I cheated on one of my final exams in college.
It was in my major. I had to reproduce some kind of flow chart and I hadn’t memorized it so I snuck a copy in that I had made from the textbook and copied that into the exam book.
While I feel bad about it, it’s water under the bridge.
In one philosophy course I took in college, the prof gave a midterm where he would give us 6 essay type questions, and we could choose which two we wanted to answer. He gave us the questions a class ahead of time, and told us that if we wanted to write the answers up ahead of time he would accept them. So I wrote em up, turned em in, and went on with my classes. It was an early morning class, and my attendance wasn’t all that great. I missed a class or two before the final. I attended the class right before the day of the final, and he handed out a list of 6 questions before we left. I knew what to do. I wrote up my answers for numbers 2 and 5 and worked more on my real classes. So I get there the day of the final, and wait for him to start. He pulls out two 6 sided dice. See, it turns out that he’d announced the final was going to be done differently in one of the classes I’d missed. He was going to roll 2 dice, and we had to answer those questions. I had 2 essays, and hadn’t studied anything else. So he rolls them. 2 & 5. I turned em in, and walked out.
Lucksack. 
Did he give you some sort of weird reaction that you were able to revel in?
My cheating days are I hope, long behind me. Both incidents happened before college, and I still get stomach churning anxiety thinking about them.
First: Fifth grade (11 years old, roughly). We had to take a test on the states of the USA. Blank political map, write in the names. I’ve always had problems with pure memorization, and this was no exception. Fortunately for me, the stupid ass teacher left the classroom’s map of the US up on the wall during the exam, and I sat next to it. Got a 98%; you think she’d have figured out what was going on when Alaska was marked “Maui”. :smack: (Note for foreign Dopers: many mapmakers draw Alaska on an inset in the lower left hand corner, floating in the Pacific off the coast of Mexico. It’s an efficient use of space on the page. Our test map did indeed use that format. Our classroom map didn’t, and so of course had Hawai’i in its proper place, with the largest islands (of which Maui is one) labeled individually.)
Second: High school, junior year (16 years old). Mrs. Johnson’s English class. I loathed her. She was the kind of teacher who would never tell anyone they were wrong, even if their “symbolism” and “metaphor” were derived rectally and contradicted everything the author ever wrote. She managed to be both perky and schoolmarmy at the same time, and to top things off, she loved me. L.O.V.E.D. me. I’d literally gag in her presence.
So one day she assigned a book report. To Juniors in high school. Any book we liked. I was so disgusted with her kindergarten style that I just made up a book. Made up the author, the title, the plot, even the publisher and date. Wrote 3 pages on it, dutifully got up in class and read it aloud on the appointed day. I didn’t have any worries about not getting yet another A.
I was a little concerned though, when she chirped, “Oh! That sounds like a fantastic book! I’ll check it out at the library this weekend!” :eek:
I was an English major in college and ended up not reading about 80% of the assigned works. It’s nearly impossible to keep up with the brutal reading schedule when you have four concurrent courses and don’t live in a library. To top it off, I am a pretty slow reader.
Even worse, just when I would get an uncharacteristically good jump on a book, we would invariably move on before I could finish it. I’ve read the first half of a lot of assigned books. For the record, I still don’t know how the Odyssey ends, or King Lear. (No spoilers!)
Fortunately, as long as you attend the lectures, you’ll know which parts of the book the professor thinks are important and why. I also made some creative choices for my papers. For example, I wrote a paper on the Fool in King Lear because he only appears in the first three acts (the only parts that I had read).
I’ve always wanted to go back and dig up my old syllabuses and read every assigned book, just to finally get my money’s worth. Unfortunately, I’m sure I’ve thrown most of them out.
Just off the top of my head, here is a list works I didn’t even start:
Omeros by Dereck Walcott
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Anna Karenina
Cymbeline
Coriolanus
Henry IV
Henry V
Henry VI
Richard III
The Winter’s Tale
(insert about seven or eight more Shakespeare plays here)
Typee
Omoo
Mardi
Redburn
Pierre
Israel Potter
To the Lighthouse
Orlando
The Years
I ended up with a 3.5 and graduate cum laude. Not great, but not terrible either.
Between this post and Monstro’s I’m beginning to see how my secondary school chemistry teacher graduated. Come to think of it the only time one of her demonstration experiments succeeded – producing, then distilling alcohol – she was disappointed with the amount she obtained because she had put more in in the first place. The rumour around the school was that she was brilliant at theory but her research career was scuppered by her total incompetence as an experimenter.
Speaking of book reports…
8th grade maybe?? I did an oral report on War of the Worlds.
Copied word for word from the back of the book. I think I got a B on it.
Loved the book. Hated homework. Hated public speaking.
My first day of ninth grade, before I was all the way into the building, i pulled the fire alarm and evacuated the building.
This is very ironic, as I have been working as a fire alarm technician for teh last thirty years
11th grade, Algebra 2. There were two stoner guys in the class that I knew and talked to sometimes, but I wouldn’t call them friends. At one point in the semester, the class took a test which was returned to us the next day. One of the stoner guys happened to miss the day of the test, so the teacher let him make it up the next day in the middle of the class. So I’m sitting there with the test I’ve already taken (which had all the right answers), and Stoner 1 is sitting in front of me struggling with the test. It occurs to Stoner 2 that I have the answers needed in order to help Stoner 1, so he starts cajoling me.
S2: Come on, Stauderhorse. Let him see the test.
S: Uh, no. I don’t know where it is.
S1: Pleeeease, Stauderhorse. I don’t know any of this.
S: Uhhh…
S2 reaches over into my backpack, pulls out the test, and hands it to S1. All the while, the teacher is distracted by something and has no idea what’s happening.
I make a few feeble protests. “Dude, she’s gonna see. Give it back.” S1 pretends not to hear; after a while, he slips me the test, satisfied that he’ll pass. I wouldn’t feel so bad about it, except that the teacher was one of the sweetest people in the world and would never expect me to kowtow to a couple of idiots like them. I still feel awful about it, and I’m really not sure why I even listened to them instead of standing my ground.
That’s genius!! I should’ve done that in my organic chem lab way back when… I’d always get these laughably implausible yields… something to the effect 0.014%, when I was supposed to get at least 3-4%. Now, of course, this could have been due to the fact that my test tube with the cystallized final product broke into a billion pieces as I was attempting to scrape the crystals off onto a plate.
Just for the record, crystallized chemical product and glass shards are very similar in consistency. All I did was add a bit of glass to the “final product” and got the hell out of the lab as soon as possible.
I did the honourable thing and switched to a different major 
In high-school, around grade 10 or 11, the English teacher had us memorize a piece every other week or so, it might have been a poem, the lyrics of a song or something else, we did not get to choose, it was her pick.
I was hopeless at memorizing things, needless to say, I did not do very well on the first one, I had though of bringing a pre-written copy to class but did not, for fear of getting caught.
We had to write the piece down, not recite it. It turned out quite a few did poorly. So we were told to learn it some more and we would have a make-up test over lunch in a few days.
Well, that day I was prepared, I had a small paper with whatever we were learning written as small as possible, everything went OK.
A friend later asked me about the make-up test and I told him I did good. He then volunteered to give me a tip, that he had taken a written copy of the poem to the initial test. I laughed and admitted to him that I just done the same.
I did that for every other test during the school year except for once and we found out that others were also doing it.
The only time I did not cheat on the memorizing test was when we did the “Balad of the Green Beret” song, for some reason, I was able to remember that one easily.
My high school geography teacher did this on a map test of South America. I don’t think he ever DID catch on to the kid who sat right next to the globe he never put away.
Anyway…1st grade. The spelling tests were a self esteem killer. I’d be at the top of the class in every other subject, but I couldn’t spell for shit. No mater how hard I tried I was never any good at it. We always had a practice test the day before so we could see how we did and wouldn’t you know it, I ended up getting 90%+ on this test. Seeing my very first 100% of the year in sight, I corrected the practice test then the next day had the words just BARELY peaking out of the edge of a book under my seat.
Got 100% on the words part, but wrote “We are taking are car to the river” for my sentence. 95 fucking percent. I can’t even spell things right when I CHEAT. 95% and I never got any higher.
Heads Up Seven-Up: Here’s how it works. Everyone puts their head down on their desk and their thumb up. Seven students go around and choose someone by touching their thumb then when everyone’s done, those chosen have to guess who picked them. If they’re right they get to replace them. Simple game for when teach is tired of teaching or to kill some time.
I would cover my head but peak out behind my desk to see which shoes the person who chose me wore. Then when I stood up, I checked the shoes of the 7 "pickers’ and got my guy.
I feel no remorse in that this game was the worst and most boring fucking “game” ever invented. :mad:
College: I play music. I hate practicing. I feel guilty seeing how far I’ve gotten and knowing how much further I could be should I really put my mind to it, but I’m just not that motivated I guess. 
Anyway, in college I took lessons from faculty. You had to write down how much you practiced and when. Pfffffff…my rule was if I even thought about practicing that counted as 20 minutes. Any ACTUAL practicing counted as at least an hour, no matter how long it really lasted (though they were usually 45 minutes). The only regular practicing I did was for one hour before my lessons to review what I should have been working on all week. How did I get away with it? I lived off campus and claimed I practiced at home instead of in the practice rooms and THAT’S why I was never there.
Then my teacher DAMN NEAR put one over on me. I left my music at my lesson on Friday. I have no idea why it was I decided to actually put some work in the following Monday but I did and realized my mistake. Had I walked in there the following Friday claiming I’ve been practicing all week, I’d have been in some SERIOUS, SERIOUS trouble. Like…expelled from the program trouble. :eek:
I remember doing the very same thing in first grade. It didn’t always work, though… some kids wore the same shoes.
In college, my girlfriend and I took the same Pascal I programming class. For the most part, I was getting it. She was not. For one assignment, I let her copy a large part of my program to use in her program. She just changed a few variable names and subroutine names to match what she already had. Wouldn’t you know I get a B+ and she gets an A. There’s some dumb luck for you.
I came very close to cheating in Probability and Statistics. In the end, I couldn’t do it.
I am a big diet pepsi drinker. Every day I took a can with me to class. On one test we had Forty-some equations to memorize. I made a cheat sheet and taped it to the bottom of my can for the test. When the professor went to the ladies room I had the opportunity to pull it out and use it.
I decided not to.
I got a D in Prob and Stats. D is for degree, D is for diploma.
Mine’s just a story - may have told it on the Dope before. Sophomore year of University, in the “weeder” class for Computer Science - the hard class meant to weed out folks not cut out for an intense, math-engineering-computer major. I had just encountered what I lovingly refer to as my first mindfuck girlfriend who had left me a babbling mess - you know that type of relationship, right?
Anyway, I had missed a bunch of classes, blown homework - the whole bit. I couldn’t see anyway I could pass - the midterm counted 50% of the grade. I saw no way I could pass and contemplated simply not going - throw in the towel. We had been learning a couple of new languages - ADA (yes, ADA) and C++ (this was the early 80’s) but I hadn’t attended any of those classes or logged any PDP 1170 time working on those languages. I was screwed.
I decide to show up; just the upright citizen in me, I guess - time to take my medicine. It turned out the midterm was all about structuring programs - you were given a problem and you could layout the structure in ADA or C++ but also in any other language or even in pseudocode.
I took a shot at each of the problems, but ended pretty early - I didn’t have a lot of detail to add to the basic structures I laid out.
A week later, my buddy came pounding on my door - I got the highest grade in class, by a lot. Most folks were so tangled up in getting the languages correct that they lost site of the basic program structure. I was not the least bit distracted - because I didn’t know the languages!! - and just answered the questions…
Saved my bacon and led to me passing the class, getting the major, being able to qualify for my 3rd year abroad program - passing that test was critical in the overall scheme of things in my life…too funny.
When I was in 12th grade, I realized that a 3x5 index card would fit inside my calculator case. A couple of times, I used this knowledge to help with chemistry tidbits I was having trouble memorizing.
I am not proud of this.
Once in junior high, I plumb forgot to write a paper. I told the teacher that I had turned it in, so he must have lost it. I even managed to feign disappointment that I had put in “all that work” for nothing. I was such an honest dork that he believed me and gave me full credit.
Probably not cheating but I joined the Army after I had attended a 2 year college for computer programming. The Army sent me to a very low level computer course after basic training. I managed to stay awake through the 6 week course and averaged 100% on all course work and the final exam. I was jumped TWO pay grades based on this. It put me almost 18 months ahead of my promotion schedule allowing me to go for Sgt. in 11 months of active army time.
If you write realllllly small, you can fit a LOT of information on a #2 pencil.
In college I used the same research paper for assignments in three seperate classes, just making minor changes each time I turned it in. There were also a few other papers I wrote for one class, but managed to recycle for another. Cheating? I guess. But I did do all research and writing on my own.
There was also one paper, where I think we had to have so many book sources. I got a lot of information off the Web, and was running way short on time. Rather than finding a book to verify the information, I just went into the Library’s computerized card catalog, found a few books related to my topic and stuck them in bibliography, knowing that the professor would probably never take the time to check on it. I believe I ended up getting a B.