Teachers Share The Most Elaborate Cheating Schemes Students Have Ever Concocted

In school, we’re taught that cheating never pays. Some students couldn’t care less and try to trick their way to getting stellar grades. And although sometimes it works, more often than not, teachers see right through these “clever” tricks. But every now and then, a student will come up with a plan so genius, even the wisest teacher won’t catch on. From collaborating with their classmates to allowing their twins to do their exams and a whole lot more, these students risked it all for an A+.

Some of these students would’ve gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for tattletales… including the cheating students themselves (oops!). They’ve done everything from impress teachers to gross them out in their schemes for better grades, and teachers weren’t shy about sharing all of their best stories. These are the most elaborate cheating scams that kids (kindergarten to college) have come up with…

Using Codes

I was supervising a final chemistry exam along with another coworker. Not even 15 minutes in, a hand slams down on a desk, and I turn around expecting the worst, only to see my coworker angrily shouting at a pair of really frightened 10th graders whose desk he smashed. Amid the shouting, I caught the words, “Morse code.” The guy proceeded to take them to the office. I called a hallway supervisor to take over and ran after the group….

Apparently, the kids were silently tapping the answers among themselves in Morse code. Not even with their fingernails, just their fingertips. I never heard a thing; my coworker happened to catch “B” in Morse code or something. I honestly thought he finally went crazy solely based on his appearance—picture Robin Williams in Jumanji going, “WHAT YEAR IS IT.” I’m 100% sure that if this particular co-worker wasn’t in the room, they’d have gotten away with it for sure. Reddit user: [redacted]

A Case Of Bad Vision

I had an American history teacher who had really bad vision problems. The light in the classrooms hurt his eyes, so he would always wear sunglasses in the classroom. Because of this, he couldn’t see very well indoors. His teaching method was to teach from his own notes. He would give us a test that basically had each sentence from his notes but with fill in the blanks….

So, on our final, this group of kids made an elaborate plan to cheat on the final and pass. What they did was seat each person from their group in different parts of the room and call him over for help. Each person would take turns calling him over and stalling him while the others would look at the notes on their phone and fill in the answers. They all passed the class with high A’s. We were only caught when a teacher who was passing by saw us. It was a major bummer. Reddit user: [redacted]

As Sharp As An Arrow

I’ve heard quite a few cheating schemes in my time, but the best, by far, I’ve heard was a bunch of students at a university who cheated in biochemistry, The classroom was like an auditorium, but each row was roughly 7-10 inches higher than the previous one. So these students (there were about 6-7 of them) would make the smartest kid sit in the middle-center of the auditorium and then, in the next higher row, students would be two sitting two seats apart and so on to form like an arrow figure….

That way they could form a copy chain with the smartest at the front. Last I heard, the professors/teachers’ assistants found out but could not actually find them guilty of cheating; now ALL the exams are taken in a computer lab, where all the seats are on the same level and they monitor for any type of communication. Reddit user: astrograph

Too Much Talking

One of my colleagues, who’s a math professor, was having a final exam for one of his classes. There was a kid who was really nice and was one of his best students; he was always friendly and talked with him a lot. At the end of the final exam, the poor guy was leaving, just saying goodbye to the professor since he wasn’t going to see him anymore….

But then he dropped his calculator, and that’s when everything went downhill. The cover flew off, revealing a cheat sheet he had not so neatly shoved back into the device when he was done with his exam. He was so embarrassed he just hung his head and started crying on a desk. He also failed the class. Reddit user: mythopoeia

With The Click Of A Pen

I’m a university professor, and only one memorable one sticks out in…well, quite a few years of teaching. I had a student years ago who took the test with one of those clicking ballpoint pens distributed by some company or other. The pen had a clear window in the body, and there was a rotating plastic cylinder that, each click, would shift, and another little motto would appear….

This clever wag wrote up some of the more difficult bits of class material on a piece of paper, cut it to size, and glued it to the plastic cylinder. Look like you’re nervous, click pen a few times, go back to taking the test. Voila! But he didn’t give it a test run first, and he either glued it wrong or replaced the cylinder upside down. I caught him when he kept clicking the pen and then turning it around so he could read it. Reddit user: [redacted]

Drop It Or Else!

I caught four cheaters all on one test. Because of laziness, I wasn’t changing the test between semesters. Yes, I know I probably should’ve shown more effort, but this isn’t about me. So students got Scantrons from previous semesters, carefully marked the right answers on their new Scantrons, and then “took” the test. I only found out because other students told me what was happening….

So I changed the test that morning. They all got zeroes on that exam. I called them in and told them to drop or I’d turn them in for cheating. I was bluffing; I didn’t have any proof except for the word of the other student. I said, “You know what you did, and I know what you did. Drop or I’ll give you an F for the course.” They all dropped. Reddit user: [redacted]

Twin Power

There were identical twin brothers two years ahead of me at my high school. They looked like two drops of water and were considered geniuses by teachers and fellow students. They were really popular and active in the community (our school always praised the smart/nerdy, both teachers and students). Strangely enough, they were majoring in two different fields: one took Arts & Languages and the other took Science as a major….

The funny thing was that each brother sucked at the other’s subjects. For graduation, our system (in the Netherlands) still requires you to take at least some math (we distinguish different levels of math), and our school also required Latin as a subject. During the Central State Examination, one twin brother would come to the exam, take it, and leave after half the time….

The other brother would come in “late” in the other exam room (there were always 2) and then do the exam. As you might have guessed, it was one of the twins doing both math exams and the other doing both Latin exams (it was on different days). They scored +85% on each test. They told this scheme to the teachers at the school’s graduation party, and they couldn’t believe it! Reddit user: ProcrastinatingAgain

Unconventional iPod Uses

So, my friend got one of those little iPods that were completely square. He had begged his parents for one and finally got it for Christmas. He bought a wristwatch attachment for it (he found it randomly online one day), so he could wrap a strap around his arm and attach the iPod to it without any of the teachers noticing the small device….

He would type out all the answers, and then he would upload it to his iPod. During the test, he would look at his watch thing and it would have all the answers on it, leading him to a perfect score. The iPod looked like a watch, so no one knew he was cheating. Turns out he got caught and received a 0. I think he was suspended too. How he got caught? He was looking at the watch too much. Reddit user: [redacted]

Which One Was It?

A college professor told me about a time a group of four students tried to buy an extra day to study for a final. He said that four guys called him the morning of the final exam saying they couldn’t make it because they got a flat tire on the way and were commuting from a town 40 minutes outside of campus….

They had this elaborate story about why the tire was flat and how it was so and so’s fault. The professor says, “It’s fine, just come tomorrow and take the final, no big deal.” They come the next day, and the prof puts them in the four corner seats of the room and hands them the exam with only one question on it. “Which tire was flat?” Reddit user: clownbaby42

The Chapstick Scheme

Nothing elaborate, but I had three ninth-graders use chapstick on their final exam. If you put chapstick on the little bars of a scantron paper, it causes the machine to not grade it. It didn’t work out. First, it makes it not grade it instead of grading it all as correct (maybe they should have only chapped some of it)….

Second, they used minty chapstick, and it had an odor that made it pretty easy to detect; why would three test papers smell like mint, anyway? Third, it was visible when it dried. Once I saw one, I could easily see them all. They all got Fs on the test, and our finals counted for 10% of the grade (or something like that)….

Two of the kids had Fs or Ds, so it wasn’t a big deal. The other one had a C and could have passed the class by getting like a 10 on the test, but this 0 dropped him into failing the class. His mom was pretty upset. Reddit user: slightlyshysara

All About The Vitamins

I was a TA for anatomy and physiology. The professor would ask for me to sit in on finals to prevent cheating. One kid came in with a bottle of vitamin water. No worries. Halfway through the test, the professor noticed that they kept turning the bottle and squinting, which was super weird, because why was he looking at the bottle anyway? This goes on for another twenty minutes…

The professor goes up, grabs the vitamin water bottle, and rips off the label. It had a crib sheet written. On the back. The student had gone to the effort to make a fake vitamin water bottle label and write notes on the back. The professor was impressed by the creativity and decided to give the student a 0, but not report them to the academic committee. Reddit user: [redacted]

You Must’ve Lost It

This was in 9th grade English. I was also a straight-A student, always did homework, everything was always handed in on time. Our teacher was the biggest joke. We were able to convince her to do things like put tests off for weeks because “she hadn’t told us about them and/or hadn’t given us ample time to study.” The same went with due dates on homework assignments….

I don’t remember how long we had had this assignment, but it was part writing our own poetry, part doing a write-up on a poet of our choice. The due date for the poetry book came and went, and I still hadn’t done it. I knew I could get her to cut me a break and let me turn it in late if I wanted, but when she finally asked me about the book, I swore up and down that I had turned it in. Her response? “I probably just lost it. You get A’s on everything; I’m sure you would have gotten an A on this too.” Reddit user: Unknown_Bells

His Three Secrets

In junior high school, I bought the teacher’s edition of the textbooks, which had all of the answers. I asked my older cousins to order it for me online since I wasn’t able to do it myself. So I automatically aced all the questions that came from the books. For bigger exams like midterms and finals, on more than one occasion, I went into the office right after the teacher printed the test and hit reprint last job. I was eventually caught….

I also got caught “cheating” when my college was testing turnitin.com…except I didn’t actually cheat (some of you may find this debatable). I had published my paper on my personal site which had been crawled, and subsequently was a word for word duplicate of what I turned in. It was still my work, though; I got zero and never did it again. Reddit user: AdamaForPresident

Making The News

Last year a cheating scandal from my high school made national news. Towards the end of the year, there was a commotion when about five cop cars showed up on campus and arrested three kids, and over the next few weeks, we all found out exactly what had happened. It would forever change the reputation of the school and the students who had committed the crime….

It turns out that sometime earlier in the year, these three kids had come to campus late at night (it’s an open outdoor campus) and had picked the locks of somewhere between 7-12 AP teachers and installed small key loggers in their computers. Over the next few weeks, they captured all their logins and passwords to all of the school’s grading services, as well as all their personal logins….

As well as logins, they got access to all of the teachers’ individual tests and answers. Over the course of about a month, they changed grades for students that had paid around 300$ each. It wasn’t until a teacher noticed a random USB key in their computers that they were caught. The school developed evidence and then had them arrested and expelled a few days later….

They tried to catch all the people who bought grade changes, but they were only able to get a few. All the teachers ended up having to destroy all their materials from previous years, and our testing system is now extremely secure. It was very surprising, as we are one of the top public high schools in America. Reddit user: HighSchool-ThrowAway

Role Reversal

I’m a high school teacher, but this story is about my own high school math teacher playing us and “cheating.” It was well known that Mr. D re-used the same questions every year, just changed the numbers. He made a big deal about making sure we all gave our exam papers back to him after we had looked at our scores and gone over everything together to prevent cheating for the next year….

Well, of course, some of my classmates got their hands on a complete set of tests from the previous year. Soon, everyone in the classroom had a set. Before each exam, we would sit together and make sure we knew how to solve every problem on that test so we could do it on the real exam, but with different numbers….

Years later, when I became a teacher myself, I saw Mr. D at a funeral. I confessed to him that this is what we used to do. He smirked and said, “Who do you think leaked the test packet to get you to study?” Mr. D had figured out that kids won’t study if the teacher suggests it, but if they think they’re getting away with something, they totally will, so he managed to get a test packet out and circulating as contraband. Reddit user: [redacted]

A Hairy Scheme

I’m a professor, and I caught one of the most bizarre cheating schemes a few years ago. It was a psychology final, and I was walking around the room. There were these two girls that would always hang out with each other; one was average, and the other was kinda dumb. It might seem pretty mean to say, but you should’ve seen some of the work they produced….

On the day of the final, I noticed they weren’t sitting next to each other, which was odd. The smarter one was sitting in front of the dumber one. I walked over towards them in the middle of the final, and I saw that the one in the front had tied about a dozen small notes into the back of her hair and was moving her hair over for the dumber one to see them. I was shocked at first; I had never experienced anything like that before. After I got over it, I made them both get up, and they both failed the class. Reddit user: mythopoeia

Nutritional Facts

Mine (I’m a high school teacher) was when a kid went through quite a bit of effort for what would have been the perfect crime. At first glance, nothing was amiss about him. But a careful look from my keen eye revealed that the student was paying particular attention to the “nutrition facts” on the label of the water he had brought into the exam room….

A careful inspection revealed that he had copied a real label, taken out the nutrition facts, and replaced them with answers. I was actually rather impressed; he had gone through the trouble to even make his changes so that they were the same font and size. Had I not been so sharp, he would’ve gotten away with it. Sneaky kid! Reddit user: [redacted]

From Sharpeners To Erasers

A few classmates did this. You know those “Naplan” tests you have to take? Or the ones where you circle or shade a number or circle? Yeah, well basically, a classmate would say “excuse me teacher, could you please explain question (whatever the question is) to me?” After the teacher had helped them, about 10 seconds later, someone would begin sharpening their pencil….

The number of times it was sharpened was the number you had to circle. It worked for about 3-4 months before the teacher worked it out and banned sharpeners during those tests. Little did she know the students planned for this, and at their disposal they had erasers, and the number of rubs was the number you had to fill in. Reddit user: Blabe

Fourth Time’s the Charm… Or Not

I’m not a teacher or prof, but an old professor of mine told me once what a kid he knew did to sneak a cheat sheet into his exams and use it without anyone noticing. So this kid would study like normal for the first exam, and then when he went in, he’d work for a bit, put his hand up, and ask for a new answer book, because he’d already used all the pages of his first….

In actuality, he hadn’t, he just wanted the extra booklet. He would then sneak the new, fresh answer booklet out of the exam and take it home. In the last few pages of the booklet, he would write out a cheat sheet for his next exam. This would then be taken into the next exam, and he’d swap his “cheat booklet” with the fresh answer booklet he’d be given for that exam (taking the fresh one home to do this all over again with the next exam)….

Meanwhile, he’d use the cheat booklet for his current exam and simply put a pencil line through his notes in the back (we were allowed to make notes in the back during an exam, and as long as you put a line through it, the markers wouldn’t pay attention to it). No one would catch on that he was using a cheat sheet, since all he would be looking at was a note in the back of his answer book. From what my professor told me, he’d done this with three consecutive exams before being caught in the fourth while attempting to sneak the new answer book out. Reddit user: joshi38

I’m Your Teacher, Not Your Classmate

I had a student in college that got his hands on a test from a previous period, typed out the answers, and printed them mirrored on a small sheet of paper. He then stuck that sheet of paper to the bottom of his desk when he sat down and read the answers off of the reflection from the face of his watch….

I would have never, ever known had he not gone partying the next night with his friends at the bar I always went to. He saw me, stumbled over, and gloated to me. I think he was drunk enough that he didn’t realize I was his teacher and not a classmate. The next day at school he had no recollection, but he quickly came back down to earth when I told him about his little confession. Reddit user: Oddgenetix

The Right Frequency

On this one test, my friend somehow got the answer key for the test. I also had a couple of other friends taking the same test, but he wasn’t in the class himself. So, what did we do? We ordered a Raspberry Pi, and we used it to transmit radio. He went home and recorded all the answers to a .wav file, and when it was test time, he broadcasted it….

I had a Sansa clip that could receive radio signals, and my other friends had to buy some other cheap mp3s that could receive radio. On the day of the test, since our teacher was chill with us listening to music during the test, I just put it on the correct frequency, and I heard the transmission. We were caught because someone snitched. Reddit user: Zeemos

Pretty Genius Idea

I’m not a teacher, but I was definitely accused by one of cheating, though I wasn’t. I was in high school English class. We were reading four books in this two-month period, and then were to have a test on all four. We had finished reading the first three and were about to start on the last one when I got sick….

It was for about two weeks, and I came back just in time for the test. It was a multiple-choice test, choices a to d. Questions were from each of the books, with each letter answer from one of the four books. It was fairly easy to figure out the answers from the book I hadn’t read by eliminating the answers from the books I had….

I was accused of cheating, but the teacher couldn’t prove it. We only read the books in class, and I was gone while reading the last book. She never figured out how I answered the questions correctly about the book I never read. Reddit user sephresx

Recycling Essays

I caught a fraternity recycling essays on a pretty clever timetable. They’d have staple essays (the narrative essay, the persuasive essay, the summary, etc.) for all the core classes with at least six variations of each. They would only use one a year and rotate through the variations. It was pretty clever, actually, and I admired the effort. But they, however, were not the brightest crayons in the box….

Not changing the date, name, or professors’ names on the title pages (before the latest iteration of APA) was their downfall. And it got almost all the members of the fraternity in some serious hot water, including the original writers of the essays (who had already left college). Also, they weren’t terribly great essays to begin with. Reddit user: ShortScribbler

Starting Young

I taught kindergarten (I teach another grade now), and between 5-6 is a really interesting age. There’s a cognitive development that occurs between 5-7 where children become much more aware of the perspective of others, and therefore learn how to deceive their peers. I could always tell when a student was a little ahead of the curve when they would cheat during games or activities….

I caught one student during a math game deal out all of the low number cards to his peer while he kept all of the high number cards. He kept winning every single round. I walked around the classroom and stopped to watch these two students. The student who was dealt the low cards had no awareness that he had been dealt a crappy hand. I had to stop the game to scold the student who was cheating, but in the back of my head I was just impressed that he was smart enough to cheat. Reddit user: hmboo

The Grossest Cheating Scheme Ever

I work for a university in Australia and occasionally have to interview students who are caught cheating. The student that comes to mind whenever I talk about cheating wasn’t particularly clever, more gross. This student was caught because she asked to go to the toilet several times in one two-hour exam; now this happens occasionally for valid reasons, but it always raises suspicion….

Procedure in the case of toilet breaks is to have a supervisor escort the student to the toilet and wait outside. After the fifth toilet break, the escorting supervisor decided to search the toilet after the student returned to the exam and found the entire semester’s notes in the sanitary disposal unit. The student failed and was expelled from the university. Reddit user: [redacted]

A List Of Schemes

My aunt is a university professor. I remember she would come home and tell us about her students and the newest cheat techniques they used. Here are some of them. Students would photocopy parts of the textbook to make a pocketbook and secretly take it out during the exam. They also used nail art, and there would be girls with cheat sheets on their legs (covered by the skirt)….

There were those who took out a piece of gum to chew; the wrapper had stuff written on. People also took turns to go to the restroom; there was a book hidden in there. Finally, there were students who claimed to be IT employees who needed your password to change your settings because of new university rules, all just to steal the exams. Reddit user: Chipsandiscream

True Or False?

One of the dumber guys in my high school American history class always cheated off my work on tests. If he hadn’t been such a jerk about it, I probably wouldn’t have messed him up, but he was a total idiot to me every day. We had a test at the end of the year that was going to be half the semester grade.

I couldn’t call this guy out for cheating since every time I tried, he’d get the rest of the football team after me; I mean the entire team would torment me for weeks. So, I got this idea. I talked to the teacher before class the day of the test. It was multiple choice with a few true/false sections. I adjusted all my answers.

If the right answer was ‘a’ then I put ‘b’, if ‘b’ I put ‘c’, rotating back to ‘a’ for the last letter. For true/false, I just marked opposite. She thought it was hilarious. I got 100%, plus extra credit for my scheme; he got a zero and got kicked off the football team. Reddit user: eithris

The Jig Was Almost Up

Years ago, a month or so before the Swedish SAT, my brother bought a watch/mobile phone hybrid equipped with a camera. See where this is going? During the test, he would simply video call my phone, turn the watch facing downwards on his wrist and sweep scan an entire page of questions, and I would print screen every single one of them.

While my brother moved on to the next page of questions, me and two of his friends calmly divided the questions between us and found the answers through Google and such, and then texted the answers back. Unfortunately, the watch started beeping loudly due to bad batteries after a page or two, and my brother had to terminate the sting operation.

Oh, and he also somehow faked dyslexia and got 50% longer test time than others. It was horrible, I know. Reddit user: harleman

To Catch A Cheater

Back in the early ‘90s, the intro to CS class at Georgia Tech was Pascal programming. My friend had to write a program that would detect cheating by shared code. His version worked by compiling the students’ Pascal source code into assembler source, which was then diffed. The compiling process got rid of variable names, function names, and a lot of the little variations, and left mostly structure….

We then diff’d everyone against each other, and output a list of the smallest differences. All of those programs were then examined to see which ones had real evidence of cheating. The differences would point them at groups of students with similar code. A brief look at the original files would let them know everything. It didn’t just catch one group of cheaters. It caught multiple groups. Reddit user: uglor

Making A Slight Comeback

In high school, we were all taking a typing class. This was back in…‘99 maybe? Anyways, the teacher had print-outs that she wanted us to retype so we would learn typing without looking, etc. I thought it was the most boring thing ever; I had already been typing for a couple of years (this was a required class for comp sci classes (ugh)….

I found out that the teachers had a share running off of a workstation somewhere. Presumably because they all changed classrooms and didn’t know they had roaming profiles. The share had all of the tests and answers and assignments (and an Excel sheet that was being used as a grade book while the new grading software was being installed). Jackpot, right!

I made copies of everything and then got greedy. I started selling them for $5 a week with the express instructions to “screw up a few parts somewhere near the beginning and change the headers.” One kid did not do either and turned in his file with the teacher’s info still in the headers—their name, department, and everything….

He caved when he was brought into the office, and I was told that as a result, I would be given an automatic D and could work my way up to a C. I ended up just changing the grade in the Excel sheet before the end of the grading period to a B; the teacher didn’t notice. Reddit user: joshlove

More Stealing Than Cheating

I’m not a teacher, and this was not technically cheating either, but whatever. My mother attended an all-girls school. In her chemistry class, they were talking about chemical reactions, specifically distillation. One of the girls suggested that they do some hands-on practical application, and the professor thought it was a great idea. So, they built an actual still, right there in the classroom….

Every day it would produce a small cup of raw grain alcohol—Everclear, basically—and each afternoon, one of them would sneak in, steal the alcohol, replace it with water, and then distribute it among her friends who would mix it in their juice. Apparently this scheme went on for weeks and only ended when one of the girls got so drunk in class that she fell out of her chair. Reddit user: Malgayne

Moving Too Fast

There was this one guy in my history class who had quite severe dyslexia so was allowed his laptop to type up all his essays due to it having spellchecker on it. Meanwhile, the rest of us are scribbling in our mundane, every day, run of the mill compositions. Five minutes into what was an hour and a half essay that was worth 25% of our overall grade, something happened…

The teacher walks over to the guy’s desk, and he’s got nearly a thousand words already. The teacher immediately grabs the laptop and finds that this kid had the essay all pre-typed out and had just copied and pasted it in. But to make it worse, the teacher also found a complete edition of another essay from a month or so back. Safe to say he got in a good deal of trouble. Reddit user: kirky1148

The Proof Is In The Ink

I’m not a professor or a teacher, but for my analytic chemistry course, they told us about the story of a kid who made copies of the exams after getting them back on which he would re-write all of his answers (with the correct ones) but copy the marks of his professor only to bring it into his office hours later to talk over “what he got wrong….”

I guess being suspicious and it being an analytic chemistry course, the professor teaching it looked at the ink only to find a discrepancy in the ink on his test and the rest of the exams. (I think different printers/copiers use different ink methods and it shows when the letters are looked at underneath a magnifying glass). He was caught. Reddit user: ColorYourPhile

Heart Attacks And Stuff

I once had the absolute worst and most blatant cheaters ever try to cheat their way through a Foreign Service Board exam that I was in charge of administering. The nerve, right? This guy comes in wearing an eye patch and a cast. Right off the bat, he tries to bribe me to help him pass the test. It didn’t work….

After the test starts, he pulls his eye patch away from his head, and he’s got answers written on the inside. Then he pulls a laminated strip of answers out of his mouth that he had all rolled up in there. Once he replaces the laminated strip back in his mouth, he pulls out a sheet of answers that was tucked into his cast…with the arm that was supposed to be in the cast….

Yes, it was a fake cast, with his arm hidden under his coat. By now I’ve pushed a hidden button under my desk that activates video cameras around the room to record this type of thing. The guy didn’t notice that I was staring straight at him this whole time, so he didn’t notice the cameras popping out of their hidden locations, either….

I guess he couldn’t find the answer he wanted on his cheat sheets, because he started making coughing noises to attract the attention of the guy next to him. He had written on his paper: “What does K.G.B. stand for?” The guy didn’t really want to help, but the first guy was pretty aggressive in his coughing, and he finally relented and wrote down the answer for the first guy to see….

At this point, I think the guy just went nuts. He started making all sorts of noises and started yelling about the pressure he’s under. He stands up while he’s staggering around the room, flailing about and shouting about how he can’t take it anymore; he starts reading everyone’s answers. To top it off, the guy starts to fake a heart attack, and while he’s writhing on the floor, he starts grabbing the other people’s tests and copying answers off them. The guy that was sitting next to him starts to cover for him, claiming to be a medic. The whole thing was caught on film. And they were both promoted. Reddit user: MythrilZombie

A Different Kind Of Cheater

I hold a research class at the state university, so most of my work is in the lab, but every other year I’m expected to teach a course. One semester during the final exam, I came upon the most bizarre cheating scheme I’ve ever encountered. One of the sophomores in my class was a hugely outspoken member of the young Republicans club at our campus….

Every time she raised her hand to ask a question, it would somehow end up relating to how Obama was ruining the nation. Anyway, when finals week came along, we were halfway through the exam when she started making a lot of noise in the middle of the exam room. I thought she was putting on an act until her white skirt was obviously soaked with a red substance….

She was a bit obese, so it was hard to tell, but it turns out that she had been pregnant without knowing it and had gone into preterm labor during the exam. The infant came out and was obviously half Asian, which was a shocker to everybody because her fiance was Caucasian—and despite all her preaching all term long about premarital intimacy and monogamy, it became quite obvious that she had cheated on him. Reddit user: actually_good_advice

Did You Bump My Grade Up?

Someone hacked into my university’s system one spring semester and changed the grades of sixty or so unrelated current and former students across a variety of majors. Presumably to obscure their own identity if the hack was noticed. Ironically, the university only caught the scheme because a former student noticed that her grade had mysteriously been bumped up and reported it….

They then compared paper records to the electronic system and found all the changed grades. So had this hacker only changed his or her own grades, he or she would probably have gotten away with it. They never identified which of the sixty students was the hacker, but apparently they had the FBI investigate it and everything. I’m not sure if they ever found the person. Reddit user: ipeeinappropriately

We Would’ve Gotten Away With It…

One of my engineering professors told me how a previous year class decided to cheat. He admitted it was the best tactic he’d ever seen, and had it not been the fact that it was so against the rules, he would’ve applauded them. It went like this: during an exam, he and two proctors would be around to monitor and answer questions….

Halfway through the exam period, three students in the front raised their hands to ask some questions. A few minutes later, three students in the back raised their hands to ask some questions. While those questions were being asked/answered, students at the other end were passing each other their cheat sheets with the answers they came up with. Anyhow, the class would’ve gotten away with it had some student not reported the whole thing anonymously….

They were given a warning, with no punishments because nothing could be proven, but since then, at least one examiner would remain on constant watch. In my opinion, I think they should have all gotten A’s. Engineering is about collaboration and problem-solving. You’re not inventing the wheel, just using it on cars, trains, and planes. These students all worked together and solved different problems of one massive problem: the exam. They forged the connections to initiate the plan and a proper execution to see it through completion. That right there is proof these students are ready for the work force. Almost everyone was really impressed. Reddit user: [redacted]

The Same Name

I was the TA for this class and did the grading and recording. The students got their quizzes back after the scores were recorded online. One girl came back a few days later saying she got 70, but a 20 was recorded online. The professor asked for the quiz back to see that it was indeed a 70. Sure enough, 70 on the top of the quiz….

The professor came to me to make sure, because he was still suspicious. I noticed that the handwriting of the student’s name looked a lot neater than the handwriting on the rest of the quiz. Turns out these two girls had the same initials, and the girl who got a 20 just erased all but the first letter of the other girl’s name and filled it in with hers. Reddit user: gohanssb

Someone Snitched

This is how a kid cheated in one of my classes at college: it’s a large lecture hall with 600+ students, so test days are always packed. I go to college up in chilly Boston, so it’s not unusual for people to constantly wear gloves. What this kid did was place a small tablet with one of those privacy screens in his backpack at such an angle that only he could see….

He sat right in the middle of the lecture hall so the TAs couldn’t see him too well. Inside his gloves, he rigged the buttons from an old flip phone to each finger so he could type out letters by pressing his thumbs against the contacts on each finger a certain number of times. The gloves were connected via Bluetooth to the tablet, and he sat there and messaged his friends what he didn’t know….

He almost got away with it until someone snitched on him; the professor made him sit in the front row for the final. He got a 5 on the test, and when they searched his bag, they found the gloves and tablet, so he failed the class and was expelled since he had done the same thing for two of his other classes. Reddit user: [redacted]

The Tech Job

I caught a student two weeks ago using Microsoft’s cloud-based document editor (365? Skydrive? I’m a Linux guy…) and a remote collaborator who knew the material. He had been opening all my assignments in there and moving the window it was inside up so that I couldn’t see the browser window, and then opening so many different programs that I couldn’t tell which was which….

Unfortunately, I had my suspicions since the first week when their work magically improved to that of a seasoned IT pro; there was just no way with his track record he could do that. When he finally asked me a question, I used Alt+Tab and switched to the doc with a collaborator connected and writing stuff. It was the fastest 0/drop/dean escalation I’ve ever done. Reddit user: sicarie