Little backstory: freshman year, I got caught cheating on a take-home quiz. I immediately fessed up, went through the Aggie Honor Council process/class (I genuinely can’t remember what it was called), and got a zero on the quiz. And when I tell you that whole experience WORKED on me, I mean it REALLY worked lol.
I had crippling anxiety afterward. For a long time, I was scared to do basically any assignment because I was terrified I’d somehow be accused of cheating again, even if I hadn’t done anything wrong. I never cheated again after that. Not even anything minor. The entire process scared the absolute shit out of me, and clearly the punishment system accomplished exactly what it was supposed to.
Fast-forward to my senior year. I’m taking my anthropology final, and I’m one of the last people still working, so the classroom is almost empty. I finish, start gathering my stuff, and look over at the girl sitting RIGHT next to me. She is fully on her phone looking up answers. Like, not subtly checking a notification. She is straight-up searching for answers during the final. She looks me dead in the eyes and smiles. It was one of those “oh fuck, you caught me, please don’t say anything” smiles. And immediately I got that exact same sick anxiety feeling in my stomach that I remembered from when I got caught freshman year. Because the room was almost empty, my first thought was that there was NO way the professor and TA hadn’t noticed. I started thinking maybe they were just waiting for her to finish before confronting her. And because she was sitting literally right next to me we were in one of those huge lecture halls where everyone is crammed together I suddenly started panicking that they might think we were cheating together.
I didn’t know this girl. I had never spoken to her. And I was not about to potentially get dragged into another academic integrity situation because some stranger decided to blatantly use her phone during a final.
So as I walked up to turn in my exam, I made a split-second decision and told the TA, “The girl sitting next to me is using her phone to look up answers.”
The TA just said okay, walked over, and stood behind her while she continued going on her phone.
And that was it. I have no idea what ended up happening to the girl after that or if she ever actually got in trouble.
I still think about it sometimes and feel guilty because I’ve never been the type to snitch on someone. I’ve never been a tattle tale or someone who wants to get other people in trouble. And I think part of the guilt comes from knowing that this complete stranger probably had to go through the same kind of process I went through, but on a much larger scale because what she was doing was way more blatant than what I had done freshman year.
But another part of me remembers how seriously academic dishonesty was treated when I got caught, how much it affected me, and how terrified I was in that moment that her cheating could somehow get associated with me just because I was sitting next to her.
