<p>Ugh, guilty is an understatement. So I left studying for an exam until the last minute, and decided to pull an all-nighter to study for it...thing is, I accidentally fell asleep and woke up half an hour before my class. So I panicked, and...wrote my professor an e-mail pretending to be sick. There was no way that I was going to pass that exam in the mental shape I was in (trust me), and exams are more than ten percent of your final grade, and I just couldn't risk it. I feel horribly guilty about that, though; I'm not the kind of person who usually does something like this, and now I'm trying to convince myself that this isn't who I am because this isn't what I usually do; I don't usually cheat or take the easy way out when it comes to school. I don't even know if the professor will let me make it up (if I were her, I sure as hell would know when her students were trying to get out of something), but if she does, I'll definitely study my ass off. If there's anything to alleviate my guilt at this point it's that there is grain of truth in the e-mail, because I did wake up feeling physcially crappy (although it was probably my panicked oh-my-god-I'm-screwed state of mind that did it). What would you guys have done if you woke up this morning in my position?</p>
<p>It's nowhere near as bad as if you cheated off of someone else's paper or stole the exam beforehand. It's definitely unfair to many of your classmates, but it's certainly not completely illegal ("sick" is a subjective term). Just don't do it too often or the teacher will get suspicious and it might raise some complaints from students who think it's unfair (and it is). I know it isn't a very good justification, but almost everyone does this for one exam or another. I'm pretty sure some CCers do this regularly, with CC having such a "beat the game" attitude.</p>
<p>"The end excuses any evil." -Sophocles-</p>
<p>That is definitely not the message of the whole book! There's a lot more to it than that!</p>