It was a compiler we had to make for a CS class, and notoriously the hardest class of the major. I showed up to pass off the project nervous, knowing some of the stuff wasn't working great, but I was out of time. The teacher told me to load up my program, then started giving me operations to pass off while he watched his stock ticker on CNBC, engaged at the same time in answering some emails. Whenever I'd pass off an operation, he'd take a look, then mark it off.

The thing was, I could do all the operations if done in a certain way, but if done in another way, some of it would have failed, but since I was sitting at the computer, not to the professor, it was easy enough to do. I'd been banging my head against some of this stuff for weeks, and knew exactly how to get stuff to work, and how it would crash the system.

I've always felt a little weird about that A, especially since it was literally the last thing I had to pass before graduation. Was it cheating, or just gaming the system, or is there real difference between the two?