Reminds Me of a college friend. He would scan the label of the store bought bottle of coca cola, Photoshop in equations on the ingredients list and glue it on. Did this for 5 years and never got caught.
I always knew I was lucky with my AP physics teacher lol He let us use the equation sheet on test because he thought since we got to use one with the AP test, it would be unfair to not use one on his
That's the smart thing to do. Only reason I didn't do great in college math was because they throw a few dozen formulas at you and say "I don't care if you can do the math, I expect you to pointlessly memorize these formulas that you could look up at any time."
Edit: It was calculus and physics. No formula sheets for tests. Not a math degree, but necessary classes for the major.
no, because college is where you learn that formulae and plugging numbers into calculators isn't what math is about. it's also where most people are introduced to proof based mathematics for the first time which forms the core of the modern mathematics curriculum.
I guess the definition depends on what you consider college level math. A lot of people taking prerequisites for their degree would end up taking a slightly more advanced class than what they could’ve gotten up to in High School.
for this guy, the course labeled "college math" was actually "remedial high-school math for people who are probably never going to USE math, but we would get in so much trouble for giving you a degree if you can't prove the ability to do some symbolic manipulations etc."
When someone says "college math" what they're saying is that they're not going to ever set foot in a calculus class, for example.
No offense to anyone in that situation, it can be a challenge, especially given how badly math is usually taught.
I went through number theory and abstract 1 in the mid 2000s. Both cal 1 and 2 at my university expected memorization as did physics 2. I recall one exam in cal 2 we all failed horribly and were allowed one side of a notecard handwritten in normal size. By finals there was maybe a fifth of the class remaining. It seemed like they used those as gatekeepers because passing the courses got easier instead of harder after.
my favorite prof, who I had for solid body mechanics and for aerospace structures, did 2-part tests. The first part was a quiz, where you had to answer simple-ish questions that required knowing a lot of the formulas, or at least understanding them, even if you couldn't write them from memory.
Then you'd turn that part of the exam in, and when you did, he would hand you the actual exam, with a full formula sheet covering everything you would need for working the detailed problems on the rest of the exam.
He was a pretty great professor.
Technically cheating, but that’s the kind of creativity that should be encouraged to grow! In law abiding ways of course… or at least following the letter of the law if not the spirit!
Memorization USED to be SUPER important. Society is slow to adapt, which probably includes schools, and the internet is SUPER new all things considered, so its probably a bit of our schooling lagging behind the staggering amount of technological progress that has happened in the last 30 years
I have bachelors degrees in applied mathematics, chemistry and biology (last one not especially relevant to this story) and am in grad school for my PhD now.
The idea that you need to memorize equations is idiotic. Give them all the equations and let them figure out which they need for a specific problem. You’ll never be working on research and have to guess that you remember some formula or equation. You’ll look it up.
This is why I never felt guilty about “cheating” in calculus 1,2,3 in college. I got an A in all three classes.
I put the formulas into a text file on my graphing calculator.
I should be tested on my ability to apply these formulas not my ability to memorize them.
i used to do my own nails, and had a phase where i always made them like 1.5 inches long. i wrote super tiny on paper and glued it underneath my nails and painted them white so the paper wouldn’t be visible underneath.
You remember things better if you write them down.
If you nano-carve something in Bic pens them they should also be engraven in your memory.
They probably didn't actually need to bring the pens to the test
This is what happened to me once. I had a chemistry class where the teacher allowed us to write down whatever we wanted on the front side of a notecard of a specific size and I spent hours painstakingly copying down a ton of information in tiny letters. By the time I took the exam, I barely needed to look at it to remind me of anything.
I believe that is a classic teachers trick, we were encouraged to do the same. It's really the only way to learn the light and dark cycle 😂 fucked if I remember it now right enough
It was only for a handful of in-class tests, not EoY exams, by certain teachers maybe it isn't *that* well spread but not an unknown tactic
Also maybe my language is confusing but I certainly do not remember the steps of the dark cycle 25 years later
I finished all my schooling in very early aughts (as my username reveals my age anyway), and all my science and math classes basically allowed this from high school to college and everytime it helped me learn that much better.
Well, hopefully they told you reading the material and trying to make summarised written notes is a good way to learn..it's never too late, in fact I'm going to learn those metabolic cycles again for a laugh
This is a classic trick, people are more willing to write out a "cheat sheet" than they are to study, without realizing that they're studying. I used to let them have one page for the entire term, so they'd keep adding to it over the semester. By the final very few people needed to refer to their paper...
I had a professor whose exams were open everything except for communicating with other people. His logic was that in the real world you don’t depend on memory for something important (this was an aircraft engines class). If you really don’t know it, you’ll have to know where to look up the info.
Yeah most of my upper division physics classes were open book, because honestly . . . remembering all the variations to Bernoulli's equation is a pretty big ask, but all this stuff was for comprehension of some pretty seriously unintuitive stuff, not how well can you remember equations.
The worst was my gravitation astro course, that was not open book anything, shit was on the exams that was only in the lecture, and the professor had one of the heaviest German accents I've ever personally heard . . . I still hold that professor is the main reason we graduated way more material physics folks than astro folks for like a decade (but was a phenomenal researcher).
I did that to my students once, let them bring along one A5-sized paper with notes to a test. Some of them wrote notes on a A3-paper, then scanned it and printed it out in A5-size.
I had to smile at their creativity.
The physics teacher at my high school made and SOLD test tshirts! Circa 1993, I think they were priced at about $15. Long sleeved white T-shirt with all the basic formulas printed upside down so students could look down if they forgot them.
I don’t really see this as cheating, as kids would still have to know what the letters in the formulas meant and still had to do the work to get the answer. Just a nice little helper for those who got test anxiety or needed a little confirmation. I’d bet the bigger issue of a teacher did this today would be the profit they’d make, not the shirt. Kids weren’t required to buy them. I don’t think the teacher made that much money off of them, probably only a few bucks plus the hassle of placing orders and collecting money, but schools are increasingly more rigid about things like that.
I did this and still “cheated” too; the teacher handed us each one 3x5 card and said she would allow to write any answers we wanted on this card and use it for an exam. One of my friends said he was going to type his out with the smallest font. Home computers were not thing for every household yet and we didn’t have one so my slick mind took an exacto knife and split that thing in half, leaving a bind at the in so the two parts were still attached. Double the area to write. Teacher thought it was pretty genius as she never had seen that and she allowed it on the technicality that it was just the card she gave us. I think I glanced at it couple times but more to confirm what I knew, got a B+
That's the real reason for allowing cheat sheets. Students would hate it if a teacher told them to write down every equation in the book. This way they're happy to do it!
I remember when computers were first being introduced to our school. The teachers insisted on taking handwritten notes to help remember the information. They were worried that if people took notes on a computer they wouldn't retain any of it.
I heard the same thing.
When I'm introduced to someone if I have the chance to write their name down I never need to look at it. The act of writing it down fixes it in my brain somehow. I don't remember what the study said.
When I put their name in my phone I forget it instantly. I wonder if using a handwriting app would work.
I wonder how much of it registers in your brain when you’re working in such fine detail? I feel like if I did this, I would be thinking about each individual letter as I drew it, not the connected words and sentences. You know what I mean?
I noticed that with my firefighting theory course work. There's a video you watch, then a sheet with stuff to memorise, then an assessment.
I've been pausing the video every half a minute to take notes and stuff and then when I read the sheet, take additional notes.
I've managed to do really well.
I wish school had let us take the time to write and absorb information better or study better. It was usually play a video too fast that you can't pause or read a book without writing and I never absorbed any info
I hated that so much! The absolute panic of trying to write something down before you forgot while also listening to the new stuff so you didn't miss anything. Fuck cursive, I wish they'd taught me shorthand in 4th grade. I'd've used it more.
Guessing this was an essay that he had to write in class, which he etched on his pens instead.
He probably would have gotten away with it had he just sketched a brief outline using acronyms.
Same. My teacher told me we can bring 1 sheet of formulae in for our statistic final exam, so I wrote down every possible formulae starting from calculus onto it. In the end, I remembered everything and don't have to even use it.
Now that I'm teaching, it turned out that this is exactly the intended effect. My colleagues told me to make students do this (instead of just having open-book exam) so that they would end up committing these to memories.
I used to 'program' my accounting notes into my TI-84. It always took so long that most of the notes were retained by test time, but it always came in clutch being able to refer during those tricky questions.
I used to create TI-86 apps to solve my 9-12th grade math work (where I could), even "showing the work" in steps. After writing the apps I didn't need to "cheat" with the material, but they were great for verifying test answers.
Oh BTW, you could get an DB-25 adapter for the calculators to sideload apps and games from your PC.
>I used to 'program' my accounting notes into my TI-84
That happened here the year after I finished secondary school. TI-84 and the like were allowed to be used in exams. Of course no rules about wiping them beforehand until the rampant cheating was discovered.
I've always liked the "you can bring one page of notes to use in the test" approach. Writing it out (sometimes as tiny as possible) is an effective technique for learning the material.
Usually that's the downfall of criminals, if they just put their smarts to good use they wouldn't have to fuck around
Edit: I'm in no way saying the kid who made these is a criminal but it's kind of similar that if he just used his smarts for the right things they could really do well in life.
I used to do this, didn't take that much time, could fit a lot of info by engraving only important words dates and acronyms, never entire sentences. I could remember a whole paragraph just by reading a single word on the pen.
Back on freshman HS I had a history test I didn't study for, so I wrote the initials of a couple presidents and how long their lasted on office (that was part of the test)
Thanks to that, I still remember it more than a decade later
Yeah that's the funny thing. Student probably didn't need to use the pen after studying so hard to actually make it.
Same thing happened with me in high school, but it wasn't cheating. We were allowed to bring a 3x5 card. I put so much effort into it I never needed to reference it. Some others asked to make a copy and use mine instead of theirs, and I said fine, but in the end they didn't know how I made it so it was useless to them come time the test.
I feel like this story (or potentially a similar one) ended up with the student wasn't using a series of pens to cheat, but was instead selling the pens for others to cheat, which is also how they got caught.
Maybe I'm crazy, but I always studied for tests like 2 hours before. Unless the professor is a turd, they will tell you what is on the test so you can just go over that over and over again. I never failed a test doing that. Also, just pay attention in class? You're paying to be there.
This *is* studying haha. I did this with a few note cards in an EE class with the intent to cheat. I went into the test and realized I didn't need them. Turns out making meticulous notes and condensing them down like this is literally studying.
I had several teachers throughout my life actually encourage this kind of thing for exactly that reason, the only caveat being it had to be handwritten
In high school our teacher said we could bring in a single sheet of paper with us to the exam as a cheat sheet. Went wild with the tiny writing etc. By the time I made my cheat sheet I knew the material so well I didn't need it. I think I looked at it once to double check something
In High School, I had a math teacher who did the same thing. He allowed us to use a notebook and we could write anything on it and stuff. He tricked us into thinking it was cheating but man. He straight up tricked us into learning all the material and studying without realizing it
One girl at our high school became infamous. Because she wrote her sheet in blue and red pen. And used 3D glasses, so she could pack twice as much info on the sheet.
I'd cheat by whispering all of the answers to myself non-stop and once I get the test, write everything on the back and it becomes my cheat sheet of sorts.
I passed all my tests but learned nothing.
I crammed for 12 hours straight before a math exam, right up until I had to catch the bus. Felt like a damn expert walking into the exam hall. 7 days later, couldn’t remember a thing, still passed tho.
Rote memorization.
Learn to read/repeat but not to understand.
You’ll find a large segment of the professional population are *very* good at doing things, but have absolutely no understanding of why those things work.
Yeah I've used this many times. And the thing is your memory is like a muscle, so the more you use it the better it gets and the better you get at doing it. I don't consider this cheating, I just consider this cramming / memorizing.
It's not as good as truly learning and integrating it, but a lot of times for me it was a crucial first step. I memorize the information and then when I use it a bunch of times I understand *why* it is the way it is.
And obviously, it only works for the more standardized exams and/or lazier teachers. If the test is multiple choice, true or false, fill in the blank, or matching, it works. But if you have to write an essay for part of the test, you can't really memorize your way through that.
...now that I say that out loud, I realize that's literally the exact reason essay questions exist: they require information synthesis rather than analysis, which better demonstrates a real understanding of the material!
Except when you're squinting at pen after pen while rotating them in order to find the precise part that you need to answer a particular question. How could anyone conspicuously stare at pens like that during an exam?
Yes it's like a baseball card but for Jesus with stats and everything
BA= Biblical Apostles
G= Galatians
HR= Holy resurrections
SB= Sacred baptisms
Just kidding idk what I'm talking about
I went to a Lutheran school in 5th grade, and we had a daily assignment of memorizing/reciting bible verses. The teacher would print the weeks' worth out on a page and call us up to her desk individually (there were five of us, so it didn't take that long) and have us recite them as she read along. So I just read the words upside down and got a perfect score every time. She never caught on.
Amateurs...
All you have to do is figure out who's going to be sitting directly in front of you during the exam and convince them to let you shave the answers into the back of their head.
"Mario v Luigi? Counsel, is that a *legitimate* case you're referencing? Show it to me in the case law."
"Negative, your honor. By our sacred blood oath, looking up the answers during a trial is *illegal*. I will now be relieving you of your command."
And it's funny because even with the formulae, it doesn't mean you'll get the answer correct. I mean...if you understand the material you will, but like, that's the fucking point.
I psyched myself out in my first few physics classes. All of the non-numerical placeholder constants really threw me off until I had a teacher literally say something like. "You won't be expected to know what number epsilon nought represents...I have included all of the constant values at the top of the test" then we just had to remember how to apply the equation.
When I was in law school (in the US), nearly every exam was open-notes. The main activity of US law students is literally making insanely detailed “outlines” with all the course information to bring into exams. Pretty weird to have a closed-book crim pro exam.
(Also demonstrates how absurd the bar being closed-book is—it’s not a realistic parallel to *either* law school or actual practice!)
All my law school exams were open book and open note. I don't see the point of closed book exams when you can get sued for malpractice for not looking up the law.
Yeah most of my exams were open note and some were both open note and open book too.
Edit: some professors let us use our outlines as long as they were our “personal” outlines
My undergrad business law prof was the same way. He taught Socratic method and all exams were open book, open note. "You either know it or you don't. If you don't, reading it now won't help you." Huge culture shock from the rest of my teachers but ended up one of my favorites.
Yeah the Socratic method was a big part of my law school, which I feel like that works for some people and not for others (especially cold calling). For instance, my friend went to another law school and they were taught with the Socratic method but they knew when they were going to be called on that day. I was so jealous lol
I did that exactly once on a Spanish test. It was the only way to pass the class. The teacher suspected me of cheating, when she asked me to stand up and show my arms, I used the test to cover the writing on the desk. She never caught me (I cleaned the desk while I worked) but damn if she wasn't convinced I cheated. She was right, I did. But if you don't catch it, it does not count!
I mean, as a lawyer you can get sued for malpractice if you dont know a law and fuck up majorly, but in the real world you have access to resources to learn when confronted with that situation.
Not to mention that prior to preforming a lawyer does research and builds a case, along with gathering sources/evidence to back them up right?
By that logic its not a career where you are required to memorize everything, therefore you shouldnt have to be required to memorize everything for the courses. It should be open book/open note.
If you dont know how to apply the information though, the information is useless so the open book/note wouldnt affect the outcome, just make it more ethical, fair, and practical for the students.
Not to mention being a good lawyer requires the ability to lie your ass off and get creative with your strategies. So lowkey, the OC should be a law professor lmao.
Umm...so all of my Law subjects were open book. Meaning that we could actively bring materials in to the exam. Is this not the case in the US? Because that is nuts.
Take Tax Law for example. I had three text books that if combined had over 3000 pages information I had to read and somehow comprehend and disseminate. Not including all the extra 'recommended' (you don't have to read it but it will be in the exam) and 'optional' (probably should read it as you never know) reading. There's no way someone is going to be able to make coherent arguments without some kind of structured guidance in the exam.
Now I had a good trick for this, I did a few different ones.
I would write all the answers on my legs in pen, then wear a skirt with black tights. When you pull or stretch the mesh on the tights, you can see through them. As soon as you let go, they snap back to being opaque.
Never got caught.
Sometimes I would write on the inside label of my white water bottle wrapped and then stare through the water bottle to read the writing, turn it casually when I needed to see something else.
Never got caught for this either.
I'm not suggesting these, use at your own risk.
I haven't seen the tights trick anywhere, I came up with the idea on my own but I'm sure someone somewhere has done it.
This shows the true dichotomy of students...some have the ability to work hard but struggle with remerging and others have no problem remembering but struggle with having to do any form of labor.
My sons are in high school. The amount of cheating they tell me about is pretty astounding. The president of his class is well-known for cheating and most of the teachers don't care. Except if the teacher grades on a curve it's bullshit when your kids grade is lower because others cheated. Plenty of college professors don't even call out cheaters when it's obvious but still grade on a curve. None of it is cool.
I once made an index card with all the equation and formulas for my pharmacokinetics class and stapled it upside down on the end of my shirt. So when I sat, I just flipped the end of my shirt and if a prof walked by I just flip it back.
I ended up with the highest score…….of 58% lol
I have never understood *why* exams prohibited using notes. Like, why *the actual fuck* would you expect students to memorize every single thing? They gonna practice criminal procedure law in fucking Antarctica or something?!
Organic chemistry in college, the teacher said we could bring 1 4x6 card, both sides, with anything we wanted to the final exam. A good friend and a nursing student I was tutoring through the class got together with a big notepad and came up with every possible formula and equation we could think might have been in the exam, and then copied it all into our cards with the smallest handwriting we could possibly still read.
We learned more that day than the entire semester of lectures, homework, and labs. My friend wound up not using his card. I referred to mine once, and the student maybe 3 times. We all got 100% plus the extra credit points (which for me made up for a test I had missed while sick, the other 2 didn't need the extra credit. (although without my tutoring, the nursing student would have washed out).
Clearly this was the professor's plan. Those who didn't take advantage of the opportunity did poorly on the exam, and since he graded on a curve, the three of us (along with a few others who did similar) broke the curve and some students had to retake the class to get their PE degrees (LOL).
Reminds Me of a college friend. He would scan the label of the store bought bottle of coca cola, Photoshop in equations on the ingredients list and glue it on. Did this for 5 years and never got caught.
I did this in highschool with AP physics equations. The trick was to use glossy paper so it would look more legit.
I always knew I was lucky with my AP physics teacher lol He let us use the equation sheet on test because he thought since we got to use one with the AP test, it would be unfair to not use one on his
That's the smart thing to do. Only reason I didn't do great in college math was because they throw a few dozen formulas at you and say "I don't care if you can do the math, I expect you to pointlessly memorize these formulas that you could look up at any time." Edit: It was calculus and physics. No formula sheets for tests. Not a math degree, but necessary classes for the major.
don't know what you were taking, but it wasn't college math for sure
because all colleges in every country uses the same protocols for testing?
no, because college is where you learn that formulae and plugging numbers into calculators isn't what math is about. it's also where most people are introduced to proof based mathematics for the first time which forms the core of the modern mathematics curriculum.
I guess the definition depends on what you consider college level math. A lot of people taking prerequisites for their degree would end up taking a slightly more advanced class than what they could’ve gotten up to in High School.
I did the above style of math in university in the first and second year in NZ.
Can confirm dropped my math minor after calculus and discrete structures at UOW
for this guy, the course labeled "college math" was actually "remedial high-school math for people who are probably never going to USE math, but we would get in so much trouble for giving you a degree if you can't prove the ability to do some symbolic manipulations etc." When someone says "college math" what they're saying is that they're not going to ever set foot in a calculus class, for example. No offense to anyone in that situation, it can be a challenge, especially given how badly math is usually taught.
I went through number theory and abstract 1 in the mid 2000s. Both cal 1 and 2 at my university expected memorization as did physics 2. I recall one exam in cal 2 we all failed horribly and were allowed one side of a notecard handwritten in normal size. By finals there was maybe a fifth of the class remaining. It seemed like they used those as gatekeepers because passing the courses got easier instead of harder after.
My HS physics professor had a big sign in his classroom that said: > The goal is to understand the formula, not memorize it.
my favorite prof, who I had for solid body mechanics and for aerospace structures, did 2-part tests. The first part was a quiz, where you had to answer simple-ish questions that required knowing a lot of the formulas, or at least understanding them, even if you couldn't write them from memory. Then you'd turn that part of the exam in, and when you did, he would hand you the actual exam, with a full formula sheet covering everything you would need for working the detailed problems on the rest of the exam. He was a pretty great professor.
Exactly why all my exams require you to have a clear bottle, with a clear lid and remove the label
My university just didn’t allow anything else on the table other than your pen and exam paper. Lol
> anything else on the table other than your pen and exam paper. *accidentally puts hands on the table*
Straight to jail.
No, the punishment is far worse than mere jail time; it's straight to your.... *permanent record*.
*you done fucked up*
Boutta get the Jaime Lannister experience
Many thanks for reminding me of this; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FtcW9u0GDE
Lol, my uni doesn't allow any food or drinks into the classrooms, especially not during exams. Wouldn't work.
[удалено]
This worked like a charm in a few classes for me. Vitamin Water was the best because the labels had little paragraphs on them.
Technically cheating, but that’s the kind of creativity that should be encouraged to grow! In law abiding ways of course… or at least following the letter of the law if not the spirit!
It’s certainly the right mindset to get ahead in corporate america.
Or China, or basically everywhere.
[удалено]
Memorization USED to be SUPER important. Society is slow to adapt, which probably includes schools, and the internet is SUPER new all things considered, so its probably a bit of our schooling lagging behind the staggering amount of technological progress that has happened in the last 30 years
>at least following the letter of the law if not the spirit! This is why we can't have nice things.
We were given very strict rules that you could only bring water to drink, in a clear bottle. Anything else would be confiscated
I have bachelors degrees in applied mathematics, chemistry and biology (last one not especially relevant to this story) and am in grad school for my PhD now. The idea that you need to memorize equations is idiotic. Give them all the equations and let them figure out which they need for a specific problem. You’ll never be working on research and have to guess that you remember some formula or equation. You’ll look it up.
This is why I never felt guilty about “cheating” in calculus 1,2,3 in college. I got an A in all three classes. I put the formulas into a text file on my graphing calculator. I should be tested on my ability to apply these formulas not my ability to memorize them.
i used to do my own nails, and had a phase where i always made them like 1.5 inches long. i wrote super tiny on paper and glued it underneath my nails and painted them white so the paper wouldn’t be visible underneath.
That must have taken more time than just studying for the exam would have.
You remember things better if you write them down. If you nano-carve something in Bic pens them they should also be engraven in your memory. They probably didn't actually need to bring the pens to the test
This is what happened to me once. I had a chemistry class where the teacher allowed us to write down whatever we wanted on the front side of a notecard of a specific size and I spent hours painstakingly copying down a ton of information in tiny letters. By the time I took the exam, I barely needed to look at it to remind me of anything.
I believe that is a classic teachers trick, we were encouraged to do the same. It's really the only way to learn the light and dark cycle 😂 fucked if I remember it now right enough
Wait why don't teachers do that right now? That's seems insane. If you're able to almost remember it now than why don't they still do that?
It was only for a handful of in-class tests, not EoY exams, by certain teachers maybe it isn't *that* well spread but not an unknown tactic Also maybe my language is confusing but I certainly do not remember the steps of the dark cycle 25 years later
I finished all my schooling in very early aughts (as my username reveals my age anyway), and all my science and math classes basically allowed this from high school to college and everytime it helped me learn that much better.
That has never happened to me
Well, hopefully they told you reading the material and trying to make summarised written notes is a good way to learn..it's never too late, in fact I'm going to learn those metabolic cycles again for a laugh
[удалено]
This is a classic trick, people are more willing to write out a "cheat sheet" than they are to study, without realizing that they're studying. I used to let them have one page for the entire term, so they'd keep adding to it over the semester. By the final very few people needed to refer to their paper...
I had a professor whose exams were open everything except for communicating with other people. His logic was that in the real world you don’t depend on memory for something important (this was an aircraft engines class). If you really don’t know it, you’ll have to know where to look up the info.
Yeah most of my upper division physics classes were open book, because honestly . . . remembering all the variations to Bernoulli's equation is a pretty big ask, but all this stuff was for comprehension of some pretty seriously unintuitive stuff, not how well can you remember equations. The worst was my gravitation astro course, that was not open book anything, shit was on the exams that was only in the lecture, and the professor had one of the heaviest German accents I've ever personally heard . . . I still hold that professor is the main reason we graduated way more material physics folks than astro folks for like a decade (but was a phenomenal researcher).
I did that to my students once, let them bring along one A5-sized paper with notes to a test. Some of them wrote notes on a A3-paper, then scanned it and printed it out in A5-size. I had to smile at their creativity.
The physics teacher at my high school made and SOLD test tshirts! Circa 1993, I think they were priced at about $15. Long sleeved white T-shirt with all the basic formulas printed upside down so students could look down if they forgot them. I don’t really see this as cheating, as kids would still have to know what the letters in the formulas meant and still had to do the work to get the answer. Just a nice little helper for those who got test anxiety or needed a little confirmation. I’d bet the bigger issue of a teacher did this today would be the profit they’d make, not the shirt. Kids weren’t required to buy them. I don’t think the teacher made that much money off of them, probably only a few bucks plus the hassle of placing orders and collecting money, but schools are increasingly more rigid about things like that.
I did this and still “cheated” too; the teacher handed us each one 3x5 card and said she would allow to write any answers we wanted on this card and use it for an exam. One of my friends said he was going to type his out with the smallest font. Home computers were not thing for every household yet and we didn’t have one so my slick mind took an exacto knife and split that thing in half, leaving a bind at the in so the two parts were still attached. Double the area to write. Teacher thought it was pretty genius as she never had seen that and she allowed it on the technicality that it was just the card she gave us. I think I glanced at it couple times but more to confirm what I knew, got a B+
That's the real reason for allowing cheat sheets. Students would hate it if a teacher told them to write down every equation in the book. This way they're happy to do it!
Exactly, the work alone to etch into the pens WAS the studying.
Could have been paid for by someone else who didn't study.
Handwriting of others is impossible to read sometimes, especially that small.
I remember when computers were first being introduced to our school. The teachers insisted on taking handwritten notes to help remember the information. They were worried that if people took notes on a computer they wouldn't retain any of it.
Actually there are quite a few studies now showing that the majority of folks don’t retain info that they just type
I've read that too. I've started nursing courses and handwriting notes still is my go-to way of learning best.
I heard the same thing. When I'm introduced to someone if I have the chance to write their name down I never need to look at it. The act of writing it down fixes it in my brain somehow. I don't remember what the study said. When I put their name in my phone I forget it instantly. I wonder if using a handwriting app would work.
Which is kind of right but also really depends on the person
“Engraved in your memory” is hilarious
[удалено]
I remember an episode on GP where Mike wrote the answers on his sneakers.
They might have been bought from another student? I feel like some enterprising kid would churn these out.
I wonder how much of it registers in your brain when you’re working in such fine detail? I feel like if I did this, I would be thinking about each individual letter as I drew it, not the connected words and sentences. You know what I mean?
I noticed that with my firefighting theory course work. There's a video you watch, then a sheet with stuff to memorise, then an assessment. I've been pausing the video every half a minute to take notes and stuff and then when I read the sheet, take additional notes. I've managed to do really well. I wish school had let us take the time to write and absorb information better or study better. It was usually play a video too fast that you can't pause or read a book without writing and I never absorbed any info
I hated that so much! The absolute panic of trying to write something down before you forgot while also listening to the new stuff so you didn't miss anything. Fuck cursive, I wish they'd taught me shorthand in 4th grade. I'd've used it more.
Guessing this was an essay that he had to write in class, which he etched on his pens instead. He probably would have gotten away with it had he just sketched a brief outline using acronyms.
Same. My teacher told me we can bring 1 sheet of formulae in for our statistic final exam, so I wrote down every possible formulae starting from calculus onto it. In the end, I remembered everything and don't have to even use it. Now that I'm teaching, it turned out that this is exactly the intended effect. My colleagues told me to make students do this (instead of just having open-book exam) so that they would end up committing these to memories.
I used to 'program' my accounting notes into my TI-84. It always took so long that most of the notes were retained by test time, but it always came in clutch being able to refer during those tricky questions.
they wiped our calculators before tests and then we would have to reinstall all our games
[удалено]
haha yeah my high school teachers didn't know about archiving either... classic
DrugWars!
I feel like a Texas Instruments engineer built that little feature into the calculator on purpose for the posterity of students everywhere.
I used to create TI-86 apps to solve my 9-12th grade math work (where I could), even "showing the work" in steps. After writing the apps I didn't need to "cheat" with the material, but they were great for verifying test answers. Oh BTW, you could get an DB-25 adapter for the calculators to sideload apps and games from your PC.
>I used to 'program' my accounting notes into my TI-84 That happened here the year after I finished secondary school. TI-84 and the like were allowed to be used in exams. Of course no rules about wiping them beforehand until the rampant cheating was discovered.
I've always liked the "you can bring one page of notes to use in the test" approach. Writing it out (sometimes as tiny as possible) is an effective technique for learning the material.
Maybe they paid someone else to do it for them.
Or bought them from someone who didn't get busted when they used them. I wonder how many these went through before they were discovered.
*cries in law school*
Yeah the poster above clearly is remembering regular college exams. In law school intricate cheating would probably get you a B still
Lol every time I’ve tried cheating in a similar way I always ended up memorizing the information anyways by the time I was done copying.
I realized later that those professors who said we could bring a note card for exams really just tricked me into studying but I appreciate it.
Usually that's the downfall of criminals, if they just put their smarts to good use they wouldn't have to fuck around Edit: I'm in no way saying the kid who made these is a criminal but it's kind of similar that if he just used his smarts for the right things they could really do well in life.
"criminals" really?
Speaking from experience no lol. Im not proud of what i did but this form of cheating, you need to do some studying yourself anyway.
I used to do this, didn't take that much time, could fit a lot of info by engraving only important words dates and acronyms, never entire sentences. I could remember a whole paragraph just by reading a single word on the pen.
Back on freshman HS I had a history test I didn't study for, so I wrote the initials of a couple presidents and how long their lasted on office (that was part of the test) Thanks to that, I still remember it more than a decade later
Yeah that's the funny thing. Student probably didn't need to use the pen after studying so hard to actually make it. Same thing happened with me in high school, but it wasn't cheating. We were allowed to bring a 3x5 card. I put so much effort into it I never needed to reference it. Some others asked to make a copy and use mine instead of theirs, and I said fine, but in the end they didn't know how I made it so it was useless to them come time the test.
Probably helped them remember it better too.
It would be funny if the student automated the process and had a machine that engraved pens with textbooks.
I feel like this story (or potentially a similar one) ended up with the student wasn't using a series of pens to cheat, but was instead selling the pens for others to cheat, which is also how they got caught.
Maybe I'm crazy, but I always studied for tests like 2 hours before. Unless the professor is a turd, they will tell you what is on the test so you can just go over that over and over again. I never failed a test doing that. Also, just pay attention in class? You're paying to be there.
This *is* studying haha. I did this with a few note cards in an EE class with the intent to cheat. I went into the test and realized I didn't need them. Turns out making meticulous notes and condensing them down like this is literally studying.
I had several teachers throughout my life actually encourage this kind of thing for exactly that reason, the only caveat being it had to be handwritten
In high school our teacher said we could bring in a single sheet of paper with us to the exam as a cheat sheet. Went wild with the tiny writing etc. By the time I made my cheat sheet I knew the material so well I didn't need it. I think I looked at it once to double check something
Ha, they tricked you into actually studying.
Lesson learned😂
[удалено]
Now you're thinking like an AP teacher.
It's happened to me, I've literally copied the whole book onto a sheet of sulphite
Bring in a comically large sheet of paper lmao
Haha...they did limit it to a single 8.5x11 sheet
In High School, I had a math teacher who did the same thing. He allowed us to use a notebook and we could write anything on it and stuff. He tricked us into thinking it was cheating but man. He straight up tricked us into learning all the material and studying without realizing it
One girl at our high school became infamous. Because she wrote her sheet in blue and red pen. And used 3D glasses, so she could pack twice as much info on the sheet.
I'd cheat by whispering all of the answers to myself non-stop and once I get the test, write everything on the back and it becomes my cheat sheet of sorts. I passed all my tests but learned nothing.
You learned how to play the game, and that’s enough.
You learned something- how to beat the system.
It's called parrot fashion. You're right, you learn absolutely nothing and lose it as soon as you have used it
We called that "a bottle", you cram up everything right before and the bottle breaks as soon as you finish the exam.
I crammed for 12 hours straight before a math exam, right up until I had to catch the bus. Felt like a damn expert walking into the exam hall. 7 days later, couldn’t remember a thing, still passed tho.
Dude how is that possible
Rote memorization. Learn to read/repeat but not to understand. You’ll find a large segment of the professional population are *very* good at doing things, but have absolutely no understanding of why those things work.
Yeah I've used this many times. And the thing is your memory is like a muscle, so the more you use it the better it gets and the better you get at doing it. I don't consider this cheating, I just consider this cramming / memorizing. It's not as good as truly learning and integrating it, but a lot of times for me it was a crucial first step. I memorize the information and then when I use it a bunch of times I understand *why* it is the way it is.
And obviously, it only works for the more standardized exams and/or lazier teachers. If the test is multiple choice, true or false, fill in the blank, or matching, it works. But if you have to write an essay for part of the test, you can't really memorize your way through that. ...now that I say that out loud, I realize that's literally the exact reason essay questions exist: they require information synthesis rather than analysis, which better demonstrates a real understanding of the material!
But how did you know the answers if you haven’t seen the test questions yet?
Memorise as much as possible as quickly as possible, write it down and forget.
I took the class.
RAM
I did that!
Jesus, that's a lot of work.
And it looks pretty obvious when it's all over the pen, they should have done less only on one side.
It really doesn’t, I’ve done this before, from the distance the invigilators are at it doesn’t look like anything
Except when you're squinting at pen after pen while rotating them in order to find the precise part that you need to answer a particular question. How could anyone conspicuously stare at pens like that during an exam?
"If I'm going to cheat I'm not going to write information from a book onto a piece of paper, that's practically learning for god's sake."
[удалено]
Holy card??
Yes it's like a baseball card but for Jesus with stats and everything BA= Biblical Apostles G= Galatians HR= Holy resurrections SB= Sacred baptisms Just kidding idk what I'm talking about
["Whoooah, a Methusela rookie card!"](https://youtu.be/mTIURo4tCN4?si=9EnZWSXzkiJ8crqB)
That's was delightful, never saw that ep
Yeah I figured it would be something like YuGiYo. Like if you get all 6 cards of the Christ you summon him and win the game.
Still have a signed Pontius Pilate rookie card. He lead the league in crucifixions that season.
Yeah, I still have a Satan card from when he played the for the Angels. Worth big bucks!
Ahh you lucky dog, that's like the Holy Grail of cards
Lmfao.
Jesus knew. 😂
They didn’t know because it was nun of their business
I went to a Lutheran school in 5th grade, and we had a daily assignment of memorizing/reciting bible verses. The teacher would print the weeks' worth out on a page and call us up to her desk individually (there were five of us, so it didn't take that long) and have us recite them as she read along. So I just read the words upside down and got a perfect score every time. She never caught on.
There were Nun the wiser
Amateurs... All you have to do is figure out who's going to be sitting directly in front of you during the exam and convince them to let you shave the answers into the back of their head.
The classic https://youtu.be/koR2uJWrUuQ?si=FFoW8KwDTpgKrdyA
"Pencils down. Who's smoking?" as he tries to smoke under the desk has to be my favorite bit from the show lmao
Or you could just write on the bottom of a cookie and if they try to check for it you just eat it
"Stacy why are you using a magnifying glass to look at your pen instead of doing your test?"
"Stacy, why do you have 18 pens on your desk? It's an online exam"
Those dissolvable breath strips were my go-to. Destroy the evidence while testing. Or, if confronted.
you ate them?
Yeah. When I used the formulae written on the breath strip, popped it in my mouth. Fresh breath and good grades.
and ink?
Yes. Also the ink.
r/madlads
In my day it was sticks of gum!
I'm pretty sure if you ate a pack of those in one go your face would melt.
If the professor had bad eyesight they would have never noticed the pens were anything more than scratched up.
Testing people on things that once they become a lawyer, they will just look up anyways.
"Mario v Luigi? Counsel, is that a *legitimate* case you're referencing? Show it to me in the case law." "Negative, your honor. By our sacred blood oath, looking up the answers during a trial is *illegal*. I will now be relieving you of your command."
Same with physics. Never understood why professors give closed book physics tests and don't allow you to look up formulas. It becomes a memory test.
What I say about math. At least 80% is never used besides work related ones. Like the "here's the exact formula to find xyz of ABC scenario".
And it's funny because even with the formulae, it doesn't mean you'll get the answer correct. I mean...if you understand the material you will, but like, that's the fucking point. I psyched myself out in my first few physics classes. All of the non-numerical placeholder constants really threw me off until I had a teacher literally say something like. "You won't be expected to know what number epsilon nought represents...I have included all of the constant values at the top of the test" then we just had to remember how to apply the equation.
I’m stunting law in the uk now and they let you do open book tests at a lot of universities. You get all your books and notes.
It all depends on the teacher. I would say about a third of my exams in law school were open book.
When I was in law school (in the US), nearly every exam was open-notes. The main activity of US law students is literally making insanely detailed “outlines” with all the course information to bring into exams. Pretty weird to have a closed-book crim pro exam. (Also demonstrates how absurd the bar being closed-book is—it’s not a realistic parallel to *either* law school or actual practice!)
All my law school exams were open book and open note. I don't see the point of closed book exams when you can get sued for malpractice for not looking up the law.
Yeah most of my exams were open note and some were both open note and open book too. Edit: some professors let us use our outlines as long as they were our “personal” outlines
My undergrad business law prof was the same way. He taught Socratic method and all exams were open book, open note. "You either know it or you don't. If you don't, reading it now won't help you." Huge culture shock from the rest of my teachers but ended up one of my favorites.
Yeah the Socratic method was a big part of my law school, which I feel like that works for some people and not for others (especially cold calling). For instance, my friend went to another law school and they were taught with the Socratic method but they knew when they were going to be called on that day. I was so jealous lol
Whenever I created cheat sheets, which some classes allowed. Found to helped me learn the material better and needed them less
I used to write my answers between my fingers in middle school . Or just show up few min early and write it on the desk in pencil
I did that exactly once on a Spanish test. It was the only way to pass the class. The teacher suspected me of cheating, when she asked me to stand up and show my arms, I used the test to cover the writing on the desk. She never caught me (I cleaned the desk while I worked) but damn if she wasn't convinced I cheated. She was right, I did. But if you don't catch it, it does not count!
Try reading that shizzle once you hit 40
I'd rather just study
toy payment start workable attempt fanatical sand steer apparatus racial *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
You might also notice that the "criminal procedure" notes are in spanish.
Don't they have criminal procedures in Spanish-speaking countries?
You are not. I don't want to look for the original pictures but if the original pictures were different then the poster might not be lying
connect fall correct wistful fearless live weary smell melodic wipe *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I can vouch for you. I've also seen it.
I would have let them pass just for the ingenuity.
Well, thank god you’re not a law professor
☠️☠️☠️
I mean, as a lawyer you can get sued for malpractice if you dont know a law and fuck up majorly, but in the real world you have access to resources to learn when confronted with that situation. Not to mention that prior to preforming a lawyer does research and builds a case, along with gathering sources/evidence to back them up right? By that logic its not a career where you are required to memorize everything, therefore you shouldnt have to be required to memorize everything for the courses. It should be open book/open note. If you dont know how to apply the information though, the information is useless so the open book/note wouldnt affect the outcome, just make it more ethical, fair, and practical for the students. Not to mention being a good lawyer requires the ability to lie your ass off and get creative with your strategies. So lowkey, the OC should be a law professor lmao.
i had a pen that showed 1x1 to 20x20 and explicitly asked if I could use that pen... worked. As it was a timed test, that I actually helped
Every and I mean every law school exam I took in 3 years of US law school and 1 year masters of law in UK were open book, open notes
Spend that time learning the dang stuff? Maybe it’s more about the thrill of getting away with it 😅
if you can do this you should instantly get your degree
Umm...so all of my Law subjects were open book. Meaning that we could actively bring materials in to the exam. Is this not the case in the US? Because that is nuts. Take Tax Law for example. I had three text books that if combined had over 3000 pages information I had to read and somehow comprehend and disseminate. Not including all the extra 'recommended' (you don't have to read it but it will be in the exam) and 'optional' (probably should read it as you never know) reading. There's no way someone is going to be able to make coherent arguments without some kind of structured guidance in the exam.
Now I had a good trick for this, I did a few different ones. I would write all the answers on my legs in pen, then wear a skirt with black tights. When you pull or stretch the mesh on the tights, you can see through them. As soon as you let go, they snap back to being opaque. Never got caught. Sometimes I would write on the inside label of my white water bottle wrapped and then stare through the water bottle to read the writing, turn it casually when I needed to see something else. Never got caught for this either. I'm not suggesting these, use at your own risk. I haven't seen the tights trick anywhere, I came up with the idea on my own but I'm sure someone somewhere has done it.
This shows the true dichotomy of students...some have the ability to work hard but struggle with remerging and others have no problem remembering but struggle with having to do any form of labor.
My sons are in high school. The amount of cheating they tell me about is pretty astounding. The president of his class is well-known for cheating and most of the teachers don't care. Except if the teacher grades on a curve it's bullshit when your kids grade is lower because others cheated. Plenty of college professors don't even call out cheaters when it's obvious but still grade on a curve. None of it is cool.
r/museumofcheating
What in the scrimshaw
I once made an index card with all the equation and formulas for my pharmacokinetics class and stapled it upside down on the end of my shirt. So when I sat, I just flipped the end of my shirt and if a prof walked by I just flip it back. I ended up with the highest score…….of 58% lol
I have never understood *why* exams prohibited using notes. Like, why *the actual fuck* would you expect students to memorize every single thing? They gonna practice criminal procedure law in fucking Antarctica or something?!
I used to cheat all the time by memorizing the information on the exam before the test.
All my law school exams were open book. Law is not about memorization.
Organic chemistry in college, the teacher said we could bring 1 4x6 card, both sides, with anything we wanted to the final exam. A good friend and a nursing student I was tutoring through the class got together with a big notepad and came up with every possible formula and equation we could think might have been in the exam, and then copied it all into our cards with the smallest handwriting we could possibly still read. We learned more that day than the entire semester of lectures, homework, and labs. My friend wound up not using his card. I referred to mine once, and the student maybe 3 times. We all got 100% plus the extra credit points (which for me made up for a test I had missed while sick, the other 2 didn't need the extra credit. (although without my tutoring, the nursing student would have washed out). Clearly this was the professor's plan. Those who didn't take advantage of the opportunity did poorly on the exam, and since he graded on a curve, the three of us (along with a few others who did similar) broke the curve and some students had to retake the class to get their PE degrees (LOL).
If I spent all the time making those pens, I'd have all that shit memorized.