You’ve heard, of course, of athletes secretly taking performance-enhancing drugs to enable them to play emotionally and physically above their natural ability.

But how about the students sitting on both sides of you during a crucial exam? Are they “high” on something?

Jordan Stover

I would have scoffed at the idea of students pumping up on chemicals just to get a higher grade until I took the grueling Law School Admission Test, high on nothing, and found out I was on an uneven playing field.

I worked hard for months using nothing but my own God-given ability to build up my endurance for the intense, 175-minute exam. I later learned that other test-takers had come up with another, less ethical solution: Adderall.

While I struggled to stay focused, other students were “zoned in” throughout the exam with little effort thanks to their performance-enhancing drug.

Like baseball players juiced up on steroids, they were hitting the ball out of the park, surpassing those of us who could have passed a drug test.

Like steroids in baseball, using Adderall on exams is cheating — unless you are diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder.

There’s a reason the LSAT and other exams are designed to test endurance. Graduate schools require hours of hard work every day. If you can’t handle that work without performance-enhancing drugs, you are not likely to succeed.

Yes, caffeine is a performance-enhancing drug, and I use it like it’s going out of style. I can’t make it through the day without a cup of coffee, and I drank some the morning of the LSAT.

The difference is that caffeine is legal, and available to everyone.

It’s illegal to obtain Adderall without a prescription. It was designed to help people with a disorder perform at a normal level, not to give lazy students a short cut to good standardized test scores.

Do yourself and everyone else a favor — don’t cheat.

You don’t want to be the Mark McGwire of standardized tests. You might get a high score, but as McGwire’s home run record will be tainted forever by his acknowledged steroid use, your academic record will always be surrounded by a cloud of doubt.

— Jordan Stover is a senior from Rome majoring in magazines and sociology