cheating at school
 

first of all i hate most cheating. what i really hate are people who cheat at school when the grades are weighted, or people who cheat to get an A or to maintain their high standing in the class.

i myself have cheated a few times, but it was usually because i was in danger of failing and it was never in a class with weighted grades.

that being said, there are some more creative ways that i have seen during my long tenure at school.

1. if you have to turn in a five page paper... just write 4 pages, but staple five together. then rip off the 5th page. turn in the 4 pages and take the fifth paper with it's matching rip mark home and print up the rest of your paper. you can either hand it in or wait for the teacher to ask you for it.

2. email the teacher a file that you know will turn up goobleygook. works esp. well with technophobe teachers that are required to accept emailed attachments, or teachers with macs that expect having difficulty opening your pc file.

3. put a cheat sheet in the sweater hood of the guy in front of you., put a sheet inside a jacket and when you lean over the jacket will puff out and you can see it. write notes on the edges of your fingers so when you hold your fingers together, but show your palms nothing shows. put a cheat sheet inside a loafer shoe so when you cross your legs and flex your foot you can see the sheet.

so any thoughts about cheating or alternative methods?

i only cheat at something if it isn't too serious and is done in more of a jocular manner for fun, rather than falsly bettering my self at something. i couldn't live with that.

for instance, somtimes when i play monoplay, i grab some money from the bank, but its all just in good fun. I do it in a joking fashion as well, if you can imagine that....

as for cheating at school, i don't know of any methods...

homework
 

I don't really cheat on tests or other important things. Mostly I just copy my friends homework when they do it, and they copy mine when I do it, its a big conspiracy. I did cheat once on the SOL because I didn't finish a section in time, so I wrote on desk/memorized the question and answer choices and just filled in the bubble later.

School is to prepare you for the real world. If you cheat, you might get good grades, but you learn nothing (except how to cheat), and you leave unprepared. So, in the long run, you only cheat yourself. That's my opinion.

Aside from it being dishonorable, your cheating will always hurt others....by artificially inflating your grades you diminish the honest accomplishments of your classmates. Even if the class is stupid.

What if what you're cheating on is only busy work and you only get a grade on whether you did it or not?

My 10th grade Social Studies teacher said it best:

The only thing that separates the Honors kids from the Parallel is that they cheat better.

Needless to say, we (the Honors people) cheated on every single test that we had in that class. He would actually leave the answer key out on his desk!

I have no problem cheating on tests and quizzes. In fact, the ability to cheat and get away with it is a great skill. Regardless, I've always been at the top of my class. Anything that I've cheated on is inconsequential - I would ace the class regardless.

For those that say cheating does nothing to prepare you for real life....have you ever worked in business? Welcome to the REAL real world.

i have in the past but I'd like to try to avoid doing it in the future. :p

For the past 20 years of my life, yes. I have other comments about your post, but they would add nothing constructive to this thread. I will simply say that we have differing opinions.

i only cheat if i think the teacher isnt doing a good enuff job and the tests dont reflect the preperation that he/she gave us.

i dont cheat on things like tests and definitally not exams.

i do put formulas and programs on my graphing calculator. i do not consider that cheating, because i have to know what to do to use the programs (all most all of the programs i use, i make).

aah, I remember this part of highschool. RAMPANT cheating, and academic dishonesty. Don't see near as much in college, and it's looked down upon MUCH more. fellow students will turn you in, even. But, yes, in highschool, I'd been known to glance at someone else's cheat sheet if they hid it somewhere where i could see it too. :/ Not particularly PROUD of it, but... at the time, w/ the pressure of needing to be bilingual to graduate highschool and having a spanish teacher w/ a southern accent... well, we all made due however we could. would never DREAM of cheating on something in college. for one, we PAY to be there. for two, it's too important to understand this shit to screw yourself over like that, and for three, if you get caught, you don't just get an F on the test. you can get all sorts of major-nasty penalties, and i don't want any part of it.

I only believe in cheating in required classes. If you chose to take a class, you chose it in the hopes you might learn something. Cheating won't help you there. As for required classes, cheat away, I did. (I see no point in failing sex ed if you can't remember where the fallopian tubes are)

One thing that I can't stand is that most teachers are so easily maipulated, in the schools that I have attended maybe as many as 80% of the teachers will grade you 50% on how well you have done and 50% how much you kissed ass. And I'm not talking about just being polite and quiet.

I would ten times rather cheat than kiss a teachers ass. But that's all in the past so I don't care anymore.

Hey its not cheating, the graphic calculator is a piece of school material, if you actually code the thing (I knew a person who just had entered in the text, didn't even write the proggie for it) then you are learning it at the same time...uh yeah :D

Chemistry baby!

I had an entire hub programmed into my calculator

in high school, we had ways of making off with the answer key or an actual test the day prior to the test. we would gather and work on the test, type up the answers in 4 pt font and bring that to class.

I say no, but I did get a term paper I forgot to write on line and turned it in with only minor changes. Good thing I never got caught!

Have never cheated. Never wiill (I hope). Hate people who cheat, and have been strongly tempted to turn people in, in the past. Never did though, because I knew that they were only fooling themselves, as when it came to the REAL exam they wouldn't have a clue.
The way the leaving cert is done over here makes it near impossible to cheat. and if you get caught, you are severely fucked for life. You can only cheat on unofficial exams, which mean precisely nothing anyway.

The way my 11th grade history teacher put it:

"If you cheat, don't get caught. If you get caught, blame someone else."

he was awesome

I never understood how people managed to cheat on tests. What the hell is wrong with your teachers? They write out an answer key before the test? what?

As far as crib sheets go, I never had any trouble memorizing a pile of crap for 3 hour retention, so I guess I have just never been tempted.

thanks everyone, cool replies.

Just sit diagonally behind a smart guy, then ask them to put the test on your side. Then put your test on their side, copy away, and no one will be the wiser. Works especially well with multiplechoice forms :D

True story:

A buddy of mine once believed that a high school teacher of ours didn't take the time to read the essay portion of an exam, so he sprinkled one of the essays with random profanity.

Sure enough, he got an "A" and showed me the essay portion to prove it.

Not cheating, but still funny.

For some of the people at my school cheating is a way of life. They miss the test day and have a friend take an extra test paper and give them that to study. It made me mad because I worked for my grades and they did not. They hardly showed up for class.

ROFL that is awesome, I swear most of my college professors who didnt have assistans just scanned essays for key words. I once asked a professor what he thought of an essay paper and he said, "well, it looked like everything you need to have in there was there and it was the right length so I gave you an A."

Cheated in my HS french class. That's about it.

Cheating will only get you so far, then real life catches up.

I'm on probation right now because I didn't cheat when I could have. It's not geting me anywhere in life if I do it, so I'm going back and paying attention in class.

I myself am a student and believe there is no excuse to cheating. It doesn't matter if the class is boring or you happen to think your teacher is inept, cheating is still wrong. Yes yes, i too have done the sharing and sectioning off of long ridiculous busy work assignments, but i admit that is still wrong. I make no excuses for that, though you could imagine why i would do it at the time. In the end, it was still wrong.

Cheating only serves to put the people who don't cheat into a disadvantaged position. There should be no reason why those honest people should work harder to play catch up with the cheaters.

If you were confidant enough about your own skills, you should be able to go through school without cheating for the most part. If you think you need to rely on cheating to get by in school, then you need admit to yourself that you aren't very bright an that you need to get some serious legitimate academic help.

In my opinion, the worst cheaters are the ones that think that they need to do it so that they can inflate themselves to straight A's or close so that they can get into the college that they want. Its sad that those people can't admit to themselves that if they couldn't do it without cheating, then they weren't meant to go to or just wasn't good enough for that college anyways.

In my high school, cheaters were as abundant as lockers. Almost all the near straight A's honor students were cheaters. It was such a disgusting practice in that they did whatever it took to make them look the best on paper to college admissions officers.

Whats incredibly amusing is that a lot of the people who fell into that category all ended up going to the same fallback state college anyways--not that thats bad, but its definatly not what they had hoped for in those 4 years of perfecting their cheating and application methods.

I believe that most people cheat because they can't admit that they aren't nearly as academicly talented as they think they are or "deserve" to be--and that is the saddest part of all.

My experiences in college with cheaters and cheating have been that it is pretty common among everyone. I think most people cheat even a "little bit", even if it is something as simple as writing an equation lightly on your desk that you were supposed to memorize.

i have never cheated, the only kind of cheating ive seen been done is to see if the teacher favorises anyone, and some do. One time 3 guys i knew handed in the exact same papers on a test, they got 3+ 4- and 5+. I never take classes with biased teachers, and if i have to take em, i allways give them shit.

I don't like cheaters, it pains me to see someone else get a good mark for not working, when I had to do some studying and paying attention. I even refused to cheat for my friend once. It was a stupid thing. My class was before his in HS physics. We had a multiple choice test and at the end of the class, the teacher would have it marked with an answer key and we got to watch. My friend wanted me to memorize the last 10 answers or something but I told him no so he got another guy to do it for him. He still got a lame mark on the written part but the multiple choice cheat boosted his mark way too much.

If you need to cheat to succeed, you'll need to keep cheating to stay successful. Its a dependancy I'd rather not have because getting caught means serious penalties.

I always cheated in school, but not because I was dumb or didn't know the material, but because I would waste my fucking time talking to my friends, so when the assignment was due I would have to get the answers really fast to avoid failure. It worked out pretty well, before test days I would just study and end up getting an A. Everyone in my classed cheated, everyone would help each other out. I don't think it is wrong. The dumb ones will eventually flunk out of college anyway.

Write in the formulas etc into a ti graphing calculator. ;)

Your only cheating yourself.
School is important. It dosn't seen that way when your there, but looking back, I'm glad of what I achieved there on my own merits.
I didn't do exceptionally well, just average, but am happy to have learnt what I did. As it all comes in handy later in life!!

Never did cheat at school, although I know plenty of people did (really frustrating when they end out on top too...)

I only cheated in High School for tests ... ended up only cheating myself for when the exams came around :(
College and University I have / I am doing it on my own (wish me luck :))

cheating is fucked up. you fuck those around you, you fuck yourself, and you get grades that you certainly don't deserve. the year I left for college, i heard of a group of kids who cheated on the SAT...and weren't punished because the school didn't want a black-eye.

*shrug* i cheat when/if i can. gotta do what you gotta do.

But its not like im hurting anyone other than myself in the long run. And i know that, but sometimes, you just forget to study, or need to copy a homework assignment.

Sue me..

It does hurt others in the long run. The class average is inflated and someone else looks bad, which might cost them an opportunity.

In highschool I didn't care about cheaters much. Now that I'm in college though it really pisses me off when I know people are cheating.

That is the worst attitude ever. You seem proud of the fact that you gotta cheat to make up for whatever you're lacking in.

Cheating hurts everyone that doesn't cheat. Cheating inflates grades so that people who are deserving of good grades only seem mediocre. Also it makes teachers lose trust in their students, which leads to time and effort wasted trying to prevent cheating instead of teaching. I really don't care if cheaters end up hurting themselves. What gets me mad is that they hurt the talented, more deserving individuals.

If you forget to study then just take the hit. Don't try to trick yourself into thinking you deserved that grade anyways. You probably should have paid attention in class anyways so that you don't always need to rely on last minute cramming.

In college I had to take a required language class, so I took Italian. I hated that class. The teahcer was a bitch, the exercises we had to do were stupid, I had to get up at the butcrack of dawn to even make it to the class.

Long story short, toward the end of semester I was failing. So not wanting to take it again I made a half hearted attempt to cheat on a couple of important tests. On one test I even put down some wrong answers I new were wrong so I didn't get a perfect score and arouse suspicion.

In the end I just let myself fail. I don't know why, but I'm glad I did. The only options I had for making up the class and credit were a couple of summer programs. One that was in Italy. I signed up for it, went, loved it, and could even speak OK Italian by the time I was done.

If I had really cheated and passed the course I never would have went.

The point is all cheating is a missed oppurtunity. Even if the oppurtunity is just to learn a little something.

The old saying "you're only cheating yourself" is overused, corny, and, for the most part, true.

I cheated in highschool, but never on exams, I would only cheat on stupid papers we had to write about something we had been taught or on research papers

highschool i never cheated but i saw others do it all the time that made me so damn angry that i was doin all that work while they just copied it down.

cheaters do not hurt themselves. I went to highschool with a woman who was a RAMPANT cheater - cheated on every test I ever saw her take. She's now a state representative who ran on a campaign of honesty. Bah. The only people hurt by cheaters are the non-cheaters. It's very difficult to compete against a crib sheet.

Generally, i was pretty good at applying myself through school and uni. However, i remeber when i was about 11, i cheated outragously on maths tests. I paid dearly for this 1 year later. I had none of the skills the other kids in my class had and got put in the remedial class with the kids with serious learning problems. It was a good life lesson really; you get what you give, you reap what you sew... etc etc

Cheated on language exams in high school. Sadly don't know the language as well as I could now.

Haven't cheated since, in college it simply was worth it because I work hard and get A's. If your in college and working hard doesn't get you A's, then deal. It means your not qualified to do high level work in your major. Switch to something easier, or if you truly love the topic then work harder.

College to a degree forces you take less BS. Although sometimes it forces you into it. For instance COSI being required to take physics or chemistry, which is totally retarded and a serious waste of valuable time...

i have cheated on and off through out my school years. my best method was sticking a small paper with notes in the inside of my hat. that way i can take it off and put it on whenever the professor decides to wander. it may seem obvious, but i have yet to be busted :D

I really see no use in cheating, because you are really only screwing yourself over when you cheat. If you get caught cheating off of someone, then it's usually both people who end up getting in trouble. There's no honor in it.

well....
 

I have cheated before. I really needed a good grade, and despite my studious effforts, just could not understand the material. I ended up with a D in the class

I dont mind cheating if its done under fun curcumstances like playing a game for example Monoplay but cheating in school in an exam is just cheating yourself.

My gut instinct is NO, cheating is NEVER right, but then I think you know if some student figures out a loophole or a way to dodge the system, I don't think that is wrong, hell I've done that. But out and out sheating is just wrong.

like the man said..."there is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action."

Same here, like my physics teacher said....if you can program a formula into you calculator with no help go ahead and do it.

I used to hate people who got free rides and/or were actually allowed to cheat just because they were on the Football/Baseball/whatever team. I wasn't one for cheating and due to some wrecked curves ended up a few tests.

Knowing someone is cheating and doesn't care about it riles me right up there with teeth grinding and nails on a chalkboard. I tell the person once that if I see them doing it again, I'm turning them in to the prof. They may keep on doing it, but I sure as hell never see them doing it.

I'll admit it, I cheat sometimes in class. Most people don't know if you have the time, you can type everything you need to know into your cellphone, it's easy. Teachers never think twice about it.

though it is entirely possible that learning how to effectively cheat is a useful skill in the real world.

wow. i remember a really funny time my first year of college during our final exam for spanish I. it was sooo hard and everyone was just stumped and not getting a lot of it and no teacher was in the room so...... one person started to ask some friendly help and before you knew it, everyone was sharing a free-for-all. :-D it was quite fun to join the bandwagon. kind of makes you feel less evil too ;P now that's cognitive dissonance.

cheating, by definition, is wrong.

Was in a senior level education class in college and a student was caught cheating. The Professor flunked him and put a "Note of concern" in his file. The guy graduated (after taking the same class with a different prof the next semester) and couldn't even get an interview. Last I heard, he was flipping burgers for a living.

Cheating doesn't hurt anyone? Tell him that!

Did I mention... cheating, by definiton is wrong.

Well.. the way I see it, just because you cheat doesn't mean you don't learn something. I think it depends on the manner in which you cheat.

I myself never really cheated that much, sure in class we would copy HW and such with eachother before we started, but I never needed to cheat on tests and what not. I would justs scan over my notes(or someone elses:) ) a few minutes before the test/quiz and do fine. And that went for most of the people I knew as well.

Back to my first statement..if you do something like steal an answer key beforehand and just fill in the bubbles with the answers, your screwing yourself unless you look at the questions and retain the information. Thats what its all about.. retaining the information.


Most of the people I knew that did cheat (and I didn't know anyone that cheated a whole lot) were very smart people that either:
A: didn't have the time to studay the night before, on the account of all of their activities/sports and sometimes not getting home until 9 at night(often) and having to get up at 5:30 in the morning every day.
or B: They were very smart but they did not want to spend every waking minute studying. (I know people that DO do this.. and thats no way to spend your teenage years).

The work load put on students now-a-days can be rediculous. If you take all AP classes (I took english... reading 20-30ish books for the year is bad enough.. gogo sparknotes.. compared to the 4-6 in a college level course), I knew a lot of people that did this as well.

But I'm sorry.. theres no way you can acheive perfect grades, be active in enough activity's that make you stand out in the college search, AND have a social life (VERY IMPORTANT). Unless you know how to BS at least a little. Knowing what you can and cant get away with is a very valuable skill in life.

Even if you take all college level courses it can be tough to maintain all of that.(Not to say that you shouldn't have to put forth some effort)

I wont comment on college.. because I'm sure its a different story, and I know i'll be working my ass off when I start this september (going to Drexel in Philly)

Anyway.. kind of rambled there. My point is, I think life is more than Black and White.

I hope that all came together.. lol

Edit: I guess I kind of went off the topic of blatant cheating, which I dont think is right.

When I was in highschool about 10 years ago I had horrible grades. I tried most of the time, sometimes I was just bored. I'm not stupid or anything. When I got to college I did much better. I never cheated, or at least didn't mean to. Anyway, seems like everyone I have run into that I graduated HS with, has told me they cheated their way thru HS. It pisses me off, but what can you do. I'm almost afraid to say it, but it seems like you gotta cheat to keep up with the world. I'm still honest and don't plan on cheating for anything... just a thought

I cheated on my GCSE Maths exam at school.... once. I could see the guys paper next to me and I was stuck on one question... I just copied what he had. He was probably wrong anyways, but I did pass the exam... although I'm sure that one answer didn't make it a pass (I got a B).

I felt, and still do, feel bad about it.... but it was 10 years ago... and I've never used trigonometry since. :)

i cheated all of the time in highschool
there was a whole cheating culture going on, esp in our final exams (which are called HSC).

Grades in my high school were a joke. More of your grade depended on who you were than what you knew. I knew several people with 3.0 GPAs that knew more than I did with my 4.1, and they were trying harder than I was. Maybe that explains why so many of the upper quarter of my class left for school elsewhere, and ended back up at Westark (the local college) within a year.

I never went back. My GPA is still 0.00, due to excessive alcohol and academic dishonesty. I just don't my kids to do what I did.

In high school, I used to cheat occasionally by putting equations and such that I needed to remember into my TI83. I never went to the extent that some students went, tracking down other people's tests and then memorizing the answers or smuggling cheat sheets in with answers, but what I did was still wrong.

Then, in 11th grade, I had a reality check. I was working on a physics test, and I had some equations in my calc. I hadn't really studied enough, so they weren't even helping me. I was the last person in the room, and my teach came over, I think to see if there was any help he could give me, and he noticed my calculator. He looked through it, and took my test away.

The next day, he asked me to stay for a moment after class. He gave me a second chance, thankfully did not report me to the administration (colleges don't like cheating on your transcript), and let me take a different version of the test. The only condition was that I got half of whatever grade I actually earned on that test. So I studied my ass off, managed to pull a 99, and got a 50, instead of a 0. I realized how truly lucky I was, and I also realized that my teacher had given me a warning. I didn't cheat after that.

I hate the people in college who hang out everyday in the teachers office hours, waiting to glean information about tests or to complain about questions on tests/homework to squeeze out a few more points. It's more annoying to me than blatant cheating.

I cheated once. In high school, long ago. I took an Algebra II class; he was a crappy teacher, he'd given up, he didn't explain anything to anybody. I was a good student and I tried, but math was not my main talent and there was no way I could keep up. So rather than take a bad grade because old Waiting-for-Retirement had given up, I cheated enough to get a "B".

Did I cheat myself? No. I wasn't planning to go into a technical field. I was just fulfilling my college general ed requirement. Of course, if I was taking that class today, as an adult college, I'd probably go to the department head and denounce the teacher as incompetent and get my ass dropped and reenrolled with somebody better.

Never cheated after that.

I've never cheated. I always considered it risky both in the short & long run. In the short run, you risk getting caught. In the long run, you risk losing your job, if it depends on your knowing the information you supposedly aced in an exam.

I'd rather truly kick ass at a job than wank my way through life.

I remember one day in english class I was the only one who didn't cheat on the vocabulary test. I got a C while everyone else in the class got a perfect. My teacher didn't even suspect a thing. I really didn't care since I hated that class.

I never cheated, THEREFORE IT IS BAD! :(