Quoth The Cheater, “This Just Doesn’t Add Up!”

In one of my classes in high school, there was a guy who sat a row over and a desk behind me. Whenever we had a test — almost always twenty multiple-choice questions — he would whisper loudly at me to show him my paper, since I was getting As.

I decided I’d had enough after three tests and was going to end it in a simple way. As usual, on the next test, [Cheater] asked to see my paper. I held it in such a way that the teacher wouldn’t see. In our school, we had three half-hour lunch periods.

In this class, third hour, we had the first lunch period after class was over. For this particular test, the teacher said that as soon as we finished the test we could go on down to lunch.

As soon as [Cheater] copied all of my answers, he handed in his test and took off for lunch. After he was gone from class, I went back and redid my test answers. You see, I had answered question number one on line two, question number two on line three, and so on. That’s the paper he saw. All I had to do was move each answer up one line.

We got our graded tests back the next day.

Cheater: “How’d you get an A and I got an F? Didn’t we have the same answers?”

Me: “Yes, we had the same answers. The first time.”

He never asked to see my tests again.

He flunked the class. I got an A.