Kids' how-to-cheat videos
Lawgeek (who's just quit his job to become a university prof) posts a roundup of students' how-to-cheat YouTube videos. The best one is definitely the guy who scans the label off a Coke bottle, replaces the nutritional information with cheaty stuff, prints it, and glues it around a bottle (presumes that your teacher lets you bring Coke into class -- I suppose this works best in schools where Coke has struck a deal requiring their products to be available at all times and in all places.)
When I was a kid, we were obsessed with figuring out methods for cheating -- far more so than with actual cheating itself. We used binary encoding to sneak in long lists of numbers, stitching them up the outer seams of our jeans or cuffs -- a stitch for 1, no stitch for 0 -- that we could read by fingertip. After we learned the resistor color-coding scheme, we started to shave pencils and then decorate them with colored bands that actually contained the same lists of numbers. We tried -- and failed -- to produce a decent tapping code for interactive cheating, though this is certainly possible. One exciting failure was a light-based semaphore wherein the conspirators would flash reflected discs of light up on the wall over the teacher's head using our watch-faces.
The kids in these videos are awfully sanguine about their teachers' YouTube cluelessness. I'm relatively certain that the adorable little English moppet pictured here has never actually succeeded in using his cheat, as it relies on your teachers allowing you to keep playing cards on your desk during the exam. This is surely a purely theoretical cheat. Link
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Cheating was never hard in high school. Not even remotely hard.
Our teachers almost always let us bring in blank paper for scratch paper to work out problems during tests, whether the test was in math class or latin class. If they inspected your blank paper, you couldn't do this, but nobody ever did.
So you go buy an extremely fine-point mechanical pencil, and some blue-lined notebook paper. Lower quality is better here; ideally you want dark blue, THICK lined paper.
Then you simply write whatever the heck you want, entirely on the lines of the paper. With careful handwriting you can do it, and it's easily readable if you had decent eyesight, but so small and low-contrast that not even the next desk over can read it. Plus, it's *blank paper*. There can't possibly be anything written on blank paper, right? The word "blank" is right in there.
If you wanted to be extra sure of not getting caught after the fact, you simply skip ahead to the questions where you need the cheat, then copy your lines into the regular spaces. It's not cheating if you write it down during the exam, right? Then erase the tiny text you wrote (make it look like you're just thinking through the problem), since you no longer need it, and all evidence that you cheated is gone.
I never cheated, never. I was not well liked though because I usually brought the curve up. I still remember the algebra test that I missed acing because I forgot one measly minus sign, gahhh!
A group of us learned sign language and after some success of helping each other with answers I was caught. My excuse that I was getting rid of flies didn't go very far.
Most of my high school tests were either of the "you can't prepare for this, but it's damn easy" or the "this is tough, but you've got a couple weeks to finish it" variety (God, I loved high school chemistry). Cheating was never necessary, so I never got a chance to try out the hare-brained schemes I'd come up with out of boredom in class some days. There are times when I wish I'd had a legitimate reason to cook up a cheating scheme. It would have been fun.
The last time I cheated was in fourth grade on a test of the NJ counties. Each of us had a desk to ourselves to put books in, and I just hid a list in the desk and checked it for the three or four I couldn't remember. I also nearly got in a lot of trouble for helping somebody ELSE cheat in fifth grade.
In some of my math classes we could only use a simple calculator. I couldn't ever remember most of the formulas so i would right them all down on small piece of paper and with black electrical tape, tape them to the back of my black calculator. With the tape I would just make a little tab big enough for me to pinch so that when the instructor wasn't looking I could flip the calculator over, pull back that cheat sheet, get my formula and then seal it back up to work the problem. Helped a lot...
Cory did what?! Why would you need to? From what I've been able to tell, you're pretty darn smart. Maybe you just liked the challenge.
me and a buddy had a sloppy interactive method for cheating on a stadardized test. they sat us next to each other. one of us would tap an eraser when the other glaced out of the corner of their eye, the eraser would be on the question they needed help with.
if the other knew the answer he'd put his hand down on the desk with one of his fingers touching the desk. different finger for a,b,c, or d. not elegant by any means. but with the teacher we had it wasn't risky at all.
Cory, when I was in high school in Argentina, we had a similar method - before the exam, we would take a pen with no ink and "write" our cheaty info on our "blank" scratch paper. It would leave an impression that was legible from up close but completely invisible from any distance. Brilliant, and totally more trouble than it was worth.
I never really spent too much time trying to figure out how to cheat. Instead I would figure out mnemonics to remember stuff. The best was the resistor color code that I got from one of our ex-Navy lab techs at University.
Bad = Black = 0
Boys = Brown = 1
Rape = Red = 2
Our = Orange = 3
Young = Yellow = 4
Girls = Green = 5
But = Blue = 6
Virgins = Violet = 7
Go = Grey = 8
Without = White = 9
There's also one to remember the order of the streets in downtown Seattle but I can't remember that one yet.
"Cheating was never hard in high school."
Neither were the tests in high school. I could usually score between 90-95% on a test simply by remaining alert in class and doing most of my assigned homework. Call me lazy, but I figured this method required less effort than staying awake at night contriving and constructing intricate devices that would allow me to bring possible test answers to the test site. Whatever information can be scrawled inside the 1.5 pt lines on a cheap piece of loose leaf or stitched into a pair of jeans is probably not so much information it can't be easily memorized.
Besides, it's the principle of the thing. But maybe I'm just bitter because I know for a fact the salutatorian cheated off of me on a regular basis.
I only cheated once in school. I helped the teacher out in the science lab after school (yeah, I was that guy) and one time he said he needed to leave early. We'd all been given the "sludge test", a babyfood jar filled with 4 of 10 possible substances, and our final exam was to determine what was in our jar. I saw a folder on his desk and opened it, it contained a list of what everyone's jar had in it! I looked at mine, but felt so guilty later on I deliberately flubbed the test.
I remember my old school chum, Gerry, had at one time, thru delicate use of razor blade and Elmers, rigged a pencil so that a sliver of wood could be coaxed loose from its side and unroll a scroll of illicit info. Then, the eraser ferrule could be spun to wind the scroll back inside. That level of creativity and craftsmanship has proven far more inspiring and useful for me in my day-to-day life than any quadratic function ever has.
i never did any sophistacated cheating in school, but my favorite were the blatantly obvious cheating that would go on. taking a quiz in class, everything would be quiet and the teacher would leave the room. after a few moments of silence, someone would inevitably ask for answers.
"whats the answer to number five?"
"yeah, i cant get that either."
"isnt it b?"
"no its c"
The few times that I had actually gone to the hassle of preparing a cheat sheet did not actually result in any cheating. Just the repetition from my notes onto the sheet and the stress of the situation gave me the short-term memory boost that I needed, and I threw the sheet away before the test started.
Sad to think in my day I actually used to sit down with text books and study.
http://www.hotpulp.com
There was a pathetic girl in my math class who, when we passed our homework sheets forward to be collected, would dawdle & copy answers right then & there before adding hers to the pile. The sad part is that when I told the teacher about this he didn't bother to do anything about it.
Cheats never prosper. Wow, I sound old.
cheats never prosper, they just run our lives
I'm with Noen and Jim Teal III. It never even occurred to me to cheat. My friends and I were congenially competitive with each other about grades, but never thought about grades being important to parents or teachers or real life. We just liked being smart(asses). I think that the focus has changed a lot from thirty years ago. Then it was learning, now it's grades. Feh. People still ask me how I know so many things and I just point out that I stayed awake in high school. They actually taught us a lot of useful information. I'm pretty grateful for a good high school education.
My favorite thing about this post is the misspelling in the image, "Cheat Hear." Or maybe it is an auditory cheat? as opposed to an actual place to cheat…
Posting these videos perhaps demonstrates why these kids need to cheat in the first place.
Take "Kiki" for instance. Clicked on her video, then her youtube profile, then was at her myspace.
Three clicks and I know that she is 18 and goes to Plano East Senior High School in Texas.
Not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
There's one fatal flaw with cheating.
The stuff I do exams on now, is too complicated to be able to cheat with.
So if I were to make some kind of cheating strategy, that would probably work, I would also, already have read the material and apropos not have to cheat.
On the AP Calculus tests you're allowed to bring in TI variety calculators. These are all programmable, which means you can either code in helpful hints or code programs that will solve problems for you.
The main thing about this is that the actual act of coding these things in makes you remember the material better. I never used these things on the test, but I still got a 5 on the AP (after an awful lot of work). When you write a program to solve a problem you have a significantly better understanding of its inner workings.
We'd simply walk into the classroom where the test was being held and scribble ciphered (sometimes not) cribs all over the board. Most people were focused on the test, so paid it no notice, and if they did, they assumed it was from another class / subject.
We were allowed to use calculators in math. Didn't help if you couldn't keep your trig straight in your head. Did help when you put the number of the question you weren't sure about in your head, pushed your calculator to the edge of the desk where your friend could see it, he waited a bit, typed the answer into his calculator then strategically positioned the screen. We always used a multiple of 7 to identify the question (so question 21 was 147 on screen) - ditto for the answer. This paid off once when we were almost caught: "Are you asking for an answer to this question?" "I don't think there's a question 147 in the test, sir." "It might be an answer, then. "I don't know sir - you tell me." "Carry on."
I memorised most of an essay about 'A Streetcar Named Desire' from an obscure 1970s text, then spat it out during the exam. When this paid off so well, I started finding old essays then writing out the key paras in the margins of the book we were required to critique. Just looked like notes I'd taken as I was reading. The essay cheat also worked for history, economics and legal studies.
Nobody else in my high school had ever heard of Cliffs Notes or the like. I guess it's cheating if you can get a VHA (an A) for an essay about a Shakespeare play or a novel you've never actually read. By Year 11, I was skipping 28 periods out of 35 and still getting good grades.
Seems strange, but this sort of thing is encouraged at work. It's not called cheating - it's called "emulating best practice". Original thinking is reinventing the wheel, fraught with risk. Much better to adapt something that's already working somewhere else.
Barclaac @9, you're thinking of "Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest" for Jefferson, James, Cherry, Columbia, Marion, Madison, Spring, Seneca, University, Union, Pike, Pine (south to north). Of course, you still have to remember which is first in each pair.
The best math teacher I ever had didn't care if we cheated. We could bring in anything we wanted. You still had to know how to figure out how to answer it, which is more important than just plopping out the right number. Hence "show your work". In the real world you're allowed to have references....
For things like vocab quizzes, my teacher would always give us a few minutes before the quiz to study. Often you can write on desks with pencil- copy what you need down to the desk, put it on your paper, and then erase it.
Another thing someome did was take the whole vocab sheet, print it out size 2 or 4 font, past it to the bottom of his non-dominant hand, and "rub his forehead in frustration" to see the see. Only thing with that is that you have to be really careful not to get caught.
"Original thinking is reinventing the wheel, fraught with risk. Much better to adapt something that's already working somewhere else."
What do you do when you run into an original problem?
In the late '50s, when I was in h.s. in a small town in central Indiana, there were two of us who were ham operators. One of us was K9HXT and the other K9SQX.
Since at the time (and for many years afterwards), you had to know Morse Code in order to get a ham license--well, we saw the possibilities.
Tapping our pencils was especially efficient for multiple-guess tests. One would send a (question)number, one would send either a letter or number reply, depending upon the test.
We did have to be careful not to overdue the rat-a-tats, because on occasion the teacher would mistake the code for a tic of some kind and tell (at least one of) us to shut up.
As hams, we were lucky to get cast-off WWII equipment. Ah, to have had transistorized wireless XMIT-RCV capabilities...
...On the other hand, after 12 years in K-12, then 7 on both sides of the academic fence in College, the conclusion I came to with regards to cheating is that in about 80% of the cases where cheating occurs, it's actually the teacher/professor/non-english-speaking foreigner teaching assistant who's really responsible; had they taught their material well, the students would have learned and wouldn't *need* to cheat.
The other 20%? Slackers, frat punks, and anyone else who was simply too lazy to study, natch.
ah college!
http://lists.enabled.com/pipermail/peace-justice-news/2004-July/001372.html
It's been more than 20 years since I last taught and I still find myself extremely annoyed by cheating--partly by the snotty little cheats themselves and partly by teachers who are too lazy or witless to design testing situations that can't be gamed easily.
My own bugaboo was plagiarism, which is a different game and in my perhaps-biased opinion, a more serious offense--and officially it was grounds for failing a course. But even 30 and 40 years ago, I found adminstrators who would a student who had plagiarized a term paper off the hook. Then couple months back I read that the president of my grad-studies alma mater was found to have plagiarized his dissertation--and was let off by his board because he argued that everybody in his department did the same sort of thing. So nothing much has changed except that the shamelessness now reaches all the way to the top.
Nobody cheats on my exams because they're all open book!
perhaps then it must be acknowledged that the ability to write ones ideas in an organized way is no longer required by society.
The one redeeming thing about Catholic schools is that you can fit a LOT of info into a tie.
I came up with a better method for cheating my way through most of my exams. I honed my memory to the point where I no longer memorised facts, but images of textbook pages in my mind, to be read at leisure during an exam. It worked best out of the biology textbooks as they had neat boxouts summarising the key facts of each section but it was still feasible with other more complex textbooks as well. It's not quite eidetic but it's as good as it gets really.
I remember sheets of scratch paper that were covered with sentences written with my eyes closed as I "copied" out of the book. It was fun to be able to recite these things verbatim when someone (teacher, friend, anyone) asked me a question about something and they would ask "How did you do that?". I would grin and say "Oh I read the textbook."
I remember using it at one point later on as well to memorise a truly massive url within seconds and terrifying my teacher by reciting it flawlessly. I think I left the English dept. rather in awe.
Then of course I discovered drinking at university...oh how much fuzzier those images got.
I've always disliked cheating, and have never done it. Despite this, I always enjoyed coming up with elaborate cheating methods, usually in the form of secret compartments inside clothing/shoes/calculators, etc. But the fun was in the idea, not the deed. As an undergrad I turned in a fair few students for egregious cheating (usually when it got to the point of selling answers en masse.) Now that I'm teaching, I catch a fair few plagiarisers every year. The department head has never punished these students, because the university has decided to take cheating so "seriously" that the harsher punishments now require a high burden of proof that is rarely met -- also administrators don't like going through the rather arduous process of paperwork involved for formally punishing people for cheating. I'd rather just be able to give them a zero.
The most blatant case of plagiarism I ever saw? A paper (which was 75% of the class grade), and still contained embedded hyperlinks, underlined and in blue.
@#9
I learned that code a little differently :
Bad = Black = 0
Boys = Brown = 1
Rape = Red = 2
Our = Orange = 3
Young = Yellow = 4
Girls = Green = 5
But = Blue = 6
Violet = Violet = 7
Gives = Grey = 8
Willingly = white = 9
and for the tolerance bands
Get = gold = 5%
Some = silver = 10%
Now = none = 20%
lol
Kind of creepy that two different groups both used rape as part of a mnemonic device.
Some of these things are more work and less effective than just simply revising your notes quickly. Seriously, i always thought it was more work to cheat than to just educate yourself. Not being judgemental, if you want to cheat, go for it, but seriously, just simply preparing for the test legit is far less work than cheating, plus you will have to prepare even less for the next test no doubt.
Anyone who cheats using methods like Cory's probably doesn't need to cheat, and probably ought to get a high grade anyway. I think I would have a hard time teaching my students to memorise binary encoding or resistor colour-codes in the first place.
Ultimately I think that a good cheat, creative, cunning and organised, is demonstrating more useful skills that someone who's successfully memorised a bunch of formulae that will all be forgotten by next week anyway.
I never cheated. I don't see the point--it takes less effort to study for 30 minutes than to take the time to figure out how to cheat. If you're so messed up in the head that you won't study, but you'll waste time learning how to cheat (which takes much more time and energy, trust me), you honestly the worst sort of human being.
I never actually studied more than 15 minutes, either. I took notes and did the homework, and that was enough. If I got a bad grade, it was because I blanked. If I got a stellar grade, I knew it was because I had learned the information better than most of the other students. I've only ever gotten two F grades in my life--both in algebra. I just cannot do math, and I've accepted that.
Ultimately I think that a good cheat, creative, cunning and organised, is demonstrating more useful skills that someone who's successfully memorised a bunch of formulae that will all be forgotten by next week anyway.
Exactly. Cheaters are hackers: they're exploiting the system as presented. They're already ahead of the game.
My best cheat was when I convinced my English teacher to let me do an author report on Jerry Pournelle (who I was a big fan of) only to realize that there was very little in local resources on Jerry Pournelle.
So I made up 'Larry Cornell', figuring she wouldn't remember the difference (this was before commercial intertubes.) I made up plots for various stories and critiqued them--a much bigger accomplishment for someone my age than a simple review.
I got an "A." At graduation, one of my friends outed me before I could do it myself. She laughed, and there was no ill-will. The only downside was that I never got a copy of my paper back. It could have been a fruitful launching point for a bunch of stories...
A "good" cheat yes. Sadly, most are boring and mediocre.
When I was in high school, we had graphing calculators, but our math/chem/phys/econ/etc teachers cleared them before every test to prevent cheating. (This was back in the days of purely ram-based graphing calculators, like the TI-83, 86, etc.)
Now I was a math geek, so for me, the real purpose of a graphing calculator was to play tetris, galaga, mario etc after finishing the exam in 10-20 minutes. But I couldn't do that if my calculator was cleared, and it was often handy to have one for quick arithmetic.
So I wrote up a TI-86 assembly hack which prevents the memory from being cleared by meddling with the menu callbacks. When you try to clear the memory, it dims the screen and writes "Mem cleared. Defaults set." just like an unmodified calculator, but it doesn't actually clear it.
The local tetris league loved it, because we could use our calculators on quizzes and still face off afterwards over the link cable. The program could easily be used to cheat, but I don't know if anyone actually ever used it for that.
After reading , my friends and I just started using the same code the prisoners struck up to pass answers interactively.
Sadly, one of my comrades fell during a ENC1102 exam.
Good cheats only work if your professor happens to not like the same sort of dystopia you do.
Swatch watches, those plastic watches with the fancy designs printed on the face and band, were all the rage when I was in high school. The band of my Swatch watch was conveniently the same width as a piece of masking tape. The night before an exam I'd pull out my .05mm drafting pen, roll out some masking tap, and write down (in the tiniest print I could manage) whatever facts, formulas, historical dates, or triggers I needed for the exam. Once the ink had dried, I'd affix the tape to my watch band. It worked like a charm--it looked like a decorative Swatch band, and I never had to worry about rousing suspicion by looking at my watch repeatedly during the exam.
Finally! A use for the TSA!
They can be posted at every desk in every exam room.
As a TA, I've always encouraged my students to bring along for the exam a "cheat sheet" full of any formulae they want/can think of/think they can't remember. The rationale is
1) just having the formulae per se can't help you at all if you don't know where / how / why to apply it.
2) just the WORK of writing down the cheat sheet and selecting the useful data is actually STUDYING!
I run into a fair bit of plagarism in the classroom. The best one yet was a machine translation from a German website - students know we google a line or two from suspect essays to see if they show up, so this guy thought this would get around it. Unfortunately he didn't even bother to glance at it after he hit "print", and the gibberish included a 20-letter untranslatable German word in the very first sentence!
here is my technique....
http://www.drivenbyboredom.com/2008/02/03/how-to-cheat/
Way late to these comments, so few will read my confession.
I teach at a university, and I have, on occasion, not even bothered to grade tests! Just chuck most of them in the trash as soon as I got home.
So take that cheaters!
Allow me to explain. If a student is going to fail regardless of their test score...or the test is not going to raise or lower their grade...why on earth should a professor spend the time to grade a test that is not going to be returned anyway?
Funny thing is that many students just assume that the test is really important to their grade. They don't bother to read the syllabus or even listen on the first day of class when it is explained.
Actually, now I don't grade ANY tests. I make the students grade their own. I trust my students, but if you don't, tell them they must bring a black pen and a red pen to the test. The answers must be written in black. When the test is finished, the corrections must be made in red. This will throw them for a loop that they will not be able to cheat, and you will not have to correct the tests yourself.
Wow! I just had a great idea! Forget the red pen...just buy a large box of crayons! Make the students take the test in crayon! Then collect them and have them grade them in any pen they want! Oh I am a genius!
Rambling on, since nobody is going to read this anyway. I had a high school teacher who had a great way to grade tests. He would collect all the test and clip them together, then take a very large nail and hammer and proceed to make his own "punch card". It took him about 2 minutes to punch out the correct holes. He gave these back to the students and they had to count how many holes they had in the right box. Great idea, and cheat proof.
ok then, thanks for your attention.
Rambling on, since nobody is going to read this anyway.
BB has 7,360,000 page views per month, and this was a popular thread, so you can guesstimate that a few thousand will read your comment. Sorry. Or congrats. Your choice.
all human progress depends on the lazy man
what's so wrong with trying your best to learn the stuff and then let the chips fall where they may?
As the parent of homeschooled kids I find it more than fitting that the kid in the video used the "hear" a product of public schools and cheating. As I've grown older I realize the true benefit of knowing when to cheat.
I don't know - by the time I reached the end of high school it would have been impossible to store all the subject matter in a small enough space for exams. (I'm thinking, eg, of history here - you just can't condense pages and pages of complex, interwoven facts into any medium that can be smuggled into an exam venue). By university level, the content had multiplied several fold, and there was even less point (and the penalties were much more substantial). One set of courses I took, in philosophy, even provided the exam questions beforehand -- you could either argue convincingly, or you couldn't.
Anyway, the point is that any good educational programme should be testing reasoning ability, not memory. We have computers to do the remembering for us now. At least until they can out-reason us, that's the ability we should be focusing on.
Cheating in real life == taking good notes with you. It's weird that kids are punished for what's good sense everywhere else.
I have to echo the sentiment of the prior comment that said by the time they copied out the cheat sheet, they had memorized everything on it as a consequence of the copying. I never cheated, but I had a couple of math tests where they let us take in an index card with limited notes. Often, the act of compiling the notes was enough to remember the stuff, and the card would go unused.
Most of the anti-cheaters here seem to think that all students, and people (especially smart people) are the same, when they're not. Some learning and thinking styles do well in the traditional education system because teaching methods, curriculum, and evaluation methods are well-suited for that particular way of learning and thinking.
As #57 points out, a good educational programme should be testing reasoning ability, not memory. I'd like to add that a good educational system should be challenging students to APPLY knowledge, and not simply require them to regurgitate facts and figures. Some very smart people have difficulty memorizing facts and figures, but are amazing at grasping and applying complex concepts and ideas. If a student can ace a test simply by copying from a cheat sheet of facts and figures, then the test (and likely the lessons leading up to it) was poorly designed in the first place. I think it's safe to say that most cheaters study for exams. I know I sure as hell did. There were just some things that for the life of me, I could not memorize.
Another thing to consider is that a lot of kids struggle with severe anxiety around test taking. Bringing some sort of cheating device into the exam is often a strategy to reduce this anxiety. A lot of kids probably don't even use their cheating devices, but do better on the exam because they feel less anxious knowing they're there.
A lot of schools now understand these things and actually allow students to bring in some kind of "cheat sheet" into exams. Believe it or not, but pedagogy, like everything else in the world, has been changing since you left high school. It seems that some of you need an update.
"Cheating" is also a pretty broad term. There are different kinds of cheating, and I would argue that it's a mistake to paint them with the same brush. Handing in someone else's paper and claiming it's your own work is quite different from bringing a mathematical formula into an exam. My arguments above do not make a case for plagiarism.