Academic Cheating

[Adam]

What were your best cheating tactics in high school or college on tests or papers?

[Blarg]

Wait, we were supposed to actually take tests?

[halobob]

Wearing shorts and taping a cheet sheet on my thigh so I could pull my shorts up and see it.

Hiding a book in the bathroom then asking to go use the bathroom during the test.

[Blarg]

Once in an English class I made up a bunch of supporting quotes and a ficticious bibliography to support a thesis about a book I never read. It was probably the most work I put into an essay the entire year.

[Adam]

In college, most of my midterms and finals required us to answer essay questions in a blue book. Most of my professors provided stamped blue books for us. One professor simply had us provide our own blue books. His exams included 4 essay questions. He provided us with 5 potential questions to study before the exam. On exam day, he chose 4 of the 5 as the test questions. From those 4 we had to answer 3.

So, I brought 2-3 different blue books to class with answers to at least 2 of the questions already completed.

Edited November 16, 2015 by Adam

[Angel Dog and Beer]

I had a couple foolproof methods

[Hollyw00d]

So you just pretended you were writing for an hour?

[Tank]

was dishonest once in college.

 

it was a chemistry class and we were taking it in an auditorium with terraced seating. i could see answers from the girl in front of me and wrote down a few of her choices. i felt so guilty afterwards that i had done that. never did it again.

[Tank]

had a kid cheat in one my history classes once by keeping her textbook open but putting it on the floor, hoping no one would notice. A for effort on that one.

 

had other kids cheat on a test by writing down answers on long strips of paper and hiding them in the sleeves of their jackets, hoping i wouldn't notice. a couple of them left behind their answers strips and one of the kids informed us of what happened. this happened on a day i was absent, so the sub missed it. the reason they cheated? so they could get a high enough grade to be inducted into national junior honor society.

[mrwicked]

not cheating but:

for an artificial intelligence class, i scoured around and dug up old finals from previous years. just to study from them and make sure i could ace each one. i spend two days doing like 10 different finals. i had them all in my backpack (with all my work) because i forgot to throw them away once i was done studying, and i walked into our final.

i get in there and the teacher says, "ok this is going to be open book, open note." 

which is a nice gesture but everyone knows it doesn't really help because the kinds of questions asked (not multiple choice, its more like complex proofs and writing pages of algorithms).

i open our final, and it's just composed of questions from old finals.

during the test the TAs were walking around like normal, and one noticed i literally have the answers in front of me. i look at him like "dude, check this out." and he laughs.

i would have rocked it anyway, but i aced the three-hour test in 20 minutes because all i was doing was basically copy/paste onto bluebook.

then left and had a slice of pizza and a couple beers.

Edited November 16, 2015 by mrwicked

[Homebrewer]

Schmoosed, flirted, and sat close to....

 

 

 

 

 

the Asian chicks.

[deepdrive]

not cheating but:

for an artificial intelligence class, i scoured around and dug up old finals from previous years. just to study from them and make sure i could ace each one. i spend two days doing like 10 different finals. i had them all in my backpack (with all my work) because i forgot to throw them away once i was done studying, and i walked into our final.

i get in there and the teacher says, "ok this is going to be open book, open note." 

which is a nice gesture but everyone knows it doesn't really help because the kinds of questions asked (not multiple choice, its more like complex proofs and writing pages of algorithms).

i open our final, and it's just composed of questions from old finals.

during the test the TAs were walking around like normal, and one noticed i literally have the answers in front of me. i look at him like "dude, check this out." and he laughs.

i would have rocked it anyway, but i aced the three-hour test in 20 minutes because all i was doing was basically copy/paste onto bluebook.

then left and had a slice of pizza and a couple beers.

 

Yeah, teachers/instructors are lazy. I had the same situation happen to me at each level of education (Jr high, high and college). I still studied because I figured they had to know someone would have their past tests and at some point would just switch everything up. Never happened - lazy is as lazy does.

 

I had a HS teacher who would leave the room for at least 20 minutes during every test. Before each test, me and the girl who sat next to me would decide who was going to do which half (open book test). I never studied for anything in that class.

[mtangelsfan]

Didn't cheat.

 

I hate all of you.

[mrwicked]

That's not a case of a lazy teacher, IMO.  Rather, a really good student. 

 

i remember in AP history in HS, i was taking a test and we were using a scantron where the back side had already been used before the previous year.

as I'm going, for some reason i flipped mine over and noticed the pattern was the same on both sides.

so basically he used the same scantron template (or whatever) for all tests.

i noticed this on the next test as well.

eventually everyone caught on, and the tests became a joke and most everyone was acing them.

he was my advisor for international baccalaureate, so one day i asked him about it.

he's like yeah, i do that, and folks can easily cheat.

but then guess what happens to those cheaters when they take the AP/IB history test? they get creamed.

so its totally up to them if they want to be lazy or not.

smart dude.

after that i made sure to never flip it over, and i didn't ace every test in his class but i ace'd the AP and IP history exams.

taught me a valuable life lesson: sure its usually pretty easy to cheat and get the grade on any given test, but just putting in the effort and learning the material will get you much further in most every field.

especially in HS or college: i mean you're already forced to be there (or paying mad $$ for it), might as well learn something from the folks who spend their life researching/teaching this stuff.

Edited November 17, 2015 by mrwicked

[Adam]

My uncle paid me $100 to do his online traffic school once upon a time. 

[Amazing Larry]

My uncle paid me $100 to do his online traffic school once upon a time. 

 

That's one test that I wouldn't cheat off an Asian for the answers.

[Hollyw00d]

I never did my HW in AP euro history because my teacher made it so tedious. By the end of the year he didn't even try to collect it from me.

Aced all the tests, and got a 5 on the AP exam. Ended up with a B- in the class haha

[Adam]

In Algebra II, I could find the solutions in my head, but I never did HW and didn't know how to properly show all of my work. I got probably 95% of the answers right on every test but got Cs every time for not showing the work. 

[Hollyw00d]

I had that problem up until calculus, then I started to struggle a bit

Physics really kicked my ass though for some reason. Maybe because I wasn't super into it

[mrwicked]

My uncle paid me $100 to do his online traffic school once upon a time. 

 

i hope you knew the trick to those.

you open up the test in one browser, and skip through all the lessons and get right to the test (at this point you're not allowed to hit "back")

so you open it up again in the second browner tab, but at the beginning of the lessons.

on the test tab you find the question, use the second tab to hunt for the answers.

can do the whole thing in like 15-20 minutes.

[Don]

Never felt the need to cheat. I've always been good with tests in general, and I always liked the feeling of going in a bit nervous, then walking out a while later thinking "I nailed that sh*t."

[Spencer]

wear sandals, put book on ground, flip through pages with toes.

tape cheat sheets or study cards or whatever to the back of the desk in front of you.

for those long homework problem sets, wait til the day they get turned in, then grab one of the smart kid's work after they put it on the professors desk, and run to the library to photocopy.

I'm smart, but was really lazy in HS and college. For all the endless cheating I did, I don't think it has held me back in my career.

If you aint cheatin you aint tryin.

[mp170.6]

In Algebra II, I could find the solutions in my head, but I never did HW and didn't know how to properly show all of my work. I got probably 95% of the answers right on every test but got Cs every time for not showing the work. 

 

I always got into arguments with high school math teachers over showing my work.  It's really all about control, and doing things their way. 

 

Things were totally different in college.  I had two math professors who told the class "who am I to question how you solved" the problem, so long as the answer is correct.  One of those guys did all of his exams on Scantron. 

[Brandon]

I don't think I ever cheated, or don't remember it. If I did I probably cheated in plain view....it feels like the suspicious looking people get caught. I feel like maybe I had a cheat sheet under my test page or behind who was sitting in front of me if I did. I was just lazy though, the dude that never did homework and aced the tests for around a B in the class.

 

The only thing I can think of that constitutes is during the first or second trimester of pre-med I had some elective like speech and some cute Iranian chick sat next to me. We get to know each other in class and I mention I suck at math and it happened to be her forte. Basically I was going to see her every weekend in Calabasas and it started where she tutored me and turned into her just doing the work for me because she liked me and wanted to spend more time doing date stuff opposed to shit like quadratic non-linear equations. So she basically did all my school work. Come the final I end up bombing it haha. The dude passed me with like a C or B.

 

As for traffic school, I remember the last traffic ticket I got about 10 years ago we had a chick at the office that would volunteer to do everyone's. Kind of weird, but she would do the online shit and we would just go to a place like the UPS store to take the final one or some shit. 

[CaliAngel]

Would walk up to ask a question and look at the scantrons on the teachers desk, so dumb of them to have 2 separate piles for the "a" and "b" tests, one time probably memorized 1/4 of the answers by memorizing "b-b-d-a-e..." Also did a ton of cheat sheets and quick eyeballs.

At my highschool, atleast in the AP Classes I took, the AP Test score determined your grade In the class for the ENTIRE year. 5 = A, 4 = B, etc.

I was always great in English so I didn't do ANY homework or studying the entire year, passed with a 5. In Pre-Cal I dicked off until the last month of the year, then crammed like bloody hell and got a 3.

Once I got to college I was way too scared to cheat, I didn't want to get caught and get kicked out, that shit can ruin your life.