Yeah, kind of wish she hadn’t added that part. Reminded me of old Scooby-Doo episodes where villains say they would’ve got away with it if it wasn’t for those meddling kids!
The problem of OP is not the cheating itself. It is actually the unhealthy attitude on how unlucky or dumb that she got caught.
The OP wants to “send a letter of explanation and talk about how my family members’ illness affected me and my grades, but refrain from mentioning the cheating incident.” I will believe that the OP owns this incident when s/he does the opposite: writes a letter of explanation explaining that they cheated and leaving out the family member’s illness. The OP should also learn not to hide behind minimizing words. S/he didn’t do something “foolish” or “stupid.” It was unethical and wrong. As for the title: “Caught Cheating on Midterms,” try this next time: “I Cheated on Midterms.”
There will never be a time in one’s life when one cannot point to a friend or family member who is undergoing trauma and claim that this affects you. A coma is serious, but since the OP doesn’t give any detail, preferring not to discuss the importance of that relationship but rather the pressure of AP exams and what a great student they are and strategize about how to make this go away… I’m (forgive me) skeptical. There’s a chance that the illness is mostly an excuse.
From my perspective, the student has exposed her experience on an open forum, explained her situation, her punishment, her thinking & has accepted all comments in a dignified & respectful manner. Some posters have made it quite clear that they want more remorse. The OP has been through a period of pressure, family hardship & personal embarrassment, yet is gracefully accepting all points of view. Give her time & forgiveness. I think that she is mature enough to learn from her past mistakes despite her open observation in post #19.
Personally, I don’t have a problem with post #19. The OP states how she was caught, and mentions a few posts later that she simply is responding to an earlier post wondering how that could happen. She isn’t necessarily blaming the teacher for changing the prompt or bemoaning how close she got to getting away with it. Maybe she is, but we don’t know that, and she states that wasn’t her implication.
The lesson I hope the OP will learn from this discussion is that to try to convince colleges that the reason for the C- is the AP pressure and a family health crisis, when she knows that isn’t true, is being dishonest. The original post says the grade “plummeted” because of the zero on the test. So most of the problem was simply the cheating. If the OP decides not to write a letter and resolves to not do anything similar in the future, that’s all anyone could expect.
I agree with @aquapt Students are under a lot of pressure these days to be the best at something, yet there is always someone better than they are. Parents can be the source of that pressure. I have known parents who help their child cheat. I was sitting in front of 2 moms laughing and talking about their sons asking what they (the parent) wrote in the child’s college application essay. If that child gets admitted due to their essay, another child who may have written their own essay, doesn’t get in, that isn’t right. I have also known of someone getting caught cheating on a chem midterm and the teacher stating while the policy is to give them a zero, because they are in line to be valedictorian, the teacher was told that they couldn’t give them an zero. What message does this send to the kids? I still remember in the greek houses, that they had a file. Members put their A papers and tests in the file so that they could be used again at a later date by another member. Non greeks didn’t have the same option. Cheating, in it’s various forms, has become so wide spread that even at the community college level, employees go through training as to how to spot it and how to handle it.
Post number 19 is LOL worthy. But OPS real issue is that she has too many reaches, period, What she should take from the thread is the realization that her application list is more of a worry than the cheating.
Agreed, @GloriaVaughn and @Sybylla . From reading OP’s posts, I think she is less skilled than many elite-college applicants at taking her readers’ point of view and managing their perceptions. I think a lot of less-honest but more “slick” young people would be able to come off more sympathetically under the same circumstances, when they might well just be skilled manipulators who deserve less sympathy.
It is, in fact, her relative clumsiness at portraying her situation that makes me suspect that her essays were already not going to counterbalance her GPA and get her into elite schools. To me, she reads like a writer who could use more coaching in perspective-taking, establishing context, and building persuasive arguments. Is she really revealing indifference to right and wrong, and/or opportunism regarding her family member’s illness? Or does her writing just lack the nuance and evocativeness to communicate her underlying feelings and values? I don’t think we can know, and I’m not sure why we need to know. It’s not like we’re being asked to go out on a limb to advocate for her. Can we not just accept that we can’t possibly have the full picture, and either offer the requested feedback or not, as we see fit?
All moral judgments aside, I agree that OP’s college list is not only reach-heavy, but also prestige-driven without any other discernible common theme. It’s impossible to infer from that list what she is actually looking for in a college experience, or if she even knows what she’s looking for other than a trophy school. And her writing does not come off, to me, like it comes from a strong candidate for Stanford/Cornell/etc. This situation seems like a failure on the part of the guidance counselor, if OP is reporting his/her advice accurately. I’m sure OP is well-qualified for many moderately-competitive schools; but she would benefit from a college with a strong core curriculum that will develop her as a writer, communicator, and critical thinker, not one that will assume that foundation is already in place. (This isn’t intended as pointed criticism - it is true of more and more high school graduates, as the HS curriculum shifts toward an AP test-prep arms race rather than truly cultivating the skill-set that high school is supposed to impart.) I still think she might consider a few additional well-chosen applications to schools with later deadlines, if she wants to have options beyond the large public U’s she is likely to get into. But to make any useful suggestions, we would need to know all of those things about her that we can’t figure out from her current list of schools. And she hasn’t, as of yet, asked for that kind of advice.
Here’s my concern: this thread is about having gotten caught cheating on the exam. It’s not about regretting the choice to cheat, it’s about the regret that she was caught.
The OP expressed regret in her very first post in this thread. Post #19 was in response to another post.
OP’s college list is decent, although a bit top heavy. Four UCs including safety Riverside. She is a California student & resident, and her school advisor assessed her chances presumably based on her school’s history at placing students in the UC system and at seven other (11 total) California schools.
Her writing fine & appropriate for this forum. OP seems to be handling her situation in a mature & reasonable manner.
Too much anger on this thread…
As has been said a gazillion times, when someone applies to schools with admission rates below 20%, these are reaches for everyone. And I agree tht the comment that the OP didn’t bother to read the prompt for the essay (um…huh??) and if so, or if the prompt hadn’t changed that she’d have gotten away with it b/c language teachers don’t check for plagiarism , that doesn’t sound conciliatory. There is a big difference between explaining and excusing. This sounds like a poor attempt at the latter.
I admit that it is very cowardly to hide behind the excuse of my relative falling into a coma, when I should be facing head on about the consequences of my cheating. I hate myself for even thinking of sending a letter of explanation as an option and exploiting my loved one’s coma by stating it is the main reason.
But on the other hand, I am worried about the ‘successfulness’ of my future and do not want this mistake to take away my chances of ‘doing well.’ I feel as though I need to ‘save’ what little there is of my potential, and this is the only way I can think of. I understand everybody’s point of view, as I thought of it myself as well (considering I am living this situation, I can definitely say I have many opinions running through my head), but also please understand my desperation and hopelessness.
I know I definitely deserve these consequences and should have never attempted to cheat; but because this is in the past and I can’t change my actions, I would really appreciate it if people could give advice of what to do onwards. Thank you.
@aquapt Thank you very much for your advice and your defense! I enjoyed reading all three of your posts and will take your advice into consideration. I agree that I would “benefit from a college with a strong core curriculum that will develop [me] as a writer, communicator, and critical thinker.” My writing skills are not as good as I wish them to do and I plan to develop them at college, wherever that may be.
From your first paragraph of your third post, I was wondering if my essays are pretty good, would they be able to strongly counteract my GPA? Also, an update: my GPA as of now is 3.724 UW and 4.038 W. I could perhaps send my common app to you for you to review my writing skills. I am very new to this website and I am not sure if that is allowed. Please advise me, thank you.
Do you know your rank, perchance?? Do you go to a private prep school? And your parents are going to be full pay to all these OOS schools? You are not expecting merit/FA?
Sure, @JollyoRanchero , feel free to send me a private message. Good essays can certainly help, within reason. (Stanford for an “unhooked” female Californian with your GPA? No essay is going to pull that off. But if you’re in range for admission at a given school, strong essays can make the difference.) Your situation is far from hopeless; you’ve had a setback, but you will have plenty of options and opportunities. It seems as if you panicked and did something that was out of character. (Because any habitual, premeditated cheater would have been more careful about reading the question!) The people at your school, who know you personally, decided to limit the consequences; I see no reason for strangers on the internet to judge you more harshly, especially when you were brave enough to put your situation out there and weather all of the criticism that followed. It’s far from the worst mistake a 17-18y/o ever made, and you can get past it. 
You ask for advice on what to do going forward. My advice was to not send the letter because it would not be honest to place all the blame for a C- on outside factors and omit your own responsibility for it. People on this thread may have different opinions about how significant the initial cheating was, or how remorseful you seem, but I don’t remember anyone saying, “Yes, go ahead and send the letter.”
It may seem like such a letter will make all the difference, but really most or possibly all of your schools would have the same decision if you got a B- or a C- for one semester grade, and most or possibly all will have the same decision whether or not you send a letter. And even if it affected one college’s decision, your success in life is not based on one college’s decision.
One more thing (and this is probably, as someone said, piling on): Imagine you’re an admissions officer. You have an applicant with an uncharacteristic C- and a letter saying it was caused by some family issues. You email the student’s guidance counselor to say that there was no mention in the midyear report about any issues, and you want to know how serious the situation is in order to fairly evaluate the applicant. The guidance counselor says, yes, there are some issues, but the main reason for the C- was cheating on a midterm. How do you feel about the applicant now–and not so much the cheating, but the sending of the letter to avoid any consequences of it?
To put it another way, if you feel bad about doing something, it’s probably a bad thing to do.
I agree with @Wilson98 ^^ who said better what I was trying to articulate.
Incidentally, OP, your “chances of doing well” are excellent no matter what college you go to. Right now you may be caught up in some pressures about which college is better, but that will fade immediately once you start doing college work. Your older self will be glad you didn’t try to blame this cheating on a family member’s illness.
OP, you’re digging yourself into a hole with the attempts to explain. That’s what some posters here are picking up on.
With a 3.78, you’ve obviously gotten grades below A, which will matter. And the fact your UW is 4.01 suggests some of that was in honors or AP (because the W bump is so small.) That already puts your apps to super reaches at risk.
And I agree with @Wilson98 that for a surprise C-, adcoms will look to the GC for some understanding (maybe they call or email, but more likely, they simply take ten seconds to see if the GC already submitted something in your defense.) BUT, that’s when an academically strong and otherwise compelling candidate has a flub. Not for borderline or meh.
And while seniors think the “competition” is about admissions, for colleges Stanford, Penn, Cornell, and maybe Berkeley, adcoms are very well aware the real challenge is once admitted, what happens under the pressure of a very high bar, among peers qualified at a very high level.
If this is how you react to pressure, your best bet for college success, the years that form your future skills, may be a less stressful college environment. Tippy tops are no cakewalk. It’s not just getting in that works any magic.
In my opinion, the OP is an excellent writer, and much more clever than most of us.