After sitting through hours and hours of the PSAT a few weeks ago, I was in desperate need of a good laugh. Logically, I entered a Google search for memes about the test to find jokes made and shared by thousands of other high school students. As I scrolled through posts about electromagnetic bees and neighborhood chat rooms, smiling, I still felt some hesitation — hadn’t I promised not to support the dissemination of information about the exam just hours earlier?

Before taking the PSAT, I, along with other test takers around the world, signed a pledge in which we promised to keep its content confidential—we promised not to make memes. Yet, they popped up all over the internet in the following days.

The justification? The contract was unreasonable, that memes don’t really give anything away about the test. Students didn’t make them to cheat, they made them because they thought they’re fun, lighthearted, and harmless.

But who are we to decide?

Maybe the consequences of a joke are basically nonexistent. Maybe the College Board was overreacting. The fact is, though, that we still broke a promise.

The problem mostly lies in that we students give ourselves the authority to determine which rules are worth following. Many of us consider ourselves above the law. We let our personal opinions influence our actions, regardless of our previous commitments.

But when we’re guided by our morals, which vary from person to person and can be flawed, it’s hard to define a line. Most Parker students would agree that copying the answers to a test is unacceptable. But what about sharing the level of difficulty or general content of a test with a friend who has yet to take it?  What about Googling a translation of a text for your foreign language class that you tried but couldn’t seem to understand, or reading Sparknotes instead of the actual book because you didn’t have time? Though my teachers have stressed the importance of avoiding each, I see these situations play out fairly regularly — almost as if they’ve been normalized by the ease and unlikeliness of being caught.  

The reason that these common violations occur isn’t that Parker students are immoral cheaters, eager to break academic integrity standards. It’s that generally we’re diligent students who care about our grades. Many of us are busy, and we’re not always able to study enough or devote the time to an assignment that it deserves. Some of us just might be lazy. Regardless, if there’s a small action that can make our lives a little easier, we take advantage of it — as long as we don’t think it’s too wrong.

Still, Parker students must be conscious of the fact that we aren’t exactly qualified to determine what’s right or not. We should consider not only the explicit consequences of our actions, but also what our defiance reveals about our character.