I find myself having issues with the ending though.
yeah i don't like the ending much either. after being so on board with the movie up to that part, after bringing up the issues of hyper-competitiveness in academics and the high pressure it exerts on the youth, wealth disparity and how that affects the education system, and how despite what you're told hard work DOESN'T always pay off, it's kind of deflating to have it end with the simplistic 'cheating is bad' message. Lynn was "forced" to admit to the cheating because Bank threatens to reveal it and if she was going to talk about it anyway, I would have liked to see her using that opportunity to comment on the whole nature of standardized testing rather than the simple 'yup i was wrong and let's move on" take. If it had a better ending, it would have been an easy 9/10 for me since it's so entertaining otherwise. As I said before, I'm usually way more nitpicky about smaller details but this is one of those rare movies where I don't care as much and I'm invested either way and I'm absolutely willing to suspend my disbelief. With a lot of other movies I would have just lost interest when too many of those conveniences started piling up but here I'm a lot more forgiving because it's so entertaining.
like when they're getting the answers back and the printer gets stuck or the phone gets cracked, there's already so many issues they're running into that it was just a "ah come on" moment that it just felt unnecessary. or when she's initially trying to vomit in class and nobody looks up until she actually does when she was making those sounds for like 20 seconds before? or how Lynn is struggling so hard to remember the last couple answers before sending the text. at that that point it's like two questions out of like 100, just say fuck it lol. how many of those kids would believably get perfect scores anyway.
but there are so many more moments that i really love.
like when it's revealed that there's two sets of questions for the test; it's a fun 'oh shit' moment that reminded me of the times when there was that one genius in class who was like "There's a back side?"
or when Lynn first gets busted for cheating and the principal uses Bank as an example of a deserving student and he just fucking winces and you see he just wants to die inside lmao because he knows he fucked everything up for her.