I’ve never cheated on a final exam because the idea of getting caught and thrown out of school was scary enough to make my asshole pucker up and get me to open up a textbook, but not all people are giant pussies like I am. Some people have balls of steel, like the kid who had his parents text him answers to his exam, or the kid who changed seats repeatedly so he could take a Spanish test for multiple students. There are some smart ways to cheat, and then there are ingenious ones, courtesy of this Reddit thread.
Happened this year. Not the first time I have posted this.
Kid sat at the back of the exam hall, all pupil bags piled up at the back. One bag keeps beeping as messages come in. Regulations state bag must be removed and phone investigated. Phone is receiving texts with the answers to the exam being sat. Pupil in question has galaxy smart watch on. He takes photo of questions with his watch when he knows he is not being observed. Watch auto syncs with phone which auto dropboxes his photo. Parent at the other end then accessing dropbox to see questions and replying with answers. Phone sends text message to the watch. Kid fucked up and was caught because he forgot to put his phone on silence.
Was a mock exam. I still don’t know if they were doing this as a trial run or were just a little dumb.
The girls at my school had it covered. They put on black tights with the information all over their legs….. Couldn’t see it when the tights were slack…. Stretch it out however and all was revealed. Sneaky!!
I had a guy in my spanish class who lived in Spain for most of his childhood. He finished our final in about 15 minutes, then went to the bathroom. Another guy went to the bathroom 5 minutes later, and when they got out, they changed places. Spanish guy took another 15 minutes to finish his final too, went back to the backroom and took another students seat. He did this with about 10 students. They all graduated with A’s.
EDIT: Some people are doubting the legitimacy of the story, so i’ll just explain how we do it in Denmark
In Denmark, we get volunteers to monitor our exams. Mostly people from the retirement home. He could easily have asked different people every time, and there is very little chance they even remembered him. The entire exam is 4 hours long, so he had plenty of time.
Girl recorded the answers to a test on an mp3 player. She ran a single headphone up her shirt, taped it to the back of her neck, and then to her ear.
The thing is, she wore her hair the same way every day. It went just past her shoulders, so her hair hid everything perfectly and she looked no different than she did any other day. It worked flawlessly.
EDIT: Should have mentioned this originally, but I wasn’t the teacher, I was another student at the time, and she told me about it after the fact. Oops.
Student here. For one of our tests, we were allowed to bring an A4 sheet of paper of notes. My teacher then explained to us that it had to be margined and there had to be specific font and spacing as someone in the previous years copied a whole textbook onto an A4 sheet and brought a magnifying glass into the examination room.
When I was a freshman in college, first semester, I was in a intro biology course.
It was a big class, probably 200 students.
The syllabus stated that there would be five exams throughout the semester, and at this point we had already taken the first one and knew that the exam consisted of 40 multiple choice questions, each worth 2.5 points.
So the night before the second exam, I was studying in the library and overheard three guys coming up with a plan to share answer.
The number of times that they scratched their nail against the desk and tapped their pencil corresponded to the question number and the answer, respectively.
On the day of the exam, I listened to their scratching and tapping as a reference to double-check all my answer, I don’t know what they scored, but I raked in that sweet 95.
Edit: I thought this would get buried at the bottom so I didn’t really get into the mechanics of their cheating system. Just to address the questions, for the questions, they had scratched with their nail for the ones and clicked their pens for fives. I think. Either that or it was every ten. To be honest, I don’t remember perfectly, it was a few years ago, but I think that’s how they did it.
Oh! Also, they had a way to ask each other to repeat a question, but I forgot what how they did it.
I can tell you what I did in Math class. I had a TI-83 and before every test our teacher would check our calculators and make sure the ram *and archive was cleared and all programs were erased. I wrote a program that brought up the ram cleared message but it did nothing. I then proceeded to write all notes and cheats in individual programs to pull them up during the test. Worked flawlessly throughout high school.
ESL teacher here living in a foreign country. Fucking students cheat all the time. It’s terrible. I’ve seen some of the most clever cheating and dumbest cheating.
The most clever was when students would take their online quizzes, they’d have to take them in the lab on campus with a proctor. The test used to be set up so that it would give the students feedback and show the right or wrong answer for a few seconds on the screen. Students started taking pictures of these with their cellphones. Keeping in mind there are 6 quizzes per level and 4 levels, so we’re talking about 24 quizzes, at an hour-1.5 hours each. Enough students started doing this when teh teacehr wasn’t looking (classroom set up not really conducive to keeping an eye on every student all the time) that they had accumulated basically all the right/wrong answers for every question in every quiz. We teachers found out and had to throw away all our tests and rewrite them from scratch.
One of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen was when I was teaching at a private, degree millish, college. I taught night and weekend students, who had no base of english, little time to study, and zero desire to learn. Some students, particualrly elementary ed majors, literally spent more time and energy complaining about having to learn english than actually attempting to learn it. In one of these classes, there was a written (short essay) test. Another computer lab that was even worse as far as keeping an eye on students. Anyway, the assignment was to write about your favorite holiday, why you like it, and what you did last time. Mother’s day had just passed, so I made that one of the options/suggestions, it’s worth mentioning then, that the term “Mother’s Day” was written IN THE INSTRUCTIONS. Anyway, one of my students submits this essay talking about “Day of the Breast” “day of the breast” what she did on Day of the Breast. What happened was she used google translate, as many students do, and had zero language skill as for identifying misnomers and basic proofreading. So what’s with Day of the Breast? She wrote “Dia de la mama” in google translate instead of “Dia de la Mamá.”
I wrote about four formulae on a glazed donut in tan-colored Sharpie in high school for a Pre-Calc quiz. I had forgotten we had a quiz that morning until about ten minutes before class, and this seemed like the best option. It was a short quiz and I got a 100!
Not a teacher, but when taking tests we were allowed to have water bottles on our desk to prevent kids from digging around in our backpacks while taking it; so this one kid removed the label off of a store brand bottle and printed out his own label resembling it but has all the answers printed. The teacher didn’t catch it.
Of course, some of these are more comical than useful and meant for idiots but so what? At the very worst if you see a kid at the end of the semester staring into a donut during his final exam, you’ll know where he lies on the spectrum.
[Via Reddit, header image via Shutterstock]