In my freshman year English class, we had these really stupid 5-point online vocab assignments for homework on a program designed by a then-junior and were required to do about an hour of that vocab work each week. Like the rest of my class, I didn’t do them until Sunday night, which was fine because it was only about an hour.
But one week, it was 11:30 at night, and I’d completely forgotten about the assignment. So, being the dumbass I was, I fiddled around with the code a bit on the website until I found an line that let me change how much time I’d spent on it. I changed it to an hour (and a few minutes) and thought that was the end of that.
Turns out the guy who’d built the program wrote a failsafe that would detect if someone altered the code as I had (I’m not a Comp Sci guy, so this probably isn’t that accurate). But the point is that my teacher found out, and I got sent to the dean’s office.
Wasn’t that big of a deal, actually. She asked me if I “cheated” (I repeat that it was a very minor, 5-point assignment), and I said that I did. Luckily, she said that all that would happen is I would get a zero on the assignment. No suspension, detention, or anything like that.
I transferred schools later in my sophomore year and moved 400 miles away, and again, I thought that was the end of it until 10 minutes ago when I saw the academic infractions section on the Common App. Should I report this as an incident? I’m not sure if that old school would report it to colleges, but I’m also wondering if this would even count as an infraction.
TL:DR I “hacked” a minor online assignment so that it looked complete, but I got caught and received a zero. No detention or suspension. Is this an academic infraction on the CA?
P.S. I didn’t spend that much time and thought into this post (it’s more of just a rant), so please mind my grammar thnx