I knew many students who took college prep classes all the way through high school and never read a book in an English class. They read Cliff Notes or Monarch Notes, or they copied work from other people who did. But they didn't cheat just in English classes. They had systems of cheating in every class. Cheating became a way of life. They were always conniving and scheming. I'm not that pure. I've tried cheating, but I soon rejected it. I didn't learn that way, and I lost my self-esteem. I also feared getting caught; and I discovered that most of the time cheating was hard, stressful work. So I never became a master observer of cheaters, because students almost always see more than teachers do. What I learned was that cheaters often put themselves under more stress than honest students. 　

　　 Even the student who pays for schoolwork can become a victim of stress. I remember a student in my junior composition class who needed a research paper, so he found a source and bought one for seventy-five dollars. The first trouble was that he had to submit the work in stages: the topic, the working bibliography, the note cards, the outline, the rough draft, and the finished paper. Therefore, he went to the library and started working backwards. Of course, he couldn't turn in only the bib cards actually used in the paper, and next he had to make out note cards for the material he "would be" documenting, and even make out more. After having all kinds of trouble, he realized that the bought paper was of "A" quality, whereas he had been a "C "student. He went back to his source and was told he should change the sentence structure and so on to make the paper weaker. Finally he dropped the class after spending more time on his paper than I did on mine. 　

　　 Then during my senior year, a female student in a biology class became another subject for my study of cheating. She was sitting next to me, so I could see everything she did. She kept her cheat cards in her bra. This is the way she did it. On the day of the test, she would wear a loosely fitting blouse or dress. Then when the instructor wasn't watching, she would hunch her shoulders like a buzzard sleeping and slump so she could look down the front of her own dress. If the instructor stared at her when she was looking down, she would blow inside her dress as if she were trying to cool off her bosom or something. Then she would smile at the instructor and shake her head and pucker her lips to show how hot it was. Her strategy worked because she did perspire due to the stress. The tests weren't that difficult. She probably worked harder in rigging the cheat cards on her underwear than I did in memorizing information. 　

　　 There were dozens of other examples ----the writing on seats, hands, arms, legs, and cuffs; the hand signs, blinks, and coughs; and the plagiarism of all kinds. There were even the classes where cheating would never be caught because some teachers didn't watch carefully during the tests, and others didn't read carefully later. But for the most part, the cheaters were the ones who had the most anxiety and often the ones who did the most work ---work that was never directed toward learning. 　

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