Recently I found a thread on Reddit.com about clever classroom cheating techniques. Below are some of the best stories. Enjoy, but remember: students can be crafty!

• Well, Mr. Homer, remember how you let us “roll the dice” the day before a big quiz to determine if we got to use a ‘cheat sheet’ on the test? Well the reason the class always let me roll was because I had loaded dice I would switch out while you weren’t looking.
• Not a teacher but a kid in my class plagiarized his entire area research paper (10ish pages). He found one online, and copied it word for word. We had to submit it to this plagiarizing checking website, so in order to avoid detection he changed all of the letter “i”s to the Russian character “i” as it is almost identical and just looking at them you can’t tell the difference. So he “passed” the plagiarism test. No one knew until like a year later when he bragged about it. That website we used was notified about this cheat and they changed the algorithm or whatever so it wouldn’t happen again.
• In a high school government class, I couldn’t make the time to study for an exam. I decided to go get a pack of those iron-on pages you could run through your printer and added the entire study guide to a graphic design that I applied to a colored t-shirt. I had my friend wear it to class the next day and sit in front of me.
• Not a teacher, but I saw another student use it. He engraved the equations into the pencil without breaking through the paint. Unless you were up close, you’d never notice anything wrong with it.
• Our teacher told us the final test was open note, however the notes had to be in a notebook so he knew we didn’t print them out. I bought a spiral bound notebook, and unthreaded the spiral. Put all the paper in my printer. Downloaded the text book in PDF form. Copied every chapter summary into word, and downloaded a handwriting font. Changed the font, printed it out onto said paper, and rethreaded the spiral back into the notebook. Done and done.
• Those mechanical pencils with the twist out erasers. Just write what you need on the side of the erasers in pen. Twist the eraser back in. Erase the answers off the sides of the eraser when the test is done.
• We were allowed to listen to our own music on test days in religion class, where we would usually have a memory test and over half the class recorded the memory on their iPods or some other form and would listen to it as they did their test. Everyone else would just make tiny pieces of paper and read from that.
• When I was in high school, I was way ahead in math. We were allowed to use graphing calculators and I finished early enough that I typed all the answers in my TI-83 and turned my test in. For the first student I helped, I held the calculator up just right so the person behind me could read the answers and just hit random arrow keys so the teacher would think I was playing a game (I played Tetris and that spaceship game a lot). I then asked to go to the bathroom and dropped the calculator at another desk, came back and moved it to another.
• Not a teacher, but I had friend who would write things on top of her boobs. She wore a v-neck shirt and would down at her chest to ‘adjust her bra’ during the test.
• Not a teacher, but a fellow college student printed out his own label for the drink he normally brought to class (like Vitamin water or something) with notes for the test we were taking in the ingredients section.
• Not a teacher, but in high school it was required for us to wear school IDs on a lanyard. Whenever there was a vocab test, people would take a small post-it, write down the vocab words and the meanings, and put in on the back of their ID. Never saw anyone get caught.
• Back in the day we used to put chap stick along the side of the scan-tron answer sheet. This kept the machine from putting down the pink lines signaling you missed an answer.

Do you have any stories to share?

Hi 5!