I only cheated a handful of times during the 20 some odd years I spent in a classroom, and couple of those involved giving the answers to other people, as opposed to helping my own cause. I guess I didn't see the point, particularly in college, of faking my through school and not actually learning anything. If I had a class that I disliked or had a hard time with, I was more likely to simply do poorly in it than cheating to get good grades. One of the enormous exceptions was my final exam in Organic chemistry my last semester as an undergrad. I had an avergae in the class that made passing the final exam critical. I nearly had a job locked up, and if I failed the test I could kiss that goodbye, as well as look forward to another semester of college - all for one class. Fate apparrently decided to intervene. A few weeks prior, my professor had a mild heart attack. The class was finished by lab assistants and other professors in the department, and the final exam was administered by a grad student. The grad student passed out the exams - and gave me what was either the answer key or a copy that some other student had decided to write the answers on. I couldn't believe my luck. After ensuring that this copy of the test was not marked in nay way, and checking some of the written answers against those problems I actually knew how to solve, I figured I had nothing to lose and went with the answer written on the test. Whoever provided the answers was kind enough to do so in pencil, all I had to do was erase and write over it, and no one would be the wiser. I even blew a few questions so as not to arouse suspicion. The answers must have been correct - I passed and graduated a week later.
A group of 4 or 5 of us in high school all did the same maths science orientated classes and one of us had their brothers books from the year before for exactly the same classes. Most of us would try do the homework questions until we got stuck then consult either each other or the book. I did this for a little while until I got tired of it then would just rock up the morning before it was due tax the book off my mate for twenty minutes in study period and copy out of it. Surprisingly I still managed some decent scores come exam time at the end of the year.
All these cheating schemes and systems are great and all, but they are also way too elaborate. Mine was very simple: I'd prepare an outline of notes/formulas/etc. on my computer, print it out, fold it, and stick it in my pocket. During the test, I'd go through all the questions that I knew answers to, and skip the ones I didn't know. Then, I'd excuse myself to the bathroom, sit in a bathroom stall, look up the answers, (sometimes take a shit), flush the toilet, wash my hands, and then return to the classroom to finish the rest of the exam. So simple. Obviously, I didn't do this for every exam, for fear of raising suspicion, and just the act of typing out notes was oftentimes enough for me to memorize answers, but there were many times when this tactic came in very handy.
I have stories from both sides of the issue. First, from the seedier side of the issue: A friend of mine (this is not a euphemism for 'me,' this really was a friend of mine) was taking some dopey class taught by an extension professor. Now the university has two kinds of classes: regular, real classes for the normal students, and then extension classes, which are just a scheme to get working professionals (or their employers) to pay gobs of money for a more-mediocre-than-usual educational experience. The former are taught by real university professors, and the latter are generally taught by some person hauled in from industry who wants to make a couple extra thousand dollars for the year. Anyway, somehow an extension professor ended up teaching a regular class, or an extension class was co-listed as a regular class, or something, because my buddy was getting regular credit from a class taught by an extension professor. Well, the extension professor was lazy and he thought that he had a way to minimize the amount of work he had to do to distribute solutions to homework problems. See, he didn't want to have to upload them to the class website every week, so he uploaded them all on the first week. "But," you say, "then all the students could download them and get the homework answers in advance!" This is true, but Professor Magneto the Evil Genius had a plan: he put all the answers in ZIP files and then password-protected the ZIP files. Each week, he would give out the password to the next file. This was a pretty brilliant plan on Professor Magneto the Evil Genius' part, but he was unfortunately ignorant of some vital information. This vital information was: Computers are real fast. Also...well, actually that's pretty much it. Worse, he picked passwords right out of the dictionary - all lowercase words like "lugubrious" and "scintillating" and shit like that. Oh, how clever he thought he was. Unfortunately, whatever Professor Magneto the Evil Genius was good at, it was not cryptography. If it were, he would probably have known about an attack against passwords that are pulled out of the dictionary. Oh, you could call it, I dunno, a DICTIONARY ATTACK. Now my friend was not exactly an expert in cryptography, but he was slightly more qualified in it than Professor Magneto the Evil Genius, and this was enough. In something like twenty minutes (mostly spent finding and installing appropriate tools) he had found all the relevant passwords. Not a selfish man, he distributed them among his friends in the class as well. I think everyone did pretty well on the homework that semester. ~ ~ ~ ~ On the other side of the fence, in my days in academia I mostly did research but I occasionally taught. I once failed about a dozen students for plagiarism in a single class. Their final papers were survey papers, where you read a bunch of research, summarize it, and synthesize some kind of conclusion about the body of work you studied. By "summarize it," I mean "write down the other people's main points in your own words." For about a dozen students, "in your own words" was strictly optional. It wasn't a matter of citation either, because no amount of citations allows you to directly copy 10-12 pages of other people's work into your 14-page survey paper. Either way, the instructors (including me) had long talks with the class about plagiarism, appropriate citations, and so on. We had a clear academic honesty policy posted on the course website, we really went all-out but it just didn't stick with a subset of the students. What was absolutely astonishing was how much paperwork you have to fill out to nail someone for plagiarism or cheating. It's a metric assload. There's Xeroxing and highlighting and all sorts of stuff you have to do. Grading a regular paper takes 20-30 minutes, but prosecuting a case of cheating takes like hours. I was just the TA for this particular class, but the professor was going on leave to another university at the end of the semester and pulled a complete Lumbergh on me: "Yeahh...I'm not, um...gonna be here....yeah, do you think you could like...take care of this for me? Yeah....thanks....all right...yeah...." So all of it fell to me. Once you fill out all the paperwork, you have to schedule and have individual face-to-face meetings with each student and a guidance counselor. I am both an introvert and confrontation-averse, and so this was a nightmarish scenario for me. I got to see nearly the entire gamut of responses. Deny everything. Cry. Deny everything and then cry. Plead for a do-over. Plead for a do-over and then when you don't get one, cry. Pretend that you had NO POSSIBLE idea what the meeting might have been about and how there is no possible way you could have plagiarized, followed by pulling out a sheaf of pre-prepared evidence to explain how what you did wasn't technically cheating. Claim that because you put the paper you copied three full pages of text from in your bibliography, it was OK to do that. Tell the TA (me) that he explicitly told the class that plagiarism was A-OK, and then act indignant that you were called in about this by the hypocrite who said it was just fine. The last one was particularly surprising and infuriating. While the guidance counselor didn't give it any credence, I felt my honor had been besmirched. I went back and located an email I had sent out to the entire class linking to the academic honesty policy AND admonishing them against plagiarism, which convinced me I had not accidentally told the class that plagiarism was OK. I was still rattled in the moment, though. I am not wholly sure how many of the students knew they shouldn't be doing it, and how many of them really just didn't get it (I think plagiarism standards vary from country to country and many of the students had come from foreign universities). I don't recall any of them protesting George Costanza style (i.e., "was that wrong? should I not have done that?"), though. When you catch somebody initially, you feel this tremendous sense of righteous indignation. "Try to slip one past me, eh motherfucker? Think I'm too stupid to catch this? TRY AGAIN ASSHOLE. OH YEAH ITS THE JUGGERNAUT, BITCH!! I AM GANDALF AND YOU ARE THE BALROG. YOU! CANNOT! PASS!!!!" By the end of those meetings, all sense of righteous indignation was gone. It was just sad. Some people had to repeat a term and give up swanky jobs. One guy I think got kicked out because it was offense #2. I saw one dude after our meeting punching a tree. You start to wonder about their situation. You think about everything you've ever done wrong and gotten away with. You ask the universe why you should be allowed to sit in judgment of the wrongs of others. There are good answers to these dilemmas. The system is set up such that enforcement like this isn't an act of personal judgment or vindictiveness, it's a mechanical process. Someone set the rules, the rules were broken, and now the system enforces the rules. You happen to be the representative of The System for a day, but are serving only as a functionary and messenger. It's not personal...strictly business. But of course it is personal.
I wouldn't have graduated high school if I hadn't cheated in English. I took mostly honors class all through high school. At the end of my senior year (after taking honors English 1,2 and 3) I was failing English 4 honors because I was burn out and didn't give a shit about high school anymore. Failing one class wouldn't have been a problem if this were an elective. I had more than enough credits and a gpa to graduate twice. But English is a "core" class. You need all four years or you can't graduate. So 5 days before I was set to walk at the ceremony I get called out of class down to the guidance counselors office. She informs me that unless I get an 87 on my final I won't walk. That would of been a disaster. I was set to move away to college in 3 weeks for fucks sake. Plus there was no way I was going to learn all the shit in 3 days. I hadn't read any of the books or basically paid attention at all. And that was just when I even went to class. So I cheated. I didn't do it in any elaborate way. I just used the classic look at the answers when the teacher isn't looking at you method. The review guide was basically a carbon copy of the test. I took a bunch of sheets of paper and slid the study guide inside and glanced at it all through the test. I guess cheating isn't the most honorable thing. But then again, half the class did the same thing that very day. I'm not trying to justify it to myself though. I don't care, even if it is wrong. Even if I had been the only one. I figure it's the way of the world. I ended up with a 94 on the final, graduated and moved away 3 weeks later. Just as I planned to. edit: I remembered another one I'm really proud of, On another final my teacher did an in class review of the test the day before it was given. No one was aloud to take notes, we just had to remember as much as we could (I still don't understand this stupid fucking line of reason). Once again, the "review" was actually "the test" and it was multiple choice. So I quickly grabbed my cell phone and opened up a text message. When she would read each answer I would put it into my phone which was inside my pocket. All I had to do was either hit the 1 or 2 button depending on whether the answer was A-D. At the end of class I saved the message as a draft, sent it to myself in an email, and sent it to myself back to my phone number so I would also have a copy of it in my inbox. I went home and prayed that I didn't fuck up by going off by one number or something. The next day I took the final and breezed into summer with an A for my final grade in the class. I don't even remember what the name of the class was. Just that it was honors and some type of social studies class.