Near the end of my junior year last year, I was accused of cheating along with several of my friends. What occurred was that we had been assigned a project for a test grade in a history class that we were given around a month or so to work on. We did the work, and then turned it in thinking everything was fine. In the last week of school, however, we were all individually called into the principal’s office and accused of cheating.
My friend group is very close, and initially I thought that the accusation was simply based on the fact that our papers might have similar ideas in it in some parts because I’m sure we discussed or even shared what we had written (as examples) for parts of the project at some point or another with each other or shared resource links. Later, however, when we were all discussing what had happened with each other and comparing our papers, I learned that one of my friends had actually copied parts from each of the rest of our papers word for word. He even had the same typo that one of my friends had in her paper in “his” paper. Apparently this happened the day that the projects were due. Whereas the rest of us had stayed up the night before to finish our projects, this friend had chosen to sleep through the evening and the night and wake up in the morning with half of the project still done. At school that day, while the rest of us were just relaxing during our second block, that friend was frantically working to finish his project. I guess because he was stressed about finishing he just ended up going back to some of our friend group’s old Skype chats or whatever where we had posted snippets of our projects and just put them in his.
I’m definitely not blaming all of this on him, because he wouldn’t have even had the opportunity to cheat in such a way if we/I hadn’t allowed him to see our papers. My only defense here would be that my friend group often lets each other look through essays and whatnot, with the full expectation that they are being read only 1) for editing purposes, and 2) to spark ideas for their own assignment, like the samples our teachers sometimes show us for prompts/projects/papers. So I fully am admitting that I am at fault here, too. I probably shouldn’t have ever let anyone see my assignments that weren’t specifically designated group assignments, even if those assignments were ostensibly being read for solely curiosity’s sake or etc., and vice versa.
In the end my principal and vice principal decided that since it was the first infraction of any type of all of ours, and that all of us were top students (current #1, and then 2, 3, etc., except for the guy who copied our papers word for word actually . . .), no official disciplinary action would be taken. Meaning that none of us got ISS, OSS, or even a 0 on the assignment. Instead we simply had to redo the assignment, which I agree is more than fair.
My question is (sorry for the really long explanation) do I answer yes if there are academic misconduct/discipline history questions on college applications?