…Someone offered to sell you answers to a test?

*DISCLAIMER – I accepted no money in this test, and all names will remain confidential.

Teens are seen today as teens have been seen throughout history – lazy, ungrateful, and generally awful. The baby boomers’ war on millennials sees the teens of our generation avoiding the brunt of the ageism, but a highly evolving job market and the resulting academic pressures has seen a steady increase in anxiety amongst teens over the past century. In fact, an estimated quarter of teens suffer from some form of anxiety today.

It’s not surprising how many responses I got asking for test answers, given this climate.

AP US History (APUSH) is considered one of the harder AP classes the school has. Advanced Placement social studies are generally seen as a given by the overachievers, and beastly to the incoming AP kids. Kiedrowski, while being a great teacher, is tough. I’m not ashamed to admit I have to work hard in his class to learn all the material.

That being said, I have the time to put into his class. For some students, that time just isn’t there, be it due to sports, speech and debate, music, theatre, or any of the multitude of extracurricular activities the school has. Pressures put on students to gain a ‘spike,’ (if they’re looking at an Ivy League school or it’s equal), or to be as well-rounded as possible (if they are looking to go to pretty much any college) lead to overcommitment and these mental illnesses seen amongst our teens.

I approached kids in my APUSH class to tell them I had the answers to the upcoming unit test. I said that Kiedrowski had accidentally put the test responses on his Moodle page. In my scenario, they had been since taken down, but I had saved the PDF and was charging $10 per key.

I first did a dry run on my best friend Aurora (whose name will be the only I mention in this story). I told her that I had the answers, but didn’t offer to send them to her, since she had already taken APUSH.

That went over like a popped balloon so to speak – she was highly unfazed, told me all the answers were on Moodle anyways, and continued eating lunch after voicing her assumption that 1) I didn’t need them, and 2) I was messing with her anyways so why did it matter?

When I told a couple of groups in my history class, it went over quite differently.

I approached small groups of students talking after we got back from lunch. My class is predominantly male, which of course skews any statistics derived from this little experiment.

The first cluster I approached, who I would say I know decently well, completely believed me. I told them, they all started laughing a bit, and I was asked if I would break a twenty by one of them immediately, another saying they had no money on them at that time. The others said they would get back to me, so they could see how well they were doing before they bought the “key.”

As I was walking over to the next group, one of them called after me, “You know, Abby, I respect the f*ck out of what you’re doing here. I look up to you now.”

I approached a group in the center of the room, my hypothesis being this particular demographic would be a bit more action heavy. Immediately after I made my proposition, I was asked to “verify” that they were the correct answers and that it was the actual test.

“Abby, just let me tell you that you have picked the right group to come to,” one said, and the whole group laughed. I was asked if I had the DBQ (Document-Based Question, a part of the essay portion of our exam) prompt as well.

They then discussed amongst themselves who was going to do it, more than one wallet emerged from a backpack or pocket, and I moved onto my next group.

This was bit calmer, as I had approached easily some of the smartest kids in the school, much less my class. Both burst out laughing as I told them, and both refused, saying they didn’t need it.

One of them later told me I would “make bank,” doing this.

I let the rumor mill take its cycle for the next day, planning to tell everyone the truth on Friday during class.

The following day, Kiedrowski received an email from a student, naming me specifically (I had no idea who she was, we had never met) and letting him know about test answers circulating.

“The more I thought about the situation the more I realized that it’s really unfair for people who actually try hard to do well on these tests,” the student said in the email.

When I finally came clean to my class, minutes before the test itself, I had already been asked by two people that day if I was still selling and/or using the answers.

However, when I did finally tell the class, one of my classmates immediately yelled, “I told you it was a sting!” A couple of other similar side conversations proceeded, and the class went on as normal.

“I think students on the whole are willing to cheat or cut corners on any kind of assessments if they feel like it will give them the grade that thy think they need to get into the college that they think they want to go to,” Kiedrowski told me later. “Four-year colleges have gotten more competitive [during time teaching] to the point where students feel like they have to have a certain GPA or ACT score, otherwise they won’t get into a certain college, and therefore their vision of what their life will be won’t be accomplished. The reality is, it’s so unlike that.”

Throughout this whole experiment, many of the kids I talked to discussed buying the answers from me, but none did. This may be because I, as illustrated by the classroom riot, am a massive overachiever and would never actually do any of this – partially because I’m a huge wimp. It also may be because I only stayed long enough to get an impulse reaction from anyone, moving on and being altogether cagey about the entire situation before anyone could actually offer me any money or confirm that they wanted to buy my “answers.”

I’d like to believe that they weren’t actually going to buy those answers though. Maybe it’s naivete on my part, but all of the kids in my class are extremely bright capable people. They don’t need the answers spoon fed to them. But the fact remains that kids deal with the pressures put on them by the school every day – and people are fully capable of actually cheating if they so choose to.