Straight-A student, by Polina Iureva

It was 2013 in the sweet town of Kemerovo, Russia.
I was working full-time as a project manager at a provincial IT company while studying economics at university. Soon, to complete the Tax Law course, I had to take an exam.

Here is the thing: some people don’t vibe with pop music.
I don’t vibe with exams.

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In some cases, a student could exchange a banknote for an A, or a smaller banknote for a B, if you know what I mean.
A project manager in a provincial IT company, though, doesn’t negotiate twenty times over the color of a button, only to spend all her hard-earned money on stupid exams.

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The Tax Law course also included weekly tests, which were written at the beginning of time and had remained unchanged ever since. The first students must have submitted answers on stone walls in a cave; later, the process was automated.

The computer program saved hundreds of hours of labor, but it had a small imperfection – if you clicked twice, the correct answer would be highlighted.

The results showed that, for years, even the Federal Tax Service didn't know the tax law as well as the students at my university.

The professor asked the IT department to fix the bug. They replied with something about the benefits of algorithm complexity within a state machine on a remote server. My professor never asked anything again.

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I smelled opportunity.

What if I developed a new program? Would it count for a final A in the course?
It would.

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In truth, a project manager in a provincial IT company can develop nothing. For the job, you need no hard skills – just a bright smile and a tendency to overestimate your own capabilities.

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My professor brought a stack of papers with all the test questions and multiple-choice answers. She looked pleased.
The stack was thick enough to serve as a press for sauerkraut. It would have taken 100 years and three days to retype it all. (There was no AI text recognition back then.)
She had outsmarted me. I should have just learned 15 exam questions and sat still.

Nevertheless, one must never underestimate a project manager in a provincial IT company. Nothing builds character quite like connecting a client's ERP system to their online shop. Anyone who once stood in the fire between accounting department and marketing team fears nothing.

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Since the tests had never changed, the old, flawed program already had them digitized.

The computer rooms at the university had bars on the windows and steel doors. Pentium 3 was guarded more thoroughly than a member of the Witness Protection Program.

Luckily, every class has that one student no one has ever seen. So when a person walked in and copied a couple of files onto a USB stick, no one batted an eye.

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The Internet has everything.
Including the aforementioned flawed program and the codec to recover all its content as plain text.

Since the need for tests is not quite unique to Kemerovo, Russia, the Internet already had a program that worked great, didn't give away all the right answers, and was distributed under an open-source license – meaning everyone could use it for free.

It took me no more than an hour to upload all the questions.
The hardest part was inventing a heartfelt story for the professor about how hard I worked and how many nights it had taken me.

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I graduated from university as a straight-A student.

Until the last semester, I had to take a total of exactly one exam.
Actually, in most cases, I had to seriously study for that to happen, but that would make an extremely lame story.

On another occasion, a professor taught market economy but hated its guts. He was a hard-core communist, you see. To skip the exam, I had to recite Karl Marx.
“Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!”
Don't ask.

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