A study was designed to investigate the ways in which graduate students respond to the fact that their competence must be repeatedly valued by means of grades, written and oral examinations, letters of recommendations, dissertation approvals, and various less official procedures. Some students, the gamesmen, have developed strategies for evading or delaying this kind of evaluation or for achieveing success without performing all of the required work. Other students, the grinds, work long hours and follow the letter of the law to meet all requirements. A scale was developed for measuring a student's propensity for beating the system. It was then possible to establish some quantitative relationship between the propensity and various factors in the academic structure and the students' backgrounds, present situations, and personalities. The basic data came from interviews with 72 graduate students in the departments of chemistry, economics, and English at the University of California at Berkeley. (Author/MSE)