Comparing being not in the top 10% of your class to being emaciated is a very illuminating example of the downsides of East Asian culture.

Exactly... rip

You should read about Nietzsche and his philosophy.

In particular, where in the world did we get the idea that cheating is bad? The answer to this question is easy if you're religious, but if you're not (which I'm assuming is the case as you are from China), then the most obvious answer is - because everyone else thinks so. It's because of the rules and values drilled into us by society, and in this case, school, not because of personal choice.

I'm going to assume the reader is not religious for the rest of this comment. In that case, you know that life has no intrinsic property of "fairness", so that hard work and results don't correlate at all, and the idea that cheating is negative is not so certain, especially after realizing that the nonexistence of universal morals means that we get to choose what is right and wrong.

But of course it's more complicated than this. We need to strike a balance between free-for-all individualism where people start doing whatever they want to others for personal gain and conformity where people are dictated what to do and what to believe in. I believe the solution to this lies in what we believe the goal of life to be.

If you believe the end goal is to maximize carnage among others, then acts such as cheating are completely justified. But most people have more conservative goals such as living better lives and furthering the human species. To achieve this end, we make mutual agreements not to do certain things (killing, etc.), not because these acts make our lives worse (who knows, maybe you can gain a lot from killing someone), but because by this mutual agreement all of our lives can be improved, and after a sufficiently large number of people join the agreement, critical mass is achieved and the punishment for committing such an act becomes too high to perform (eg. jail, death sentence, etc.).

But how does this fit in with the "crime" of cheating? In particular, does the mutual abstinence from cheating make each of our lives better? Perhaps if schools were actually good at teaching, and our education system produced educated individuals who were capable of contributing to society positively, then cheating would be bad because it allows less-educated individuals to join society. But ultimately, I don't believe this is the case, and I'm sure you don't either. As a result, it does not truly make sense for individuals to have strong morals against cheating.

Tl;dr, choose your morals and values carefully, and make sure your selections are justified rather than imposed by other people.

That's a great point that got me thinking. My personal goal in life is to squeeze out every bit of potential I have and be the best person I can be. I think the goal of society, on the other hand, is to create a system in which every person has the opportunity to utilize their talents and to be who they want to me. Because so, I believe every person who enters society is born into a contract (echoing Enlightenment ideals) that they must fulfill, in return for which they obtain rights, property, and opportunities. Logically, cheating, then, is an act that gives inferior individuals unfair advantages that prevents others from achieving their goals and ultimately goes against what I think the goal of society is. As a result, the reason I've never cheated up until now is due to my respect for what I believe is the goal of society. At my school, however, many, many students act on a much different rationale, specifically, solely that of self-interest to achieve high marks and go to Ivy League colleges. Most of them are doing so to satisfy their parents, whose tempers fluctuate according to the student's grades. As a result, cheating is in quite widespread in my school (perhaps not directly, but asking what's on the test from those who took it already or asking for infinitely many retakes). This is, in fact, why the entire retake system of my school changed from infinitely many retakes to one single retake per semester with a ceiling of B+. Because of this type of behavior from inferior students, the top students, who do respect the system, have to suffer as well.

Perhaps the reason why I did what I did was because I got so sick of such disrespect from these inferior students that I don't want them to interfere with who I want to be. After all, my parents pay the expensive tuition to my school, and the school's job is to set me up in the position to be who I want to be. If this isn't the case, I'm just going to have to do things my way.

Nevertheless, what I did acted on impulse and frustration and goes against what is right (from my values in society), and therefore I will not do such things again.... unless I have no other choice.