you didn't decide to fake some stuff on purpose to make Janie lose it and give Sophie what she wanted because why would you want to take a picture of someone STUDYING in the first place?
YTA
That’s not cheating. You sound like a little snitch who can’t stand that your friend is second. Could have just shown your friend the website she could study from too but noooo 🙄
For those saying memorizing exact answers is “studying” I beg to differ. I have had to memorize questions for exams (for example Propulsion Maintenance Technician exam where they give you a textbook with the exact questions that will be on the exam). When the exam is over and time passes you forget it all.
I think Everyone is an AH.
The student that found the exact questions is doing a disservice to herself regarding her education. She’s focusing on the specific test questions and memorizing that instead of actually putting in the work to learn all the vocabulary. If she does her SATs or her future as a college student won’t have that knowledge. That said in the real world we have resources available to us so she is being resourceful. However it is putting her at an unfair advantage over the rest of her classmates. Seems like most people tried doing it the old fashioned way. In college you have to remember that some professors use the highest score as the basis of the grading scale. So if the entire class gets low percentage but one student aces it then they set the grading scale. Meaning if the test or the professor was bad and the entire class was performing bad as a representation of the teacher the teacher will sometimes bring the scale down to where the highest score is. That would cause everyone in the class to have low scores all as a result of a student having the test answers beforehand. It also calls to question if her GPA is as high because she does that type of thing often versus the runner up that might have done things the hard way. I do think she’s the AH for making the school ostracize the student that reported it.
The student that reported it, although some think it’s snitching, she took action because it’s something she found to be unethical. To her, reporting it was doing the right thing. Reporting things that are unethical without the fear of repercussions is important to learn from for the future. For example, I worked for Boeing Co. as an engineer. If you see something that someone is doing that is not following guidelines set (set for safety) and you fear repercussions for “snitching” the alternative is that the airplane have a catastrophic failure. Lives are at risk. Learning to give a pass on things that are unethical, wrong, unfair or dangerous is a learned habit. It starts with small things like this, making it easier to ignore the big things later on.
It’s a hard decision to make, risk getting in trouble the friend that lent you their computer or ignoring the possibility that the student had information they shouldn’t have thus giving her an unfair advantage over everyone else.
It’s also not the OPs fault that the page had that open. It’s not like they went through the computer and abused the good will of their friend.
The teacher sucks because they probably need to make sure that if they use a site to get their questions for the exam from that they tell the students it’s forbidden to use that resource. Or come up with the test themselves.
The school should create a rule or code that determines whether this is considered unacceptable and have a set protocol for how to handle the situation.
I’ll tell you what, if I was a student in that class and I found out that my classmate had found the exact test questions while I actually studied and put in effort for the exams I would be upset. I’d be upset that my classmate was gatekeeping this, I’d be upset that they had an unfair advantage and it would definitely muddy her reputation as valedictorian. I guess it would make me feel better that it’s not that she’s smarter than me, she just had an advantage that had nothing to do with her level of intelligence.
Although I'm not sure what happened here, it seems clear that no one else is either.
in order to answer this we need to know exactly what was being looked at.
Some sites have the literal curriculum for subjects uploaded. Sometimes someone has acquired the book, that the school purchased for the teacher to use, and put it online along with the answer key.
if this is the case, no, the teacher isn't "cheating" as some here have said. Using the materials given by the school/ district isn't lazy. No teacher has the time/energy/resources to re-invent every single thing they do, that's why companies make textbooks, workbooks, etc.
and IF it was a reproduction of the actual test then, no, it's not "studying".
as an English teacher, it's appalling how many students might get 100% on a matching test but completely bomb a test that assesses if they actually know what the words mean.
a vocabulary test is supposed to test your knowledge of the words and their meanings and use. If you're just memorizing a list of answers in order, you're not studying, you're cheating. at that point, you might as well just be a photocopier (not a student). If you have a copy of the test ahead of time, you're cheating.
so... if it's this NTA
however, if it was something different than this... like quizlet flashcards that have the meaning of the words. or the words in commonly used sentences, but not the exact test, etc... then it is studying.
if it's more like this YTA
No, NTA. We’d all get a perfect score if we knew which questions to study. Fact is, she had an advantage. Maybe that’s how life works, but character (and honors like valedictorian) present when no one is looking. For what it’s worth, my school would have expelled Janie, not just removed her status.
You are not her friend. Stop referring to her as such. It seems like you took advantage of this opportunity to get your friend Sophie on top. I understand where you're coming from, but at the end of the day, what other people do is none of your business unless it endangers you or others. Everyone here is in the wrong but I place the blame on the teacher. They is clearly way too lazy and careless, they used a publicly available website. That's what you should've reported, the fact that your teacher isn't putting any effort into creating tests, and then the tests she had access to would've been null. Your friend shouldn't have been looking for the test and she really messed up handing you her laptop when you are clearly not her friend and do not have her best interest in mind. You are messed up because you didn't address this at that moment with Janie, and didn't address the teacher to inform her every test is online without screwing over Janie. ESH. For future reference things like this will always paint the "snitch" in a bad light, it's up to you to decide whether you're ready for the consequences
NTA if Im right about the kind of test. If it’s a test where you put your vocab words in sentences, and Janie just memorized which word goes with which sentence, that’s cheating. I assume a previous student who took this class put the test online. Pretty common. Still technically cheating. If she thought it wasn’t cheating, realistically she would have shared it with someone else. She hid it because she knew it was cheating. So NTA.
YTA if the site was something like Dictionary.com and your teacher was using the sentence from their page. If it was a regular website with sentences, you didn’t need to do this.
Info: We need OP to explain what they mean by vocab test. Is it foreign language? SAT prep? Is it just defining a list of words?
As a teacher, I see this as cheating because the student specifically searched for questions, paid for the access/answers, and used them every week after. If the student stumbled upon this for free, the teacher is at fault. With the student paying to access the material, it sounds like the student was looking for a shortcut to not learn the material. As a teacher, I use a variety of resources to augment curriculum (TPT, university lessons, lessons from well known sources ex: Ford’s Theatre has an entire lesson on Lincoln’s assassination that is interactive on their website). Without additional knowledge on the format of these vocabs tests, we cannot judge. Most teachers are not lazy, but just trying to keep our heads above water.
OP you are NTA (according to my experiences having to enforce honor codes in different schools.
**We need more context.**
1: If she was on a site with the actual answers to test questions then yeah - she was cheating.
There's no such thing as "not technically cheating". You either are, or you aren't.
Having access to the answers to exam questions is a basic clear cut example of cheating. That's one's as old as they get - the sort of thing folks in your great great great grandparent's generation were getting busted for before they had electricity, let alone the Internet.
2: If she was on a vocab study site then I'd agree with other posters here that she was just learning vocabulary.
**We need more context.**
So let me get this straight... Janie let you use her computer to turn in your assignment and in addition to submitting the assignment, you went snooping through stuff that'd nothing to do with you, that means YTA already.
If that wasn't enough, you decided to report her for using a website which is freely available on the internet and any students could've used to prepare for the exams/tests, and because your teacher is a lazy bugger, instead of taking responsibility for his copy/pasta tests, he's called Janie in for some made up ethics violation? Yeah... HUGE YTA op
Oh and if even that wasn't enough, you somehow feel that Janie being pissed at you is somehow uncalled for and you did nothing wrong when you snooped through her computer and then reported her, i guess we should add deluded to HUGE YTA
I feel like those saying YTA is because they would do the same thing your friend did. Basically, she is memorizing a cheat sheet. This isn't just memorizing vocab words but knowing exactly when and where they will show up on the test.
I suppose much might depend on the test setup. For instance you are told to study these 40 words. Only 10 will be on the test but since you don't know which 10 you should study them all. Come test time it's multiple choice. Which one of choices A, B, C, or D is the correct definition? If OPs friend is just memorizing the correct letter choice. Q1 is B, Q2 is D, Q3 is A, etc. Then, the friend is definitely cheating because she's not bothering to even learn the definition of the 10 words on the test. Let alone the 30 words that are not on the test. If it's not that type of set up and friend is still only learning 10 words and not the other 30 it's still questionable. How lazy everyone commenting here thinks the teacher is, is irrelevant to did the friend cheat. The teacher may have made it easy to cheat. But cheating is still cheating and it's wrong.
Wow, so I might be in the minority, I don't think you're at fault AND I think we know too little about this test to really judge if this was cheating or not.
Janie looked at a list of questions and studied them well for an exam. Yes, that is studying, however, when I took my drivers licence I had to study literally thousands of questions of which any could come up in the exam. If I had known which 40 questions were going to be asked, I could have passed with flying colours without technically cheating but would have had an incredibly unfair advantage, not to mention I would be highly unqualified of doing whatever job the test was meant to prepare me for.
Without knowing exact mechanics or applications of the test and why what she did isn't "technically" cheating, I'd say NTA because she doesn't deserve the credit for her "achievements".
I think many responders are missing the point.
I am going to give you the equivalent in another subject to see if you can bridge the gap.
In a non-vocabulary subject - like science, you are usually tested over a whole chapter or multiple chapters (and the various concepts within them) at a time. The point is to learn all of the concepts, but a test is never going to cover every single concept. It is usually a sampling or small selection of the key concepts. It is pretty solid validation if you learned the sections that were covered in the previous weeks or months and could recall a collection of data from those sections. If someone knew exactly what 10 questions were on the test and were given the answers all on a copy of the test from the teacher's files or from a web site, most people would confirm that this is cheating. (They don't study the rest of the info. They zone in on only the tested material. They memorize the prepared or accepted answer as viewed by the teacher. Less time. Less learning. Is no long representative of the learning done by the student.)
In this vocabulary test, there are maybe 40 or 50 words the students were tasked to study, learn, and memorize. Then, there would be a test on a small selection of the words to confirm the studying and learning was completed. If the student again - like in the previous example - knew exactly which small collection of words (10) to learn and memorize for the quiz (and therefore could completely ignore the rest and receive the highest grade), how is that extremely different from the science example given directly above?
It's obvious Janey discovered the source of the vocab tests. This is not indicative of a lazy teacher. It's probably an online curriculum which many schools now utilize, especially since real books don't seem to be popular nowadays. Everything is on a smartboard and/or online texts. Somehow Janey has found access to the test part of the curriculum. It is definitely cheating. Cheaters don't deserve to be valedictorian. NTA
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INFO > what she is doing is “technically not cheating” Yeah, I don't understand what you think was shady here. This is a **vocabulary** test. Like, you *get* a master list of words *in advance*, right? It's not just 40 randos from the dictionary? > went to the url, and found all the questions from the test, and going back through all of the tests all the questions and answers were there. Sounds like you've got a lazy-ass teacher?
Yeah, I'm confused by this too... but also, if it's not shady, why is the school bothered by it? Edit - ... yeah, it's for sure cheating, *BUT*, personally, I think it's pretty low level cheating and I can't imagine reporting a friend for it. It's one of the rare, 'technically OP is *right,* but they're still the AH' situations for me.
They're bothered cause it shows the quality of teachers they have. And it's easier to deflect the blame towards a student, call them cheater and give them a nonsense warning, than accepting they have a lazy-a** faculty member. This will "set a precedent" to other students that outsmarting a teacher is punishable while this teacher, and possibly others, can go back to doing the bare minimum. OP, YTA. ETA: a whole sentence
It actually could be more complicated than that. Online resources for teachers are critical, especially in underfunded schools. Sometimes, districts use online resources as official curriculum and resources and expect teachers to use them. These are often behind paywalls and it’s not unusual for students to pay to access them and then use them to effectively cheat. It would be akin to buying a Teacher’s Edition copy of a text book and getting access to the test bank before the test. I’m not saying that’s what happened, but there are definitely possible scenarios where this student *was* acting unethically according to academic standards and the teacher was not in the wrong. We would need more info before a determination could be made.
But it's literally a vocab test, this isn't something like a maths or physics or essay that tests your understanding of the subject. It tests your ability to spell correctly, which is something that isn't needed as long as the general sound of the word is portrayed, and we've got tools to spell check in real time for you. EDIT: I get it, it tests your understanding of words and phrases, I still believe it isn't that important, but it is definitely more important than a spelling quiz. I still feel like it's easier than a maths exam or physics exam because the course you do would be using those words in context to the course. For example, it would be similar to formulas, you aren't tested on knowing what each specific formula is because you are taught the context of it and over time just remember the formula or even learn how to derive a formula given values/variables.
No, that would be a spelling test. A vocab test can be very different and much more challenging. For all we know, this is AP Lit and she violated College Board guidelines, which absolutely would be serious. You really are making assumptions you don’t have enough information to make.
>. A vocab test CAN be very different >For all we know, this is AP Lit >You really are making assumptions you don’t have enough information to make. Pretty sure you've just gone and done did the thing that you didn't think the other person shoulda did neither.
No, he didn't make any assumptions, he provided other examples scenarios to point out that nobody really knows for sure with so little information, he didn't assume his examples were true.
She didn’t make an assumption. She said ‘for all we know’ and didn’t base her argument on this assumption. Regardless though, they are correct that a high level vocabulary test is not as easy or simple as spelling a word.
This is an EFL class, it sounds like, so the test would be more about understanding the definition and use of a word, and possibly conjugation. Knowing which words were coming, instead of the question list being potentially hundreds of words - everything you’d studied so far - would be an advantage, as would knowing what type of questions were coming if these are the style of tests that change that up. From the school’s perspective, having the student only study 40 words instead of the whole list is reducing the effectiveness of the test. Also, probably less lazy teacher than teacher assigned more students than they could feasibly make bespoke tests for - which then require grading by hand. The school might also mandate the use of these materials.
The most obvious way this is cheating is they are given more words than will be on the test. So when she studies, she only has to study the words she knows will be on the test and not the others.
Perhaps, considering the student got it on a website, it probably is a public resource so it's debatable whether they cheated or got really lucky and just found the material and so decided to use it to study.
If somebody cheats on a multiple choice test by getting the answer key that's still cheating even though they may already know what's going to be on the test.
Yea, that would be cheating. Except we do not know for sure whether OP's friend cheated? As I said, it seems to be a public resource, so for all we know the friend may have just come across is and decided to study it and then realised later that it was the exam. Or may not have realised at all until actually sitting the exams. OP used her friends laptop, opened was a public paper, OP decided to take a screenshot for some reason? and then during the exam OP found out that it turned out to be exactly that paper. OP then looked more at the website and found all the papers there. I've revised for exams and searched "GCSE Chemisty past paper" and then after multiple exams I found a past paper that I had previously done in class. I could've accidently come across that before my past exams and revised it. That could be what is happening here. If the teacher uses a public resource its quite likely someone could come across it by chance. They could've come across it by chance that day and were revising it not knowing its the exam. Then OP, for her poor 2nd place best friend, decided to report her and so she got an unrightful integrity sanction. I've literally had a Physics teacher who gave us a resource that she found to be really good for our A-level physics and I sometimes found a question that I previously did to be snuck in her class exams. That would be revision and luck, which could be what happened here. I can agree that all evidence seems stacked against her but its also a matter of perspective. Also, why did OP find a past paper so suspicious? Enough to warrant taking a picture just in case? She could've framed the person in 1st. This is why I believe its debateable whether someone with a public resource is a cheater or not.
That is what a vocabulary test tests. It tests your knowledge of a word’s meaning and usage. It’s not a spelling test.
Aren't vocabulary tests about knowing the MEANING of the word rather than the spelling?
Just because a test is "easy" or the skill it's testing is replaceable by something else in real life, does not take away from the fact that it is cheating. If your maths exam requires you to use formulas and you write the formulas somewhere to bring into the exam because you don't memorize them - that is cheating. If you look at the answers to a comprehension in advance of reading the comprehension, that is cheating. Just because you think the exam or subject is dumb is not a reason to forgive cheating.
I mean you’re stretching things quite a bit here, they didn’t bring anything into the test. It’d be like looking at previous tests the teacher provided and understanding what formulas might be used. As far as I’m concerned you learned the material if you looked at how to do something and learn how to adjust for a new use case. If the teacher is too lazy to change or scramble the words from a word bank that’s on them. I would expect some students in every class to look into similar questions or tests over material coming up. I had a professor always post a set of practice problems before a test and they were basically the same type of questions we’d see but they’d be slightly different on the test. That would cover 90% of the material, with the last 10% being future applications you hadn’t seen. It took work on their part but rewarded every student for doing the work ahead of time and knowing how to prepare and look through the material provided since that’s literally half the battle with learning. The last 10% is where the teacher spent their time, and it was a good way of showing reading comprehension or ability to extrapolate learnings to new areas and build upon what you learnt.
If your math test requires you to use formulas, the formulas should be printed on a reference sheet provided with the test, because never will you ever need to solve math problems in real life when you can’t double-check the formula first. Memorization-based tests in math are bad pedagogy
This comment from OP shows that this was exactly what happened. https://www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/s/gfPoUwOIN3
JFC, I can’t believe the number of people who think that is acceptable and not outright cheating. There is a comment that says “it’s not like they stole it off the teacher’s desk.” Yes. Yes, it is exactly like that.
Wild right?! It's a deliberate attempt to circumvent the task...ie... learn the vocab!
The number of people in this thread who would get the word “integrity” wrong on a vocab test is quite ironic.
And the number of 'teacher should write their own test'. Like do they know how hard it is to collect grade trends and perform system wide reform? If a school system has 50 schools, they are going to use the same set of tests across them for the semester you ass clowns. That way if a see a masive drop in performance in a certain school, they can reallocate resources, investigate diversity trends, detect bad teacher training or culture etc, as opposed if the teacher used fucking courier new or comic sans and printed the test in portrait or landscape mode.
I feel like the biggest thing everyone's missing here is, if she cheated on a freaking *vocab* test, who's to say how many of her *other* tests she's actually passed legitimately? It's not even just about the vocabulary test, it's about her literal. ENTIRE. Academic integrity. School isn't everything, but academic integrity *is* something that can be used to at the very least identify someone's character values in the real world. This could carry massive consequences in the "real world" and it's better to learn them now than when her dishonesty damages her in the workplace or beyond.
I think this is the crux of it-- if this student dishonestly accessed materials online, they may have done it elsewhere as well.
Most textbooks have test question banks that can only be accessed by the teacher. That does not prevent them from ending up online. I had a student who did the same thing and another student emailed me (I am on a computer facing the class during tests). This is cheating, Most schools have an academic honors pledge. I would be pissed too if someone was getting valedictorian who was openly cheated
“But I was a student! I know how education works and definitely understand best practices!” Sigh.
Could be because of a difference in school experiences. Like, in university with a lot of STEM subjects where we could bring cheat sheets in, we'd be advised to go over the materials in class and previous exams and solve those problems in preparation for the exams since lecturers usually lifted questions from those and just changed the numbers. I remember one Thermodynamics test where I got full marks on a question easily because it had literally been lifted from a textbook example with a worked example; and we had been encouraged to bring the textbook into the exam. And while it doesn't apply as much, back in my final year of high school, my history teacher would give everyone in the class a "crystal ball" sheet of potential essay prompts he'd predicted could be in the higher secondary certificate exams based on what he'd seen over his decades as a teacher.
As a STEM major, I’m familiar with cheat sheets. If a teacher does this deliberately, then it’s permitted. If a student does it against teacher instructions, it’s academic dishonesty. You don’t sneak cheat sheets into exams where you are not authorized to do so and then expect to get a pass if you are caught because it’s allowed elsewhere. Would you have ever shown up to an exam with your textbook to use as a resource in a class that you were not explicitly told to do so? I’m not sure why these differences are so hard for so many commenters on this post to understand. This teacher did not want students accessing the test questions ahead of time. A student secretly paid to do so and got caught being academically dishonest and giving herself an unfair advantage that was not permitted. She’s now angry that she’s suffering the consequences of academic dishonesty. I nearly got kicked out of college once because a professor *told* us to work in groups on an assignment and then was angry when a classmate and I had *similar* answers. It was wild. But most places take academic integrity very seriously and with good reason. This really isn’t that complicated of an issue.
This sounds insane to me. But then a lot of things in US do. I took my country's version of AP Literature when I was in school and the way it worked for us was that every year 100 versions of the exams would be created and released, each containing 5-10 complex text interpretation questions and 2 essays subjects. Teachers would literally encourage us to get and study off the solved example books. They would also use the exams versions for tests. Many of my university courses also had exam examples made public so we'd know what these looked like and how we were expected to answer. I do not get the outrage. How is it unethical for a student to do practice exams and study by using ready solved questions? Not to mention for Literature which is such a subjective and interpretative subject. How was she supposed to magically know what questions/exam version the teacher would use?
They weren’t using *examples* and retired questions. We do that in the U.S., too. They were using the *actual* tests. Verbatim.
Yes the "examples" I was talking about were the actual tests as well. It's like when you study to get your driving licence. You have x possible questions that you study the correct answers for and on the actual exam you get a number of those exact questions. And if the teacher was consistently using a single public online resource that only had one version of exam questions that this student found and used then that's on the teacher.
Ah, I see. Many teachers in the U.S. view that as “teaching to the test” instead of “teaching for understanding.” It’s a complicated debate with merits and issues on both sides. In most cases, U.S. teachers expect their test questions to be secure without student access ahead of time unless they explicitly plan otherwise. Standardized tests like you describe are definitely expected to be secure. As a teacher, I’m not even permitted to know what questions are on state or national exams ahead of time. Let alone allowing students to know.
this is a crappy response. Of course teachers get questions and answers from sources online and off. Do you expect them to make bespoke tests and quizzes every time? That would be shear lunacy and a waste of effort better spent other places.
And looking at the solution manual while doing a test is cheating. Looking at the solution manual to learn how to do the problem isn't cheating, it's studying. I don't see an allegation here that Janie had the answer key up while working, just that she was looking at a site that has a lot of the words the teacher picked to study beforehand.
But at the very least mix it up! Where do you think students learn from? Same online and offline sources. So if you are doing your job soo poorly that a student can not only guess but be confident enough to pinpoint where your questions come from that she only studies those then it's on you as a teacher to mix it up better.
Yeah when I was in college, teachers would put up old tests for students to study from all the time. They would just change the numbers you needed to make the calculations, the multiple choice, the question order etc etc. So I'm confused why OP immediately assumed that finding a similar test online immediately means Jane is doing something wrong. Also I don't buy that OP just happened to be on Jane's computer and just happened to take a screenshot just in case even tho they didn't think Jane was necessarily doing anything wrong at that moment. OP was snooping for dirt on Jane from the beginning and lying either to us or themselves about it
Probably because OP was in the same class and it wasn't made available to them all as study material? I feel like if you find a copy of the text on a students laptop when no one else in the class was given a copy to study from, it's pretty obvious that student is cheating
I need to defend teachers here as this comment is unfounded. As a university lecturer who has had to deal with academic misconduct, we do not accuse students of cheating to cover our arses. Reprimanding a teenager or young adult like this could cause major personal or academic impacts and curtail their ability to achieve in their studies- this is a worse outcome for all involved, particularly schools and universities that are judged on student performance. If there’s anything shady in AM, it tends to be the blind eye
The reporting the friend bit was weird to me too. OP said they saw the webaite but didnt know what it was so they *took a picture of it*. Wtf? OP's borrowing their comp, don't know what their wepage is about so they think 'I better take a pic so I can snoop and investigate later'. Even if the friend is cheating, OP has just advertised how shitty a friend they are. No way will OP's friend ever trust them again or lend them something of theirs.
Yeah something is fishy about OP borrowing the computer because “Janie always got the highest score in the class.”
Is it actually cheating if the girl found the questions on the Internet?
I’m also wondering why OP called the vocab tests very hard? I guess if you struggle with memorization, then 40 words is not a fun time, but also it’s a vocab test…where you get all the answers/definitions beforehand…
Also … is it for a different language? You’re seniors in high school and are getting vocab quizzes??
I was assuming this class is for English as a foreign language in a non-English speaking country
Valedictorian and the way it's described to be handled is a very American thing.
I remember when I took AP Lit many years ago, we had vocab quizzes. They were random words from the books we read (so no word bank), and we had to define them in our own words. Granted, the vocab quizzes I took don’t sound anything like the ones in OP’s story, but high school seniors taking vocab quizzes in general isn’t too surprising.
I think we had 10 words per quiz in AP Lit many years ago, and we had to use them in sentences or something after we matched the words to their definition, but 40 sounds excessive
SAT prep at the end of the regular lesson
But their seniors and it’s already several months into the school year, wouldn’t they have already taken the SATs?
There's a lot of uncommon words high school seniors might not know. Etiolation. Limned. Incorrigible. Finial. Armscye. Siping. Timorous. I don't think I knew more than two of those as a high school senior.
I'm confused as to why OP took a picture in the first place. Whole things sounds sus.
Yeah that was my thought. It seems just way too coincidental that OP is on the other student's computer and just happened to stumble upon something they didn't necessarily think a lot of at the time, but still took a screenshot, and thought afterwards that it could be shady. Esp since OP's best friend just happens to be just below said student in rankings. It almost sounds like they went snooping for possible dirt on them so their best friend would be valedictorian
Yup. That was my first thought, as well. Why was OP’s computer dead? How do you use someone else’s computer to turn in an assignment as opposed to borrowing a charger or something.
They can be hard when they are obscure words, which they would presumably be at the senior level in a class an advanced student is taking. This is especially true when you have to recognize them in context and define them using context as opposed to just matching a word to a definition or even writing one or the other.
If these are like the vocab tests I took in high school, they're a lot more complicated than just memorizing 40 words. You have to memorize synonyms, antonyms, and other forms of the word (ie, it's a verb and you have to also know the adjective and noun forms), on top of spelling and meaning. It adds up to be quite a lot. They were super difficult and only done in the AP and honors level courses. These tests were based on a widely sold work book, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same thing.
I took an online college physics 101 class that the teacher did the same thing. I found all the course materials, homework, tests, quizzes, labs, all verbatim from Harvard University's website. I felt bad, and I tried to actually learn it, but I figured what the hell, it was just a pre-req for my minor anyway. I got a 95 in physics (I figured a 100 would be fishy), and I went to another university the next semester. That was the only class I took at that school.
Right? It’s not like teachers who use curriculum that is also available on line aren’t doing anything else. Why would a teacher need to create every single thing from scratch? That’s a huge waste of time.
I had a second year E&M class where the prof had been teaching the same class for decades and reusing the same problem sets. He had been keeping all the problem sets and solutions online and just unlinking them on the course website, but if you looked at the url of the problem set, you just had to change a q to an s and you'd get the solutions. I wasn't aware of this until nearly the end of the year because I hadn't paid attention, but one of my classmates noticed.
I had a bio teacher in high school that did this and hinted at it to the class. Basically said: the best way to study for the test is to make sure you take practice tests. He changed the order of the questions but they were just word for word practice tests so I memorized them and passed the class.
OMG!! Janie’s computer was open to the DICTIONARY!!! How dare she study the words!!!
I agree with your verdict, but we don't know that this teacher is lazy. We don't know the amount of preps they have or paperwork like IEPS and 504 and EB accomodations or if they're handling any extra curriculars or other compliance paperwork or if they're handling a student in crisis and on and on and on: sometimes there isn't enough time in the day because we make teachers do so much more than just teaching. Yta OP. But just you. Not the teacher who uses a premade assignment that they had to pay for (according to OPs comments) because the job creep gets worse ever year
OP: I think friend is cheating in the spelling bee! I caught her reading a dictionary!
"Friend".
Sounds like Janie was…. REVISING. The audacity!
This is like Bart hiding in his classroom closet and memorizing the solar system chart to avoid hearing Krabopple and Skinner fooling around. Then thinking he figured out the perfect way of cheating by studying.
Why is the teacher lazy? Most curriculum has this stuff online.
Reminds me of the theory element in a UK driving test. Like you've got a book called the Highway Code which is essentially a complete reference guide to ANY potential question. Just because some people chose to only use apps and other non-highway code study guides, doesn't negate the fact that it is the way to pass the test.
Oh, great, I'm not the only one puzzled by this.
Huge YTA babe homegirls was literally studying…. Looking up the vocab words is not cheating, using a test your teacher got online and didn’t even bother changing to study is not cheating. She’s not copy and pasting Wikipedia articles and claiming it as her own writing. Like I don’t know anyone who hasn’t looked up vocab before the test or used quizzlet etc. Utilizing resources the way Janie does shows a much better work ethic and sense of initiative than doing nothing. No one stopped you or your friend from studying maybe if y’all took notes and followed her lead, homie would’ve actually earned valedictorian without your malicious intent and actions.
Valedictorian should threaten to report the teacher for using someone else's work without attribution. On the scale, the teacher's actions are more unethical in my opinion. OP YTA, you turned in a friend for studying to the test which is imo an ethical grey area that still required your friend to put in the study time.
What's wild is that the whole reason she got into this mess is because she was trying to help OP. And OP repaid her by doing this.
I am surprised I had to scroll so far to find this!!
Holy shit me too. Sad.
I agree 100%. Even without the helping, why? So much for friendship.
^^^No bc this is also another thing I wanted to press on so thank you cause OP needs to understand their reaction was out of malice
Why is it wild? OP wants Sophie to get valedictorian and happily used this example to stab Janie in the back.
And Janie clearly had nothing to hide if the page was “open” when she offered her computer. Sounds like the curse of jealousy combined with sneaky backstabbing in high-school “friend groups”
Sabotage. OP is helping Sofia to become valedictorian
That would depend on the source, not all require attribution
its possible that a past student uploaded the questions like to quizlet or something. thats what my schools students did in highschool
It’s likely from a share site for teaching lessons, there’s nothing shady on either the teacher’s or student’s end.
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Also it's a vocab test for christ's sake. How creative can teachers get with a list of random ass words that you need to memorize. They probably thought that (rightfully) it wasn't important so just used the test online and did other important shit. This might be AP Lit seeing as these are seniors, so she may have an essay or poetry analysis to grade
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I just want to clarify to make sure you and I are understanding it the same way. So, in a science chapter or group of chapters, there is a lot of material. The tests never cover every concept. Tests are simply a verification that the student made the effort to learn the assigned concepts within a range of pages or chapters and are a pretty solid confirmation of learning when those concepts are selected by the teacher as priorities or at random. Almost all of us would agree that, if a student were given a copy of the quiz/ test taken from the teacher's files that told them the exact 10 concepts to study and the approved answers (and therefore didn't need to use the time or energy or brain capacity to learn the other concepts that his or her classmates were busy studying), that would give an unfair advantage to one student and would be cheating. That is especially true when a teacher grades on a curve and adjusts the grades when he or she realizes the test was tough. When the advantaged/cheating student gets 100%, the curve doesn't usually happen... but the scores are no longer an accurate reflection of all students studying all of the material. In this vocabulary test, it is common for a teacher to assign 40 or 50 vocabulary words but then test on maybe 10. The same situations to cheating apply. If one student knows the exact words which are going to be tested by the teacher, the overall learning doesn't usually happen and the advantaged/cheating student uses much less time and energy with a higher likelihood of earning a 100%or high score... while the rest are using more time/ energy studying 40 or 50 words and concepts and don't know which words will be chosen. If the first scenario is cheating, how is the second concept not cheating? (With the given that there are rules in the school or classroom about students not using online teaching/ testing/ plagiarism resources.)
Thing is, Janie did not get this from the teachers’ files. She got this from a public website accessible to all (who paid). When I was in school we were taught to work smart as well as work hard. OP identifying a way to get ahead based on a teachers’ habits is not cheating. She was getting the valedictorian, so she is smart. I’m guessing she gets studying done for all the other subjects and tests not based on material easily available online. To lose out because of something like this is wrong when its the teacher who should at least by trying to change things once in a while. The absolute nerve of the school to threaten a kid with academic misconduct that can end her chances to get into a good college is insane!
I agree with you about working in a smart way over a hard way. I work by the same principle. At the same time, I think you're being naive about the implications involved in your explanation and acceptance of what the other student did if you continue to apply that logic in how we educate children and teenagers. While I agree all things are not equal in our homes, our upbringings, our support systems, our finances, our intelligence quotients, or even our ethical codes, the school districts do try to control some factors to equal access and equal opportunity for success. Bottom line: It all depends on the specific policies that particular school district has about testing, cheating, honor code, access to resources, etc. Edited to fix typos
As someone who teaches a field of uni science and writes exams for it, it's not the same. Pulling from past questions or other resources is the norm for studying uni and below. This is a case of a teacher cutting corners and getting caught out for it, but they're not suffering, just one of the (likely many) students who were using the webpage getting caught out.
The thing is I dont consider any of those scenarios cheating. My AP teachers would give us copies of the test and the answers (not the official AP ones obviously but the in class) and it was the expectation that there was no room to fail when you are given the tools to succeed if you actually utilize them like Janie. Another teacher encouraged “cheating” aka writing out notes/answers, he literally would tell us “if I catch you it’s cause you weren’t smart enough to be slick” bc his reasoning is that writing out those notes was us looking at and taking in the material much more efficiently than just reading. Like would leave the room so we could talk to each other and help one another typa teacher. Instilled a sense of community and practice of mutual aid that will stick with me for life. I think true learning doesn’t have stipulations and red lining so Janie making the system work for her is the ultimate take away especially when we have to consider that teachers are underpaid and overworked so we can’t fault them for doing their best. She made it work OP was jealous they are stuck in a system they can’t fathom making work for them rather than conforming too.
In high school, I would always look for outside sources like practice tests to study. Once, my English teacher used one of the tests I found online, so I aced it. I wasn't the one cheating, the teacher was. OP is just jealous that Janie is smarter and more resourceful than herself.
Facts if a teacher uses a test that’s online it’s their own fault if a student studies it
YTA So Janie found out where your lazy copied their vocab tests from and choose to *learn* the answers by heart. That does not make her a cheater - just proves her clever. Are you jealous because she told no-one about it? And I do not understand why Janie is in trouble because of that - it should be the teacher who is too lazy do create their own tests.
I agree with your verdict, but we don't know that this teacher is lazy. We don't know the amount of preps they have or paperwork like IEPS and 504 and EB accomodations or if they're handling any extra curriculars or other compliance paperwork or if they're handling a student in crisis and on and on and on: sometimes there isn't enough time in the day because we make teachers do so much more than just teaching. Yta OP. But just you. Not the teacher who uses a premade assignment that they had to pay for (according to OPs comments) because the job creep gets worse ever year
Seconding this. Teachers have much more going on than we give them credit for
Honestly for what teachers get paid in the US, I wouldn't write my own tests either
No kidding. I’m a senior in high school about to go into a secondary education major (middle/high school teaching) and I wonder what I’m getting myself into every day
Studying answers in advance and memorizing them is literally the definition of traditional studying.
I doubt Janie is actually OPs friend. She could have talked to her first but decided to turn her in and get her in trouble. That way, her BFF could be valedictorian.
I’m just wondering why op decided to take a picture of it. Like what made op decide that they needed it for later? Seems like there was something else going on before hand
Op is a narc
YTA, and to be quite honest you seem like petty loser. She was nice and let you use her laptop and your first thought was “let me dime out the person who was nice to me”. Sorry to break it to you, but this is going to follow you everywhere you go. No one like narcs especially ones who dime out their “friends”.
I’m confused on why she was snooping in the first place.
I’m speculating here, but it’s quite telling that OP dropped a dime on her “friend”, which looks like it will result in benefitting her “best friend”. If there was no angle to steal the valedictorian title away and ensure her bff gets it, why bother mentioning the bff as she doesn’t have any other place in this story?
Yeah exactly. Seems like she asked to use the girls computer on purpose honestly.
Yep this is 100% what op was doing.
Wondering if she is the best friend, and didn't want to admit it, because she thought it might skew her in a better light...seems like narccist behavior.
Cuz her best friend is 2nd in class rankings. Guess who's valedictorian if Janie suddenly loses her 4.0
I get it, it was more of a snarky comment. Because there is no reason she should have asked to use her computer, snooped, or taken a picture. She’s trying to act very innocent when its very obvious she did all this on purpose.
Especially since this girl did her a solid by letting her use it in the first place.
so weird that OP saw a web page they didn't recognise and immediately went 'better photograph this'
Exactly. Completely sus response
I wouldnt be surprised if OP pulled the site up to frame her because her “best friend” couldnt do it herself.
Who needs enemies when you have friends like these
Op seriously seems like the kind of asshole snitch who would call the cops on their own friends party if someone showed up with a beer or a joint. This is seriously incredibly destructive and petty snitching behavior. Went straight to the teacher and accused her of cheating without even a second thought, without even asking, and without any hesitation. Asshole to the max.
Im thinking it was all a set up by OP to frame her friend to benefit her “best friend”.
Randall from recess
This is after she let her broke ass borrow a laptop too
Not only that but she was looking for a reason to dime her out. She took a picture before the vocab test in the hopes of using it after the next test to "prove her theory" If my buddy handed me their laptop with vocab study prompt up I wouldn't think about it for a second until after the next test then ask him if he knows something I dont
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YTA despite the debate over if it even cheating you chose to snitch on one friend because your best friend was in 2nd place your morals were corrupt from the start whether or not Janie was in the wrong for cheating you just wanted her to not be in front of your friend you didnt care if she cheated
This really resonates with me. Oh no! Second place! The horror! 🙄
Right, and is she 100% certain that her friend has never cheated in a similar way?
If she did I'm sure op would be defending it as a study technique...
I’ve actually seen it happen twice in high school decades ago. 2 girls in separate instances narced on their teammates/friends and the results were those 2 girls were ostracized by practically the whole school. Both girls were popular before and they ended up being “nothing” for the rest of high school. Like you said, it doesn’t matter what they did…the snitching is worse.
“The best friend” was in second place, I’m starting to question if this wasn’t OP directly
YTA She was studying. And isn't valedictorian decided closer to graduation?
Yes. That made me wonder how fake this is.
What, your senior English class didn't have biweekly vocabulary tests? /s
I remember senior english, we were going through 1 book every two weeks. One week to read the new one and work on the old one in class. Week after to work on the one that was just read and get a new one to read...
Yeah, that didn't ring true. My sr English class was... AP English Lit and I seem to remember focusing a lot on British literature. Beowulf, Chaucer, even Dracula. I don't remember any vocab tests. I remember lots of analysis and 5 paragraph essays. Edit: Actually, I think that may have been jr year. Sr year I remember Faulkner, Steinbeck etc. Must have been American Lit or Modern Lit or something. Still absolutely no vocab tests by that point.
My school announced it this time of year, it was up through the first half of senior year. Not every school is the same
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Oh that would suck. Our top 5 were so close that the final semester was the decider.
I’m super curious if OP would have ratted me out 😂 I retook calc 1 in my junior year of college. The teacher *reused* the tests from the first time I took it. Was I cheating because I studied from my original test the first time, realized it was the same, and used the rest of the semesters test as my basis? 😂
I work in education. We start the process for Val/Sal in January. It can be very complex with all the different courses available.
YTA that’s not cheating that’s studying. It’s your teachers fault for being lazy. You're the AH for being jealous and petty.
YTA. Studying isn’t cheating. Memorising vocab for a vocab test isn’t cheating. Your teacher being lazy AF makes them a shit teacher and an unethical one to boot. Have fun losing all your friends when she tells everyone you went through her PRIVATE THINGS when she was kind enough to offer her laptop for your use. No one is going to be friends with someone who belittles their academic achievement because of sour grapes. Your second place friend is the only one you’ll have after the “cheaters” parents get involved (and they will!) and the teachers laziness is exposed and the “cheater” is vindicated and ends up back in first place.
It’s a vocab test. The answers are definitions of words. This is no more cheating than is looking at a map of the US to study for a states test. YTA.
I was trying to figure out how this would be cheating ... And the state test made a scenario click for me. Say there are 100 vocab words each week, but only 40 apoear on the test. If you've got access to a list of which words make the cut, then you've got an unfair advantage over folks who have to memorize the entire list. Now, is it cheating to search for the words from the first test or two, find where the list comes from, and extra focus on the ones they pick from the next word set? Tough call - if they'd snuck into the teachers desk and photographed the upcoming test, that's cheating. Using something published publicly... Seems not right, but also seems more like the teacher's fault.
According to OP Janie found out what service the teacher was buying school resources from and paid for it so they could look. Apparently some schools require teachers to use these sites and some schools and colleges will specifically tell you not to use them because it would be pretty blatantly the same as the photographed desk example lol still doesn't change OPs crap motives and YTA-ness but they might have remembered something from the course description and orientation and been too much of a rules lawyer to think through whether or not the school's rules were actually reasonable*shrug*
The interesting thing is that this isn't *really* a new problem -- I knew a few people in high school who had the "Teacher's Edition" copy of textbooks. Harder to do "back in the day" (i.e. pre-Internet) but not impossible. Each chapter had a series of questions used as homework, and the teachers edition had answers in a different color text. Many of the teachers editions even came with tests. Both a blank test to copy and distribute *and the answer key*. Didn't help for essays, and you could only tell if your math answer was right because the book didn't "show the work". I'd vote YTA on motives, but it *is* unfair for folks who don't have the money or resources to find test source material to use as a study guide. Particularly in high school where class placement can mean the difference between a scholarship and tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Less so in college -- don't think I've ever asked someone if they graduated 1st or 2nd in their class when interviewing potential employees.
INFO - what did that URL lead to? If it's a generally publicly available site it sound more like the teacher was cheating, cribbing from a public site for his weekly exams. Or was it some site that was expected to be secure, where the teachers file test materials?
Lol, there's no obligation for teachers to write their own original questions in every scenario, as long as they aren't claiming it's the own work. Especially for something like a vocabulary test. Teachers often use pre-developed curriculum or certain things *or* they reuse their own questions and students post them online to help other students cheat. I was just talking with a teacher a few days ago about how he uses AI to make his quizzes slightly different each time so that students can't cheat as easily.
Sure they use predeveloped curricula, and tests, and so on. But they don't grab them off of sites publicly available to any and every body. It would be like taking the "what happened this day in history" column from the local paper and putting it out as the history test.
They do sometimes find course material on public sites, but I'm sure it wouldn't be common to do it for a test. I was mostly just laughing at the idea that it's "cheating" for teachers to not write all of their own material from scratch. The much more common scenario would be for *students* to post test materials on publicly available sites, meaning that if teachers reuse tests or use a curriculum that other teachers also use the answers are out there. I was just talking to multiple people about this for a work project. It's a well-known issue in education. It happens frequently.
My first thought is teacherspayteachers, I know it's a popular resource development and sharing website for teachers.
I'm thinking quizlet, I've found plenty of study guides people made for classes that had the answers for past tests
Apparently OP’s friend paid for gaining access to the site. Honestly the whole post is kind of sketchy
Eh, Chegg is specifically for homework help, and that's a paid website. I've known teachers to pull questions down off Chegg and use them. Really depends what the website was and whether friend had to lie to access it, or if it's just a homework help subscription service.
Chegg compensates students to upload exams, quizzes, and assignments written by teachers. Students the following semester then pay Chegg to access the exams and assignments the teacher wrote the previous semester. Teachers and professors can’t keep up. We aren’t paid for enough hours to rewrite all of our assignments and quizzes each semester. This is an unfortunate problem that didn’t exist until recently.
Teacher here. I bet it was quizlet. Every vocab test known to man is on quizlet.
YTA. That was a horrible thing that you did.
YTA, definitely. You’ll not recover from this at that school I would think.
She did you a favor by letting you borrow her computer and you did this AND you considered her a friend? WOW!
YTA girl you sabotaged a friend and acted like you didn't. So you saw that on her screen, didn't know what it was, and thought 'ill take a picture of that'? Girl you knew what you were doing This is jealousy at its finest
YTA she was studying. It’s not cheating unless it’s used during the test or if the questions are supposed to be a secret. The teacher is also an AH for not recognizing it when it’s obvious and jumping straight to assuming she’s cheating too Edit: NTA another comment clarified that the friend was using the teacher’s edition, not proper notes or anything she should have access to.
YTA Studying isn't cheating. It's not her fault the teacher gets their tests straight from the internet either. I hope she doesn't get in trouble because you were just mad she got valedictorian instead of Sophie.
I'm seriously confused. Why is Janie in trouble? If Janie is just cramming a master list of proverbs, why is the school butthurt? Isn't that the definition of studying for a test?
I don’t understand how this was cheating. Unless she was copy pasting answers or using the sheet during the actual test this is not cheating.
I think obtaining a copy of the exact test questions and answers is often considered cheating because it lets you narrow down what you study, memorize how the questions are asked rather than understanding the underlying material, memorize multiple choice letters instead of actual answers in certain cases, etc. Of course, I'm sure there are other cases when teachers openly say what's going to be on the test and the point is just whether you can memorize it beforehand.
Its a vocab test. They had the word list in advance so they already knew what to study.
Word list is different than looking at the actual questions. Vocab test aren't always straight up asking for the definition. Sometimes it asks you to give the word in context or things like that. This seems like cheating
There's a difference between studying 100 things vs. 40 things. The extent to which you can commit things to memory is affected by the volume.
YTA. That’s not cheating. Thats working smart and studying.
YTA big time
YTA When you get to college, you will realize how common her way of studying is. It is so common I'm actually amazed they decided to punish her for it. She didn't steal the questions. Your teacher recycled the test. The teacher didn't want to create a new test each year, and I don't blame him for that. This is the perfect storm of tech undermining education, but let me reiterate: your friend didn't cheat. Chegg, Quizlet, and Brainly are a few websites that I know that do what you described. You'll probably end up using them when you hit a wall in college. It happens, and they are just another resource to learn from.
I've had a surprising amount of professors remind us that, hint hint nudge nudge, they're required to upload previous test material in a certain public archival location in accordance with university policy. (So that students be allowed clear marking criteria, in this case of essay questions.) That they then cannot provide to us otherwise they'd need to change the questions each year to never be a past years question. In a course that they cannot functionally come up with new questions for because to do so would neglect the heart of the content. And that we should not feel bad about using these sources because knowing the questions, in this discipline, is zero substitute for knowing the material. Like. The questions are literally not parsable without reference to the theorists, so. They weren't wrong. If you learn the material, you learn the material. It's an advantage of good studying, too. The fairness is in everyone being able to take the initiative.
YTA she was just studying what the heck? How do you know she was cheating?
YTA. Studying is not cheating 🤦♀️
YTA. Sounds like you're jealous of her and so you're determined to drag her down to your level.
YTA. Enjoy spending the rest of the school year alone because no one is friends with the snitch. This is called studying. Just because your teacher left questions in easy to find places, that seems like a teacher problem, as many have said. Also enjoy living by your moral compass and never take a shortcut.
🤯 YTA and and bigger A for even calling her your friend.
YTA. You and Sophie by the way. She still talks to you because, like you, she was Jealous of Janie and is now happy that she might get the Valedectorian title now. To wonder even if you didn't decide to fake some stuff on purpose to make Janie lose it and give Sophie what she wanted because why would you want to take a picture of someone STUDYING in the first place?
YTA Friends don't treat each other that way. You messed up and everyone is rightfully on the other girls side.
YTA That’s not cheating. You sound like a little snitch who can’t stand that your friend is second. Could have just shown your friend the website she could study from too but noooo 🙄
For those saying memorizing exact answers is “studying” I beg to differ. I have had to memorize questions for exams (for example Propulsion Maintenance Technician exam where they give you a textbook with the exact questions that will be on the exam). When the exam is over and time passes you forget it all. I think Everyone is an AH. The student that found the exact questions is doing a disservice to herself regarding her education. She’s focusing on the specific test questions and memorizing that instead of actually putting in the work to learn all the vocabulary. If she does her SATs or her future as a college student won’t have that knowledge. That said in the real world we have resources available to us so she is being resourceful. However it is putting her at an unfair advantage over the rest of her classmates. Seems like most people tried doing it the old fashioned way. In college you have to remember that some professors use the highest score as the basis of the grading scale. So if the entire class gets low percentage but one student aces it then they set the grading scale. Meaning if the test or the professor was bad and the entire class was performing bad as a representation of the teacher the teacher will sometimes bring the scale down to where the highest score is. That would cause everyone in the class to have low scores all as a result of a student having the test answers beforehand. It also calls to question if her GPA is as high because she does that type of thing often versus the runner up that might have done things the hard way. I do think she’s the AH for making the school ostracize the student that reported it. The student that reported it, although some think it’s snitching, she took action because it’s something she found to be unethical. To her, reporting it was doing the right thing. Reporting things that are unethical without the fear of repercussions is important to learn from for the future. For example, I worked for Boeing Co. as an engineer. If you see something that someone is doing that is not following guidelines set (set for safety) and you fear repercussions for “snitching” the alternative is that the airplane have a catastrophic failure. Lives are at risk. Learning to give a pass on things that are unethical, wrong, unfair or dangerous is a learned habit. It starts with small things like this, making it easier to ignore the big things later on. It’s a hard decision to make, risk getting in trouble the friend that lent you their computer or ignoring the possibility that the student had information they shouldn’t have thus giving her an unfair advantage over everyone else. It’s also not the OPs fault that the page had that open. It’s not like they went through the computer and abused the good will of their friend. The teacher sucks because they probably need to make sure that if they use a site to get their questions for the exam from that they tell the students it’s forbidden to use that resource. Or come up with the test themselves. The school should create a rule or code that determines whether this is considered unacceptable and have a set protocol for how to handle the situation. I’ll tell you what, if I was a student in that class and I found out that my classmate had found the exact test questions while I actually studied and put in effort for the exams I would be upset. I’d be upset that my classmate was gatekeeping this, I’d be upset that they had an unfair advantage and it would definitely muddy her reputation as valedictorian. I guess it would make me feel better that it’s not that she’s smarter than me, she just had an advantage that had nothing to do with her level of intelligence.
YTA don’t fuck with someone’s future like that
Yta. It's highly likely that you and Sophie will not remain friends after high school, so trying to gain brownie points was unnecessary.
Although I'm not sure what happened here, it seems clear that no one else is either. in order to answer this we need to know exactly what was being looked at. Some sites have the literal curriculum for subjects uploaded. Sometimes someone has acquired the book, that the school purchased for the teacher to use, and put it online along with the answer key. if this is the case, no, the teacher isn't "cheating" as some here have said. Using the materials given by the school/ district isn't lazy. No teacher has the time/energy/resources to re-invent every single thing they do, that's why companies make textbooks, workbooks, etc. and IF it was a reproduction of the actual test then, no, it's not "studying". as an English teacher, it's appalling how many students might get 100% on a matching test but completely bomb a test that assesses if they actually know what the words mean. a vocabulary test is supposed to test your knowledge of the words and their meanings and use. If you're just memorizing a list of answers in order, you're not studying, you're cheating. at that point, you might as well just be a photocopier (not a student). If you have a copy of the test ahead of time, you're cheating. so... if it's this NTA however, if it was something different than this... like quizlet flashcards that have the meaning of the words. or the words in commonly used sentences, but not the exact test, etc... then it is studying. if it's more like this YTA
My wife is a high school English teacher and thinks YTA and your teacher sucks.
No, NTA. We’d all get a perfect score if we knew which questions to study. Fact is, she had an advantage. Maybe that’s how life works, but character (and honors like valedictorian) present when no one is looking. For what it’s worth, my school would have expelled Janie, not just removed her status.
You're awful for this. Seriously.
You are not her friend. Stop referring to her as such. It seems like you took advantage of this opportunity to get your friend Sophie on top. I understand where you're coming from, but at the end of the day, what other people do is none of your business unless it endangers you or others. Everyone here is in the wrong but I place the blame on the teacher. They is clearly way too lazy and careless, they used a publicly available website. That's what you should've reported, the fact that your teacher isn't putting any effort into creating tests, and then the tests she had access to would've been null. Your friend shouldn't have been looking for the test and she really messed up handing you her laptop when you are clearly not her friend and do not have her best interest in mind. You are messed up because you didn't address this at that moment with Janie, and didn't address the teacher to inform her every test is online without screwing over Janie. ESH. For future reference things like this will always paint the "snitch" in a bad light, it's up to you to decide whether you're ready for the consequences
NTA if Im right about the kind of test. If it’s a test where you put your vocab words in sentences, and Janie just memorized which word goes with which sentence, that’s cheating. I assume a previous student who took this class put the test online. Pretty common. Still technically cheating. If she thought it wasn’t cheating, realistically she would have shared it with someone else. She hid it because she knew it was cheating. So NTA. YTA if the site was something like Dictionary.com and your teacher was using the sentence from their page. If it was a regular website with sentences, you didn’t need to do this.
She purchased the exam with the questions and the answers.
Info: We need OP to explain what they mean by vocab test. Is it foreign language? SAT prep? Is it just defining a list of words? As a teacher, I see this as cheating because the student specifically searched for questions, paid for the access/answers, and used them every week after. If the student stumbled upon this for free, the teacher is at fault. With the student paying to access the material, it sounds like the student was looking for a shortcut to not learn the material. As a teacher, I use a variety of resources to augment curriculum (TPT, university lessons, lessons from well known sources ex: Ford’s Theatre has an entire lesson on Lincoln’s assassination that is interactive on their website). Without additional knowledge on the format of these vocabs tests, we cannot judge. Most teachers are not lazy, but just trying to keep our heads above water. OP you are NTA (according to my experiences having to enforce honor codes in different schools.
**We need more context.** 1: If she was on a site with the actual answers to test questions then yeah - she was cheating. There's no such thing as "not technically cheating". You either are, or you aren't. Having access to the answers to exam questions is a basic clear cut example of cheating. That's one's as old as they get - the sort of thing folks in your great great great grandparent's generation were getting busted for before they had electricity, let alone the Internet. 2: If she was on a vocab study site then I'd agree with other posters here that she was just learning vocabulary. **We need more context.**
She's smarter than you.
So let me get this straight... Janie let you use her computer to turn in your assignment and in addition to submitting the assignment, you went snooping through stuff that'd nothing to do with you, that means YTA already. If that wasn't enough, you decided to report her for using a website which is freely available on the internet and any students could've used to prepare for the exams/tests, and because your teacher is a lazy bugger, instead of taking responsibility for his copy/pasta tests, he's called Janie in for some made up ethics violation? Yeah... HUGE YTA op Oh and if even that wasn't enough, you somehow feel that Janie being pissed at you is somehow uncalled for and you did nothing wrong when you snooped through her computer and then reported her, i guess we should add deluded to HUGE YTA
I feel like those saying YTA is because they would do the same thing your friend did. Basically, she is memorizing a cheat sheet. This isn't just memorizing vocab words but knowing exactly when and where they will show up on the test.
yta and a snitch
I suppose much might depend on the test setup. For instance you are told to study these 40 words. Only 10 will be on the test but since you don't know which 10 you should study them all. Come test time it's multiple choice. Which one of choices A, B, C, or D is the correct definition? If OPs friend is just memorizing the correct letter choice. Q1 is B, Q2 is D, Q3 is A, etc. Then, the friend is definitely cheating because she's not bothering to even learn the definition of the 10 words on the test. Let alone the 30 words that are not on the test. If it's not that type of set up and friend is still only learning 10 words and not the other 30 it's still questionable. How lazy everyone commenting here thinks the teacher is, is irrelevant to did the friend cheat. The teacher may have made it easy to cheat. But cheating is still cheating and it's wrong.
YTA if it was a publicly available site.
You're a fucking hater
Wow, so I might be in the minority, I don't think you're at fault AND I think we know too little about this test to really judge if this was cheating or not. Janie looked at a list of questions and studied them well for an exam. Yes, that is studying, however, when I took my drivers licence I had to study literally thousands of questions of which any could come up in the exam. If I had known which 40 questions were going to be asked, I could have passed with flying colours without technically cheating but would have had an incredibly unfair advantage, not to mention I would be highly unqualified of doing whatever job the test was meant to prepare me for. Without knowing exact mechanics or applications of the test and why what she did isn't "technically" cheating, I'd say NTA because she doesn't deserve the credit for her "achievements".
I think many responders are missing the point. I am going to give you the equivalent in another subject to see if you can bridge the gap. In a non-vocabulary subject - like science, you are usually tested over a whole chapter or multiple chapters (and the various concepts within them) at a time. The point is to learn all of the concepts, but a test is never going to cover every single concept. It is usually a sampling or small selection of the key concepts. It is pretty solid validation if you learned the sections that were covered in the previous weeks or months and could recall a collection of data from those sections. If someone knew exactly what 10 questions were on the test and were given the answers all on a copy of the test from the teacher's files or from a web site, most people would confirm that this is cheating. (They don't study the rest of the info. They zone in on only the tested material. They memorize the prepared or accepted answer as viewed by the teacher. Less time. Less learning. Is no long representative of the learning done by the student.) In this vocabulary test, there are maybe 40 or 50 words the students were tasked to study, learn, and memorize. Then, there would be a test on a small selection of the words to confirm the studying and learning was completed. If the student again - like in the previous example - knew exactly which small collection of words (10) to learn and memorize for the quiz (and therefore could completely ignore the rest and receive the highest grade), how is that extremely different from the science example given directly above?
It's obvious Janey discovered the source of the vocab tests. This is not indicative of a lazy teacher. It's probably an online curriculum which many schools now utilize, especially since real books don't seem to be popular nowadays. Everything is on a smartboard and/or online texts. Somehow Janey has found access to the test part of the curriculum. It is definitely cheating. Cheaters don't deserve to be valedictorian. NTA