And Then There Were None Essay

Mrs.Belden

Honors English 1

9 September 2014

And Then There Were None Essay

Part 1

If I was ever in a situation where I would cheat on an exam to get an A there will probably be several things that would lead up to when I would finally admit to doing it.  Right from the very beginning I will feel awful and a tremendous amount of guilt in the days following meeting up at Starbucks and cheating.  When I take the exam a week later I will try to push away the rush of guilt for listening to the people at Starbucks and cheating.  “All I need to do is focus on getting the questions right on this exam,” I would tell myself.  Once the test results get back and I know I got an A, I start to feel even more guilt and regret for my actions.  How could I have ever gone as far as to cheat on an exam?  Each time someone brings up the exam and tells me how good I did more guilt would build up inside until it got unbearable.  It would be so hard to even look at a Starbucks without all the guilt crashing down on me making it hard to breath.  After a few day, once I figure out one of the kids in the study group admits to cheating - taking all of the blame, I wouldn’t be able to take it anymore and would confess.  Even though getting a 0% on the exam would be horrible, living with all this guilt and knowing that someone who confessed was getting all the punishment and blame would be even worse.  I am not sure that I would give the names of the other people in the group that cheated right away because I would want to give them a chance to do the right thing.  In the end though I would probably give the names anyway just to be fair to the people that didn’t cheat.  Overall even though I would probably never be put in this situation this is how I think I would react.

There are several different reasons why students would cheat but these are the most common reasons why.  The most common reason why a student would cheat would probably be because they forgot to do their homework or study for a test so they would cheat off of someone else to get a good grade.  Another reason why a student would cheat may be because they don’t even want to take the time in the first place to complete their homework so they just copy someone elses.  Some students may not think that this is wrong because in most cases the person they are cheating off of knows and lets them do it.  This makes the student think that if the person they are cheating off of doesn’t care then it can’t be wrong.  A second reason why students may think this is ok is because they would argue that it is just homework and they were working “together” on it.  A third and final reason why someone might want to cheat is because they aren’t confident in what they are being tested over even though they study so they think the only way to get a good grade is by cheating just like the people in the situation above.  There are many different reasons why students cheat although these would probably be the three most common reasons.

Part 2 (Dr.Armstrong)

Today when I got to Starbucks for the study group someone handed me a copy of the math exam.  At first I was appalled that they think I would be ok with this, but after listening to the reasons why this wasn’t really cheating I started to warm up to the idea and ended up staying because I need all the help I can get on this exam.  Besides I had never gotten all A’s on my exams because the math exam always tripped me up.  This time I might finally have a chance at getting all A’s.  The study session went really well and after a few more days of studying I was ready to take the exam.  When my math teacher handed me the exam and said “Good Luck” I felt a pinch of guilt because luck had nothing to do with me getting a good grade on this exam.  All of  my guilt quickly vanished when I opened up the exam and figured out how easy this was going to be.  When I finally got the test back and figured out I aced the exam I wasn’t as happy as I thought I would be because I did not really earn this good grade and knew I couldn’t have done this without going to that study group at Starbucks.  That’s when all the guilt started to come.  When my friends started asking me what I got on the exam I couldn’t tell them how well I did without feeling even more guilt.  Especially when they started to congratulate me.  The worst was when I told my parents how well I did and my mom told me she was so proud of me because she knew how hard I had worked.  Little did she know that all that time I was “studying” I was really trying to memorize the order of the questions on the exam and their answers.  The next day when I went to school things got even worse.  Word was going around that some guy cheated on the math exam and is now receiving a 0%.  I started to get very nervous and jittery because I thought they were talking about me.  I didn’t know for sure so I acted like this was news to me and who would do such a thing. Once someone mentioned the name of another person in the study group I started to wonder if I would get caught too until they said that he was taking all the blame.  I thought I would be relieved to hear this news but turns out I felt even worse because I knew this kid and he would have never cheated if we hadn’t  pressured him into doing it.  Now with his big heart he was taking all the blame for us without even blinking twice and I knew how much his grades meant to him.  I had to do something, but what ?  I couldn’t say that I had also cheated because that would mean that I would receive a 0% on the exam and I couldn’t afford that!  While I was thinking of a way to help this kid out I passed a Starbucks.  The same Starbucks that we had our study group at.  I couldn’t even look at it without having the guilt suffocate me so I kept walking with my head down.  When I got home my parents had made me a special dinner to celebrate getting A’s on all of my exams.  My grades meant a lot to me and since this was the first time I had ever gotten all A’s on my exams my parents were making a big deal out of it.  My mom gave a little speech about how proud she was of me and how much she knew I had worked to get all the A’s (especially in math because it was my worst subject) on my exams.  That is when I knew I couldn’t break her heart by telling her I cheated on the exam.  I also couldn’t tell the school because my grades meant too much to me.  I couldn’t afford to get a 0% on the exam and fail the class.  Sure I would never be able to walk into a Starbucks again without feeling a tremendous amount of guilt but I couldn’t put my grades in jeopardy by confessing.  I would just have to keep this secret to myself and live with the guilt.  I mean, how bad can guilt be?

Part 3

There are several reasons why I chose Dr. Armstrong to make certain decisions in part 2.  These reasons are due to the quotes and Dr. Armstrong’s actions in Agatha Christie's book and how I interpreted it into this scenario.  The reason why I chose Dr. Armstrong not to confess to cheating in the end unlike me was because in the book Armstrong says, “Lucky that he’d managed to pull himself together in time after that business ten-no fifteen years ago. It had been a near thing…...He’d cut out drinking altogether”(Christie13).  This shows that he did feel guilty for killing that lady when he was drunk but not guilty enough to confess and put his business in danger.  He separates himself from the situation.  That is why in part two he did not confess, even though I would, because although he felt bad for the boy and wanted to help him, his grades meant too much to him to throw them away by receiving a 0% on the exam and confessing.  I could never do this because I would want to earn the grade fairly.  In the quote Dr. Armstrong also says that, “He’d cut out drinking altogether” because drinking was the reason why he had killed that lady and it had brought back the guilt of his actions.  That’s why in part 2 I made him mention that he would never be able to look at Starbucks the same way again because it reminded him of cheating and brought back the guilt just like the alcohol did in the book.  The second quote I used from the book was when Dr. Armstrong was acting like he did not know who the voice was talking about when he was accused of killing the woman.  The other characters were sitting in the room asking why he was accused of killing this woman and all he did was deny even knowing her by saying, “The name meant nothing to me when it was spoken.  What was it- Clees? Close? I really can’t remember having a patient of that name, or being connected with a death in any way”(Christie71).  This quote shows that Dr. Armstrong was trying to play it cool when the voice accused him of the murder by acting like he had no idea what they were talking about.  That is why in part 2 I had Dr. Armstrong act like he had no idea what his friends were talking about when someone said that a student had cheated on the exam until he knew for sure that he wasn’t going to get caught.  This quote also is the reason why I chose him to be appalled at the thought of cheating in the beginning at Starbucks but then warmed up to it when his friends explained that it is not really cheating.  This quote shows that Dr. Armstrong tends to block stuff out if it is to his benefit just like it was in the quote and at Starbucks.  In conclusion I mostly used the book and it’s quotes to guide me on how Dr. Armstrong’s character would react to the situation.

Although I did not write the book And Then There Were None I tried to copy Agatha Christie’s writing style.  One way I did this was by talking about guilt and how it affected Dr. Armstrong’s actions in the scenario that was given because in her book guilt was the main theme.  Guilt drives the plotline by effecting the character’s actions and how they interact with others.  Another way I did this was by using the character’s personality that Ms. Christie had already developed in the book and trying to transfer it to this situation by reading quotes in the book and figuring out how the characteristics in the quote would transfer into this situation.  Overall even though I am not Agatha Christie I tried to transfer some of her writing style into the situation that was given in part 2 using Dr. Armstrong’s character.