The older you get the more you question the phrase ‘cheaters never prosper’, because with every year that passes you see more and more people get ahead in life by cutting corners. At this point in my life I’m not only convinced that cheaters do prosper, but that cheaters nearly ALWAYS prosper. That is of course the person doing the cheating isn’t a complete dumbass and cheats in a clever manner and/or covers his tracks.
Don’t believe me? Well, I’ve pulled the best responses (out of thousands) over on an AskReddit thread titled ‘How did you cheat school?’, all of which you can see below. If you’re in the market to do some cheating at school I’m not going to endorse it, but I’ll at least say you should cheat in as effective a manner as possible because I don’t want you getting caught.
How To Cheat Your Way Through School And Not Get Caught
In boarding school a group of us got our hands on our the question for our final english exam (based on a book we were reading). Spent the next week writing the best paper I could before the actual exam. I used a small razor blade and cut one of the blank pages out of the book we were reading that semester (and able to take into the exam) and copied the exact font, spacing, page margins etc. and printed the paper I had written onto it. Stuck it in the middle of the book. Walked into the exam – the teacher checked my book for notes and found nothing. Copied it out word for word during the exam and then pulled the page out and ate it. Got a C
Not me, but rather someone I went to high school with. The student in question wore a hijab for religious and cultural reasons (She was Arab-American). Well, on test days in our maths classes, she would download an MP3 track with maths formulas she had recorded onto her iPod, put on her earbuds and cover them up with her hijab, take the test, and then ace it.
I only knew about this because I accidentally walked in on her in the bathroom putting in her earbuds, but I didn’t tell the teacher because I thought her method of cheating on tests was fucking brilliant.
We did our homework as a group where everyone did what they were good at: my friend did algebra and geometry, I did chemistry, biology, Russian and English, other kids did physics, geography, history, and so on. We cannot choose classes in Russia, we have to study everything in full measure, so in high school there is sometimes too much homework each day for one person to do it all and still have some time to live, so we’ve been sharing the burden for about three years. Never got caught, surprisingly.
Back in high school I would do the old data file switch-a-roo. Basically change “.mp3” to “.doc” on any song file I named after the assignment.(So ‘Barbie Girl.mp3’ would become ‘Essay.doc’) The essay would show as corrupted when the teacher tried to open it. This stalled me an extra day to complete the assignment. It was part of my emergency toolbox.
I was in summer school one year because I was lazy and never did any work during the year. The entire summer school was on a computer and was estimated to take 3-4 weeks, 4 hours a day, 5 days a week. So after about an hour of doing the computer program I notice you can skip the section you’re on and take a shot at the test and if you pass the test you pass the section. The test had 10 questions and you could try 3 times before you were required to read the section. I tried the test twice and realized it didn’t have a large pool of questions to choose from and would repeat some questions when you retook the test but the best part was it would tell you what the answer was if you got something wrong… bingo. I learned that if you took the test twice you were guaranteed to have at least 8 of the answers which would give you an 80% passing grade on the test. I passed summer school in less than 8 hours and no teacher raised a red flag and I got to enjoy my summer. I cheated the system. 10/10 would do again.
Not really cheating but on my 8th grade Science midterm I ABCADABA-ed the entire test so that I could leave school early and go to the Rangers ticker tape parade in Manhattan. It was 1994 and I was young and ignorant. I got a 70 with my method (thanks Who’s the Man) on the exam and my classmate scored a 40 by choosing C all the way down (as he stated, when in doubt choose C).
In this exam, I had to submit three essays in three answer booklets. Only wrote two essays. Hid the empty booklet. Two weeks later, the exam markers asked if I had submitted three essays – I said yes – they assumed they lost one book so upped my marks.
This was for the final year of high school and directly helped me get to university.
A couple of years ago, at the beginning of the whole Michelle Obama “no fun food allowed” thing where they took all the vending machines and replaced all the drinks with shitty diet versions and our school lunches got worse and they stopped selling any kind of sweet thing at all, I took advantage of the demand.
I sold donuts and made quite a bit of money.
In the class period right before lunch, I had an Academy class. It means I would leave my school to take a class at a nearby school that my school didnt offer. In this case it was auto shop with a really chill teacher.
Id stop by Giant on the way there and buy 4 boxes of a dozen donuts for 50 cents a donut, and then sell them for a dollar each in auto shop. The teacher also (probably still) sells soda out of his office, so we accidentally created a restaurant. I had to bribe him with a free donut to allow me to sell in class, but it was worth.
Then Id take all the leftover donuts (about half) and sell them at my own school, where I would show up during lunch. Id hide in one of the side hallways near the band/theater areas and kids would know to find me there.
It was a big business. I only misjudged and didnt sell out maybe three times out of the six months or so Id do this. Kids would buy soix donuts and resell them for a buck fifty in their own classrooms. I became a donut pusher. Sometimes demand was so high that I could buy six boxes of donuts at the beginning if the day, and make $30 for about eight minutes of actual work.
On snow days or weird schedule days or for special requests, I would charge 2 bucks. And kids would pay it.
I made a good chunk of cash off of this and never got in trouble. I even sold one donut to the school cop near the end of the year.
The good old answers-on-the-inside-of-the-water bottle-sticker trick.
I maintained a good relationship with teachers. Having your teacher like you will help in many ways.
If you are not cheating you are not trying. All sorts of things, Like using my Dyslexia to be allowed to do my exams on a computer, then getting round the network restrictions to either google answers or check cheat sheets i mailed my self, Or keeping a tiny set of notes inside a Mechanical Pencil. The biggest cheat i ever did was download a paper from the web, Translate it to French on Babel-fish, Then translate it back to English on Google translate. The 2x translations was enough to screw a lot of the grammar and sentence structure, which i then went back and re-write in my own style of writing, Creating a new document with all the same points but enough changes it would not show on a google search.
EDIT so i just wanted to make the translation a little clearer for everybody. Go to Google translate and translate something from English to Spanish, Then take the Spanish translation and translate that to french, Now translate the French back to English again and you can see the difference. Somebody at school was convinced it was better to go German to french but i can’t for the life of me remember exactly which one was best. Give it a try, you will probably notice how the language sometimes goes back to being very basic (‘Quick brown fox runs quickly’ becomes ‘The quick brown fox runs very fast’ but you get the idea)
I got lucky making a really risky gambit in high school. I had a really shitty Spanish language teacher in 10th grade. She told us a portion of the final exam would be a spoken exam where we have to have a conversation in Spanish on a particular topic.
We were given a sheet with 15 potential topics, and said she’d be dropping them into a hat on slips of paper and randomly selecting one. I hated Spanish at this point so I came up with a crazy idea and banked everything on it.
I immediately volunteered to go first on spoken part (which was the next day) and studied everything I would need to know for only topics #1 and #15, this teacher was extremely scatterbrained and I was hoping she wouldn’t shuffle her pile before selecting one out of the hat.
Sure enough, I couldn’t believe my luck when she took the stack of paper slips, plopped it in the hat and immediately pulled topic #1 off the top, I got a 95/100 on the spoken portion.
My favorite part is that this isn’t even technically cheating, I just predicted incompetence and capitalized on it.
i used the fact that i had early acceptance to art school as ammo to convince my guidence counselor i didn’t need any more math classes.
i didn’t realize at the time going to art school meant i’d be working in retail and should’ve used all the practice i could get.
I applied to college as a high school junior. Was accepted, got my scholarships, dropped out of high school.
I used a smart watch in my exams.
Writing papers I just used google scholar to find similar papers, then reword what they wrote and copied their sources.
Senior year of high school we had to write a research paper. Spent almost all year on it. Was supposed to be like 10 pages or something. I goofed off and said fuck it.
Time comes to turn it in and I turn in one of those clear folder things with just a cover sheet in it.
A week later the teacher comes to me and tells me she lost my paper and needs me to reprint it and bring it in tomorrow. I tell her no problem and go home.
Next day I come in and tell her that it had been written on my mom’s computer (only computer in the house) and that my mom had already deleted it. Sounded really sad and asked what I was supposed to do now. I couldn’t write a new report that quick. I had spent all year on it. She says she will take my average from the other assignments we had done and that would be my grade for the paper.
Walked away with a 93% on the paper.
Aaaaaaaand last but not least….
Dos based class sign up program had a bug where if you put in a fake SSN and dropped a class, an opening would appear in a full class. Got every class I needed when I wanted to take it.
My fraternity had a filing cabinet with every test from every professor on campus. They pretty regularly would recycle tests, usually on a three year cycle. Made it pretty easy.
Slept with two teachers.
As I mentioned before there are THOUSANDS of responses over on that AskReddit thread, so if you’re hungry for more you can follow any of the links above and click on over. I’m curious though, have you bros ever used any ingenious methods that weren’t listed above? Care to share them with us down below in the comments?