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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Yes. I struggled with Calculus in college and cheated on a few tests with a well hidden index card/cheat sheet.

The irony was that creating this cheat sheet was sort of a form of studying, and I barely needed them come test time.

Was it wrong? Yes. Do I feel bad? Only a little. I don’t need or use anything from that course in my life now so it is kind of inconsequential.

A non-zero amount of times :3

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.

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.

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 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.

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.