Ask Lemmy

Not intentionally, but in high school we had a test on identification of flowers and plants. The teacher was an older man and he wasn't good with computers. He was showing pictures from the computer using video projector but didn't realize that Windows was displaying the filename of each picture in the title bar and each picture was named e.g. "daisy.jpg". Almost the whole class got full marks on the test except for the unlucky few who sat in the back row and had poor eyesight.

In school: yes, many times. Never was caught either.

Kinda once in college. It was a lab practical. The girl I thought was smart was across stations from me. I tried looking but noticed she had an obvious wrong answer, so I decided to not use her answers.

No

We had TI-89 calculators in school. You could load programs on it to show, step by step, how to do quadratic equations. Another teacher in a history class was more manipulable and the students convinced them to allow us to bring in calculators to calculate the difference between dates, and they agreed. So we loaded our calculator up with notes from the computer.

I've smuggled things into tests just to see if I could, but I've never actually used that to answer something.

I had a professor in college who would do 10 question pop quizzes from time to time. He would always have the answer key stapled to the front of the envelope as he passed them out. I have good spatial recognition and would always crack a joke to him when he got to me just so he'd pause for a second and I could memorize the pattern real quick. I'd fill out the answers in under 30 seconds and just pretend I took it.

Not on my own behalf, but have helped others a couple of times.

All the time! I do this thing where, before the test, I look over the subject matter and store the information in my head, letting me breeze through the questions.

In seriousness, no. But I've definitely been cheated off of.

Only once.

9th grade physics.

The teacher used an overlay to grade our multiple choice tests, and in a few spots, I'd mark two answers. I got caught, earned my crappy C, and never cheated again.

I hated physics.

I almost kinda involuntarily cheated and almost got flunked out of college. Comp sci major, forced to do a partner programming assignment. Met up with the dude and banged out like 75% of the project in the first meeting. After that, he kept dodging and rescheduling and giving excuses yadda yadda why he couldn’t meet up. Finally, just before the deadline, he says he’ll finish and submit it. I reluctantly agree (mostly because I was over a barrel at this point). The dumbass submitted his buddy’s version from the previous semester and it got flagged as a 99% match. We both had to face an academic dishonesty committee and plea our cases. Thankfully he fessed up (and I showed chat transcripts and screen shots) and he got an F in the class and a suspension of some kind. I think the prof actually kinda took pity on me because I was supposed to get a zero on the assignment, but I was a pretty crappy student anyway and that would’ve tanked my whole grade, so I think she just averaged my grades or something and I got a C+ overall.

I completed a full semester of a class in a few days since I just googled the answers

I used to cheat the credit system by taking mind-blowingly easy exams from management courses (they're literally all the same) or from business studies (half of them are like maths for dummies). Weird minor courses were extra fun, and sometimes actually interesting to do read a book for.

Zero studying, just sign up for the course if it doesn't have an attendance requirement, take the test, free credit! Sometimes you could even shape those wildly unrelated courses into a Minor, which I how I have 4 minors on my diploma (1 normal one, 3 Frankenminors I assembled myself out of whatever I had already).

I used to do that with a few friends, and we almost got in trouble once for telling the truth ("no, showing up to class isn't mandatory and we're pretty sure we can pass the exam with zero effort"). There were zero rules against this, and the only harm was to the professor's egos, but I did get several stern talkings to.

My university would keep past exam papers in the library. This was apparently a little known fact, but somehow we discovered it, went and got them and use them as the basis for revision.

Turns out our professors were lazy and used the same exam every year. Does that count as cheating?

Yeah. My D average, undiagnosed ADHD brain wasn't about to let me make it through high school the conventional route.

I haven't. Learning was always easy for me. Pay attention in class, take proper notes and do your homework. I know I'm lucky in that regard. Usually I only checked my notes the night before an exam and went through with it care-free. I only really studied for my math A-levels because it's not my strongest subject and for my final Spanish exam at the end of my 3-years job training because I could't care less about the language and thus only ever did the bare minimum learning it.

Once, in school, I saw my teacher had carelessly discarded a printout of the questions for next week's tests in the classroom's paper basket.

I grabbed it to take home and study perfectly for those questions, feeling like a secret agent.

Never got around to even look at it before the test, though, and showed up unprepared as ever.

I don't believe I have ever cheated on an exam or big test, but there were a few cases in college where teachers would leave answers for homework or projects unsecured, and I did make use of it whenever I came across it.

One such case was in an introductory computer science course. We had a weekly lab session where the teaching assistant was giving us an overview of using the Unix systems at the university. At one point early on, he was teaching about file and folder permissions, and gave us all access to his personal folder. And... Then he forgot to lock the permissions back up. His folder was fully accessible for the entire semester, and he posted full solutions to every programming project there.

I remember another course where the professor would send us a link to the solutions to the homework problems, after he finished grading the homework. But I learned that I could just change the URL to access all of the future homework answers.

So in high school, we had TI-84 programmable calculators. Those could be used to store text. The teachers knew about that capability, so when there was a test where we were allowed to use the calculator, they wiped the memory of each one at the start of the test. However, I found that there was an app you could install called "fake", where you could restore all your saved data after a supposed memory wipe by entering a predefined numerical code. Teachers never knew that method existed. I may or may not have used that functionality a couple times. I don't feel bad about it, as memorizing some physics formulae would have never been any use for me in my later life anyway.

Don't know if it counts as cheating, but in uni there were some professors who reused exams all the time. Some students set up a download server where you could download all previous exams and its solutions. Pretty sure the professors knew about it as well, but were still to lazy to come up with new exams I guess. So as we were allowed to bring a hand-written sheet of paper with notes (which is a way better policy than all the memorization in high school), I just had all the solutions on there.

Kind of. A college professor assigned a programming assignment for homework which I swear we had not covered the material required to implement it in class. They had however lazily assigned it from the textbook. So I went onto eMule (I know, right?) and found to teacher's guide and worked backwards from the solution to try to understand it. Then I wrote my own solution. It still didn't work perfectly though lol.

Oh once in high school, the smart kid memorised the multiple choice answers to the science test which they had in first period. They shared it at lunch time. We all memorised it or wrote it on something like an eraser. Needless to say, the next day, the whole class was given a new test and a firm talking to.

No, but I did help others cheat a couple of times 😀

Yes, kinda.

I was in an entry-level “database” class that was administered online. I took it as padding to get credits to fulfill a requirement after switching majors. I figured it would be easy because I had a few years of on the job experience with databases.
Although it was still the early days of online learning, my school did have a comprehensive online learning platform. The teacher was self-taught, and hosted the course on their personal website. While we did have a book and a syllabus, the actual course focused on how the teacher knew how to use Microsoft Access.
They graded based on assignments that they handed out all at once at the beginning of the semester, plus tests. I did the entire semester’s homework in about 2 hours the first week, but found I kept missing test questions. After each test, it showed you the expected answers, and they often made little sense (not wrong, just weird – using anachronistic names for things, or the question was very specific about where menu options were that weren’t there anymore). You could retake the test as many times as you wanted (I don’t know if that was a bug or not), but I didn’t have that kind of time. So I just viewed source, where he’d clearly labeled each correct answer, and more or less skipped through the dumb quizzes.

Plenty of times mostly on literature and history exams in high school, helped a few buddies in university as well.

I knew of someone who kind of did, depending on which way you look at it. Only for one question though...

He noticed that the answer to a single question, was literally written on his otherwise exam-compliant calculator a few weeks before the exam, for high school math. The question often came up in practice tests. This calculator wasn't programmable (in the sense you could store answers).

The question?

How many kilometres in a nautical mile? Answer: 1.852.

He figured out that the numbers in the centre row of the calculator lined up exactly with the decimal fraction:

7 8 9

4 5 6

1 2 3

So he drew a line around the calculator pad to link those numbers up. None of the teachers picked it up, as it looked like graffiti.

Some times in school I did, and not only do I not regret it at all, I also see it as a necessary life skill.

Many times people are put in deeply unfair situations where the rules are against them to begin with. If you play by the rules you will always lose.

In school I had some teachers who didn't give a fuck. They were not taking their job or teaching seriously but were still sadistic people taking some form of sick pleasure against students.

In such cases, there is no established framework in these situations where it there was a class with knowledge transfer/teaching, where the student is properly put to a test to verify he indeed adquire such knowledge. You rather have a sick social exercise where a sociopath is in a position of power making student's life hell and test results are semi random.

In university I also had teachers who only pretended to teach. They would not be there for most of the time of the class or not show up at all, but they still made tests with the material that wasn't teached and that students didn't even know about. Of course many would just fail like this.

In these cases I cheated.

Life trows you these situations, and learning how to cheat is rather learning how to save yourself. I never cheated in legitimate situations, as I just didn't feel I was being treated with injustice, and therefor didn't even had the need to cheat.

Only once. By remembering more-or-less all answers to a test that were given by a professor.

No, of course not! Never!!
Oh, wait, is this here a test at all?

A non-zero amount of times :3

No. I've never really been in a class where someone else had a deeper understanding of the material to cheat off of. Equal sometimes, sure, but equally likely to be wrong.

I did reach a point in math where I couldn't go further and took that as a sign. Math is math. If I can't do it in a test, I'd just be putting myself in a situation where I'm expected to do things I can't — most likely in the next class.

Regrettably not

Na, tests were too much fun to waste on cheating.

No, I haven't. Never felt the need to do it.

No. Learning stuff is important.

I once passed the answers to a latin test to a friend of a mine, by writing them on a programable calculator that we placed between us. Looking back at it, i guess the teacher wasnt paying attention at all.

No, worst academic misconduct I've done is a written one page report that was questionably close to plagiarism.