For my social computing class, the first assignment is called "Assignment 1 : Going Viral". We were tasked with creating a viral post. Our grade on the assignment depends on whether or not we are able to go viral. It was a competition, where the person who's post goes the most viral automatically received a score of 100.

Like I said, I conveniently already happen to have a social media following. Nothing crazy, but like 50k followers. There was no mention of whether or not you have to use a new account for the assignment, and in fact it was explicitly stated that it doesn't matter.

Again, our grade depended on being able to create a post that goes viral. If you can't, you essentially fail the assignment or get a C. I didn't think it was fair to use my account because it would give me an advantage, so I created a new account to try to make something go viral.

I kept trying to make posts that would do well, but nothing would get any traction. As the deadline approached, I started to get sort of desperate. I began to realize that my "morality" was going to make me fail the assignment. The day before the assignment was due, I just decided, fuck it. I posted a video on my account with 50k followers.

The video ended up doing better than most of my personal videos that I make just for fun, and ended up getting around 1 million views. Many other classmates had successful posts, but they were mostly around the range of 100 - 300 thousand views. When I realized I was going to win the competition, I already started to get nervous because I knew what was going to happen.

They announced me as the winner in class and that I would receive the 100. And, oh my god, I have never seen looks of such contentment. Of course, my classmates were really pissed off because they think it wasn't fair.

I get it. I really do. I didn't want to win the competition. But at the same time, was I supposed to fail the assignment due to my morality? I did take the 100 from someone who probably deserved it more, but nobody else's grade was negatively affected. I feel really bad about it, but at the same time I don't regret it because otherwise I might have failed (or at least gotten a C) in the class.

I guess the question here is not ass much, am I the asshole, as am I justified in resorting to being the asshole? What would you have done in this scenario? Should I tell the professor I already had a following and to give the 100 to the person with the second most views?