Cheating or Working the System?

I, personally, don't cheat. I've never really seen a reason. By putting in a moderate amount of effort to studying (by which I mean, for any given test, I study about an hour or two), I can easily get at least a B. I've never taken a class where, if you attend fairly regularly and do even a minor amount of reading and prep, you can't get a B on a test, if not an A.

Plus, I am going to be a high school teacher. Would be kind of hypocritical and shitty of me to cheat my way to that particular license. Although, I do want to thank everyone for showing me what to look out for with my future students. I'm sure they'll thank you, too.

Somewhat on focus: I have noticed a lot of cheating in the exams I am taking now. Twice I have seen a girl was sitting with her cell phone on her lap, texting questions to her friend. Two kids in front of me were passing answers back and forth. In one class, the professor would go kinda nuts about explaining that all the tests were different, and that there were different forms, and he would even rearrange the desks so that people couldn't see each other's papers that well. That didn't stop two kids in back from texting throughout the exam and using some cheats written on their arms. I just find it funny that some people put extensive effort into finding ways to cheat, when the simple stuff still seems to work well enough, as long as you have a professor/teacher who is completely oblivious (apparently, this goes for every single professor I have at my current college).

My theory, as a college student, is that I have no intention of cheating, myself. I can put that same effort into studying and still get about the same grade. But, if the professor is too stupid to notice or doesn't care about others cheating, I don't feel its my duty to turn other students in (seriously, how do you NOT notice someone texting throughout a test?). That is the professor's job to keep watch for shit like that, and if he is too busy reading the newspaper or grading papers for another class, then why should I give a flying fuck if someone next to me is cheating.

The only time I would consider turning in a classmate for cheating is if the test ends up being curved, and I know that someone was cheating... and even then, I'd only turn them in because it would benefit me by giving me a higher grade (I'll take a 88 out of 93 over an 88 out of 100 any day). But to me, if a test is going to be curved to the highest score in the class, and you cheated to get that score? You can go right out and fuck yourself, cause now you're fucking with my grade.

 

The amount of cheating that went on in my high school was ridiculous, but one class sticks out to me.

Back in Pre-Calc, our teacher used to leave the spreadsheet of all of our grades up on his computer all day long. My friends and I would go up there while he was in the bathroom or out for a smoke and change our grades. Easiest and most effective way in my opinion.

 

Clever shit, to be sure, but that's a pretty extreme amount of effort to put in when you could just study and actually learn a few things. Granted, it's easy to argue that most of what's taught in a good number of classes is almost unusable in the outside world, but it can still be handy from time to time.

FOCUS: I never cheated, at all. From the posts on this thread thus far, I think I might be an endangered species. I struggled through most of high-school but never really had the urge to cheat. Looking back I understand why it's common, although it pains me somewhat to know that most teachers (and to a lesser extent, professors, because the risks are much, much higher in post-secondary) have to spend a great deal of time outsmarting their students instead of teaching them what they need to learn.

I've always figured that that the amount of effort required to do it properly far outweighed the benefits of a high grade, coupled with the fact that when you get into university you will be woefully unprepared for some of the shit that's required, and I'm curious to hear other people's opinions on this.

 

In high school I cheated as much as possible, I didn't give a fuck back then and I don't now. I still cheat now that I am in university, but not towards my work since I want to learn what my parents are paying thousands of dollars for me to learn.

I had a business teacher in high school who would assign questions from the textbook and leave the classroom for up to twenty minutes at a time. During this time many of us would go to the computer and change certain grades, nobody ever got caught.

I took a math test in grade 11 with a graphing calculator, when i finished the test I saw that the test said in big bold black letters at the front of the test "No Graphing Calculators Allowed." Oh yeah, I sat right in front of the teachers desk when I took the test. I guess I'm lucky he didn't notice.

I never really wrote cheat sheets or anything like that, because I felt that the amount of work it takes to write one can be used to just study and get roughly the same result with less risk.

The only time I got in trouble for cheating was during grade 12 biology. There were two classes during different times of the day. Exact same curriculum just different people. Well my friend was in one and i was in the other. The teacher also loved my friend and hated me. So I remember I copied one of his assignments and turned it in once. When we got the assignments back which were identical he has a mark of 13/15 while i had a 9/15. I tried to let it go, but it kept bugging me every time i saw that shitstain's face in class. So i had the brilliant idea to go and call him out on it. My rationale was that he can't get me in trouble without getting himself in more trouble. I called him on it, and the conversation went something like this.

Me: You took marks off because you don't like me, see me and Friend have identical assignments and you gave him a higher mark.
Him: So you are telling me that you and Friend cheated? That's a 0 on the assignment plus you have to have your parents meet with the principal and discuss further repercussions.
Me: If you tell the principal it will become obvious that you marked me badly based on preference.
Him: I knew you cheated.

Well he told the principal, we both gave our stories and while I took the 0 plus some other punishments he got away without even a talking too. I was also dumb enough to not realize my friend could get in a lot of trouble for helping me cheat, so I had to lie that I stole the assignment from his bag when he wasn't looking. Yes, I'm an idiot.

Nowadays, I just write papers and labs for other people in exchange for money.

 

What a timely thread. Just yesterday my Arabic professor was 20 minutes late to administer our chapter test. He walked in, tossed us the test, and informed us it was now a take-home test. Awesome.

I never did cheat much in high school... it's pretty pointless if you're confident in your knowledge. Even if you're absolutely average, consider that 50% of the class will do worse than you. Why take the chance? Nowadays (sophomore in college) we have buzz-in style iClicker quizzes on our reading in lectures. It's pretty easy to sneak a sideways glance and see what button most people are pressing.

 

Nowadays I just either whip out a notecard, talk to my room-mate next to me, or look at the person in front of me. But in AP Government spring of my senior year and high school me and my two high school hockey buddies did something similar you did.

We would have these bullshit vocabulary tests where you had to fill out like 15 out of 20 or he would pick 5 at random out of 10. Either way, he gave us the words before, so they would be printed on pieces of paper no bigger than a credit card (usually smaller) and taped up-side down to the inside of our shirts. Wait for the douche to sit down at his desk (he really was a douche - like creeped out high school girls), flip the front of your shirt over, slouch, and copy away.

Made up for getting C's on all the tests where he would make us write 3 essays and answer 25 multiple choice in 80 minutes. Just starting to get the feeling back in my hand 3 years later...

Also, half of you people have made me feel just horrible about my cheating. Eh, whatever, I have too much fun playing NHL and drinking. Plus, I can present, shake a hand, and smile; what else do you need to succeed in the Business World, right? (wee bit kidding of course so no one gets confused)

 

I cheated in 9th grade geography. We had to learn the entire map of Africa: countries, captials and major cities for one test. It was fill in the blank. Half of those countries aren't even pronounceable let alone remembering how to spell them. Capital of Mauritania is Nouackchott? Go fuck yourself. How about Burkina Paso? Never heard of it? Capital is Ouagadougou. How about Cote D'Ivoire? Don't remember that easy one? It's Yamoussoukro. I was 14. I drew the map on my leg in 3 parts. It took hours to do. And I didn't shower the morning of, obviously. The ink stayed pretty intact over night. I wore pants and pretended I had an itch every few minutes to check. I also did a map like this for eastern Europe. Fuck those tiny USSR countries.

 

I didn't cheat much for fear of getting caught. One thing that I would do in exams and tests was to write a few notes on my thighs and wear shorts to the exam/test. I would sit at the back of the lecture theater, and wait until nobody was around and roll up my shorts to see what ever I had written. I figured that there was a lower risk of getting caught because lecturers would be hesitant to ask me to roll up my shorts.

 

all your cheating methods seem so elaborate, and rather funny. my cheating career is far simpler then all of this.
In my english class i was actually one of the best when it came to the listening tests, so i was the person signaling the answers to the rest of the class. The tests were multiple choice, but they switched the answers randomly per booklet so cheating was impossible. Or at least that's what they think.
signaling was easy, there's time to read each question in between the audio, and i'd put my hand onto the side of the table corresponding to the length of the answer, so at the top for the longest and at the bottom for the shortest. My buddy next to me would copy, and five people in the second to last row got an A.

my latin classes nowadays cheating is not done as much because dictionaries are allowed now, but in the first few years there were grammatical exercises on the test where you had a list of verbs and you had to write down the correct translation without a dictionary. This spawned the most rampant cheating i've ever seen in my classes, everyone would pretend they were done with the test and put their work at the corner of the table, signifying you are done. If you had done that you were homefree, you could grab your books from your bag and check what you did not know, then put your book away and write the correct answers onto your paper before you handed it in at the end. I have seen 15 out of 30 people in class use that trick on a single test.

Next to that is the standard texting each other or sitting next to the radiator you taped / wrote some notes on the class before the test or the wall-sized maps of antient italy which were filled with notes.

yeah, my teacher were real vigilant.

 

Back in the day the TI-85 graphing calculator was the greatest invention ever for cheating at math. Either the AP math nerds would write me a program to plug the variables into or I'd just copy down all the formulas that were on the test.

The best however were the "trade with a partner and correct" bs tests/quizzes teachers would give. They just didn't want to correct a bunch of papers so they'd have the class do it. What we would do instead was write our names on it and then quickly switch before the test. Then when we "switched" for correction we'd have our own blank test back and could fill in the answers as we went along. If an educator is too lazy to even try to make it hard to cheat I say fuck em.

 

I don't, and really can't, cheat in college. English majors just write.... all the time. That's it. I wouldn't pay anyone else to write my shit because I think I'm smarter than everyone. Honestly though, I'm a literary maniac. I read millions of books and write about them all the time anyway, I don't really mind having to do papers.

High School though? Yes, I cheated a whole boat load. Mainly only in Math and Science classes, you know, the stuff that I suck at (the stuff that actually matters).

In my Junior Math class, Algebra or Geometry or whatever the fuck it was, me and a few others never EVER did one homework assignment, and cheated on every single test. We would have almost definitely ended up failing the class if not for one glorious day towards the end of the term. The teacher got called out of the room for awhile by the principal and as we sat there waiting we all suddenly realized her gradebook was sitting open on her desk. With a knowing nod, we all got up and sprinted up to that fucker and put a check mark by every single homework assignment. We had homework every night in this class, and there had to be at least 40 or so empty spaces we filled in. Though I'm sure she knew, she never said a word and we all got B's.

This was the same teacher that we poured a bag of leaves on one day during a fire drill, and referred to as Grandma. I think she was afraid of us.

 

I used to do this all the time, the programming language on the TI's really isn't that complicated. I had a kid try to narc on me, and the teacher told the narc, "Listen, the point of the test is to determine if you understand the material. Writing a program from scratch demonstrates some pretty damn fine knowledge of the material. Now, if I were you, I'd think twice about tattling on your classmates from now on."

 

In my first year of college, I did Comp Sci, because I was one of those idiots whose thought process in selecting a major went something along the lines of: "I don't know what I want to do. I like computers. I'm good with manipulating Windows and troubleshooting network issues. Therefore I will be able to easily memorize complex grammatical structures and rely on my non-existent math skills to become a brilliant programmer. Never mind that I hate repetition and minutiae". Yeah, I'm dumb. Two weeks into the course it became apparent I was incapable of mastering the maths involved. Fortunately, I had friends that let me copy every single assignment for all 4 of my units. I maintained a solid Credit/Distinction average (B/C).

Then I took the exams, failed 4/4 of them, and thus 4/4 of the units, and changed my college and my major (to Communication and Cultural Studies. Yeah. Still dumb).

You'd think I would've learned my lesson here, but at this point I started really putting the hours into getting wasted and laid. One of my new courses was Film Studies, where we had to watch a film and comment on various aspects of it. On the one hand, it was awesome if the film was Blade Runner and I could get massively baked before class. Sometimes, though, the film was some depressing shit on how Maori's beat their wives or the evils of colonialist invasions. This is when I discovered IMDB. Every week, we had a quiz on the movie we had watched the previous class. With IMDB/TVTropes, I got high distinctions on movies I'd never watched.

And I can still bore people with how the increasing movement of the fan in the interrogation room in Blade Runner symbolizes events getting out of control. Win/win.

 

In grade 8 we had one of the substitute teachers who was pretty slow. We all knew he was a retard, and it was a unit exam that day. So my group of friends and I had our TEXT BOOKS out during the exam that day as a reference. I can't believe he didn't notice something so obvious.

In Grade 12, my awesome English teacher would give us old provincial final exams, from like 10 years ago to practice. We were told to do them partly at home and partly in class. Well, because these exams were provincial, there was a good chance that they were posted on the internet (questions and answers). Most were. I gave myself a modest 85%.

 

I did a few Physics subjects at Uni and really never understood the point of having to memorise the formulas when I perfectly understood the principles involved and how to solve the given problems.

So I cheated by writing down the formulas , if anything , as a backup should I forget after staying up too late studying or being tired from already having done other exams that week.

Im happy to share my simple yet effective method for "writing down" the formulas to anyone that wants to PM me.

 

In the third or fourth grade, I was sitting for a spelling test. The word was "Wednesday". I had no idea how to spell it, I suck at spelling. Then I remembered the classroom had a big weekly calender right in front of me. So I looked up, and copied it down. The teacher saw me and told me I got a zero for the test. I still stand by it being bullshit.

In college, one prof was getting furious at the cheating going on in the class. It was a mechanics course, and the first test allowed us to have a notecard of formulas and a calculator. Some kids decided to write out sample problems on the notecard instead, so the next test he banned the cards and said he would give us the needed formulas. Some kids decided to store formulas/problems in their calculators. So he banned everything; all we could have was a pencil. Actually worked out pretty well; if your solution involved any math that was slightly difficult, you were doing it wrong.

 

Ya'll are sneaky fucks. And really complicated. All I did was write a ton of the equations and key numbers or words on the desk a few min before the exams were given out. They were those shiny slate one's or whatever and the dark wooden one's that you could write on and not really notice unless you were looking for it.

And of course, in High school, the Ti-86 was my best friend. The teachers caught on a little bit and before a couple tests, they erased our calculators memory. Oh well, it's not like that shit was hard in the first place.

During college, my classes were so big, we could sit towards the middle of the massive lecture halls with our books on our laps and just flip through no problem.

 

One other thing that helped me get through some tough math situations. I wasn't allowed to use graphing calculators in college math classes. But the scientific ones were cool, and they have those paper inserts in the outer case. Write shit on those. I always confused the Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion formula and vice vera. I knew the basic principle, but I would confuse the 5/9 and 9/5. That little insert helped me tremendously.

 

In high school I was a fucking businessman when it came to cheating. I had the income of a low wage part-time job just by pimping out my homework. In my lit classes, I would write elaborate study guides and then sell them to people. The advantage was that just writing the study guide would pretty much complete my studying for me. Then it just became a cash cow. My biggest money maker was so simple. In AP Calc, the school gave us all TI-89's. Of course everyone realized pretty quick there was a text editor in there and people started writing cheat sheets. However, most kids were too lazy to even make that since it would take so much time to type. I was lucky enough to have a TI-89 handed down to me from my older sister and with it came a connecting cable. This allowed data to be sent from one TI-89 to another. I was the only person with this cable. So while my money making study guides for lit could be foiled by people making copies of their copy, here I had a complete monopoly.

Another good story for AP Calc was our midterm. My and my friends established a little code to compare answers during the test. Since it was multiple choice it amounted to a simple "A-cough, B-sniffle, etc." system. Since I was one of maybe 3-4 people out of a class of 20 who knew what the hell was going on, I was generally the source of the answers getting only a couple of answers in return. However, it was ruined by one jackass friend who was too fucking dumb to remember what bodily function corresponded to which letter, and so he wrote the legend on his desk...AND THEN FORGOT TO ERASE IT. The teacher saw it and got him to rat us all out. The teacher told us we would all have to retake the test. I thought I was fucked but then it turned out someone, I have no idea who, talked to the teacher and told her I was the one who was helping people out for the most part so she let me get off scot free.

Another good story came from my AP Econ class in high school. Our midterm was going to be an former actual AP test. A little bit of googling and I found out that only one version was available for purchase. I promptly bought and sold answer keys to people in the class. We all rocked it and never got caught.

In college I was nowhere at this level. One piece of advice I would give to the people on here in college now or who will be in the future, utilize torrents and the amazon marketplace. Using these two things I pretty much never had to buy textbooks because I would find pdf's of torrents. Very often, those pdf's would be instructors editions which would earn me perfect grades on homework assignments. You can find the instructors manual for just about every textbook on the Amazon marketplace. Aside from that I basically only had Math, Economics, and Stat classes in college so I always had my trusty TI-89 handy. If only I had an excuse to use it in Spanish.