This happened to me once. I don't know what to think...

I was studying Macbeth in English at high school. The teacher said "the exam is next week. You can read books wriiten by literary ctirics. But you really should use your own ideas". I was so busy with other subjects that I didn't read any critical analyses; I had read the play of course.. Then two days before the exam I started to worry. I read a long essay by a US critic about how Macbeth was not a hero.

Then the exam came. The topic was "Is Macbeth a Hero?" Suddenly the whole essay that I had read poured through my head. I proceeded basically from memory [this was a closed book exam] to give the same arguments that the critic had. Including from memory quoting from parts of Macbeth.

A few weeks later my English teacher gave me an A for the exam and said on my school report "impressive, original, thoughtful response that went deep into Macbeth's inner emotions and motivations". I felt bad. I felt unworthy of the mark. But I didn't know if I had cheated or not. In a sense I hadn't. Had I ? Sure. I hadn't acknwledged the source. But in an exam thats closed book you can't be expected to. I'd done the work to read it. I'd even out researched the teacher who had a phd and was a great teacher who knew a heck of a lot. Should I have felt bad for that?

Yet I thought about telling him and asking for the mark to be lowered. If I had run into him - he was the school senior director of studies so sometimes he was hard to find - I might have. I still feel bad about it all.