Did you ever cheat in school?

High school maybe once or twice.

College only during super hard tests. I would get desperate and look on the paper of the super smart person I conveniently say by.

I had an online spanish class that forced us to film ourselves taking exams. I would just tape notes to the wall behind my lap top and look up during the test(didnt help because I was awful at spanish lol).

I never plagirised or cheated on projects, and I never cheated in classes I cared about. Its just if you are forcing me to take some bs math class while I have 5 other classes to study for, I will complete the course with as little effort as possible.

Im in Grad school now so I cant risk it(smaller class size and more engaging material).

In first year physics and calculus. I had all the equations written on one side of my wrist sleeve jacket for the physics final. Without it, I would have failed surely. I used sites that had working answers for calculus and physics assignments. I guess the questions were common enough among universities for a site to have all info down. Got 100% on all of those. I was young, stupid and lazy. I hardly studied and I put no effort into those classes. I only passed those classes because I cheated. I didn't need, or use, those classes to progress through my career so I don't feel too awful about it. Cheating never crossed my mind after first year.

I feel that. I mean I know a guy who started college at 18 and he has been on and off uni for years(he is in his 50s now). He just can not pass physics and that one class keeps him from his degree(I have met people in similar situations where its one class holding them back). At that point if its due or die, I say cheat.

During middle, I cheated through math class with calculator from 6th & 7th grade and when I made it to 8th grade, I stop as I gotten better in Math classes. When I enter High school as a freshman, boy I had to cheat on fewer test in my classes but that was rare on my part because I kinda flunk here and there throughout my first semester. From 10th-12th grade, I totally stop cheating and took my work seriously.

Best thing all about is, I never got caught cheating lol.

Lolz, very funny question. It is related to our past school life and the answer is yes.

Nope. There's nothing in school or campus hard enough that I wanted to cheat.

I don't have any vivid memories cheating in high school.

Only once. High school chemistry, I couldn't remember the table of elements to save my life, so I took a number two pencil, shaved off the paint, and wrote the answers on the sides with a mechanical pencil. And I got caught. I thought I should have at least gotten some points for effort.

I honestly don't think professors who stress memorization should be teaching at all. The point of a class should not be to retain information by rote, it should be to understand concepts. It's doubly worse when you can quite easily keep a formula notebook handy at any job in which the information is relevant. It's like those teachers who used to say "you're not always going to have a calculator in life," but the joke's on them now. As someone who really struggles just committing something to memory, I can say I'm pretty good at remembering a lot of these formulas, but only after I use them on a consistent basis. I really hate having someone who's spent at least nine years working with the same formulas day in and day out tell me I should have these memorized easily in a couple of weeks just because they have them memorized. That being said, I'm not going to cheat on their tests if for no other reason than getting caught can ruin your college career.

@theone86: Yeah dude. I’m really good at memorizing applications and specific aspects of the concepts I learn. But when it comes to formulas, I just don’t have that kind of patience.

Looking back, I know it was a stupid thing to do. I didn't look up "how to cheat without getting caught" or anything. I just got lucky that I didn't get caught. I could have really fucked myself if I had gotten caught and received a "0" for that class, which other schools would know is for cheating if they needed my transcript. I'm strongly against cheating now and would never encourage it. The risk of getting kicked out and unable to get into other schools, isn't worth it. If it's taking years and years to pass a class, like that guy you know, then maybe it's time to move on to something else.

@theone86: Actually since you brought it up, what happened when you got caught. I would have had a massive anxiety lump in my throat.

In that position I do feel like you gotta ask yourself if the class is something you are ever going to use. If not is it really worth being continuously stuck at where you are in life just so you can keep your honor. Especially when loads of things life are designed to keep you where you are because it's more profitable for others if you are not successful and instead remain complacent about that fact.

Wow, I wouldn't even be able to write that small. I can only remember one occassion where I wrote notes for myself to cheat with and I used my leg. I just crossed my leg and pulled up a pants leg inconspicously. I didn't get caught, but was doing so poorly at that point that it didn't really matter.

Nope: I tend to be very self-reliant, and often like to challenge myself. For example, I prefer to find my own way to places through looking at maps and research, and only asking for directions as last resort or if I have no choice. All this for no other reason than just to see if I can.

So I always saw tests and exams as a challenge, which I relish. Cheating would cheapen my "sense of pride and accomplishment." Yeah, I'm weird that way.

And that's a real one, by the way, not the (TM) version manufactured by a certain game company I shall not name.

Yeah, I don't remember any specific instances of cheating but not because I would have had a moral objection to it back then. If I thought I could do it and was sure I could get away with it (and felt like it would have actually helped because I didn't know the topic), I probably would have done it. As an adult, though, I wouldn't because I'd rather not pass something that way.

-Byshop

My sense of pride and accomplishment has kind of been warped. When I was in school sharing notes was considered cheating (not that the teachers could really do much about it, but still it was considered wrong), but now sharing notes and information is actively encouraged.

I mean, if what is considered cheating has fully flipped years later and seen as a good thing why should I consider what is believed to be cheating today as actually bad? What are the odds that it will be seen as good in coming years and the people who followed the rules missed out while the ones who didn't got ahead in life?

Rules change; it's just a fact of life. I believe all you can do is demonstrate good faith by following the rules of the time. Everything else is out of your hands.

I've never cheated, but honestly if I had, then I think I'd have MORE of an objection to cheating on something that was really challenging.

I mean, it's one thing to cheat on something easy because I was lazy or just didn't feel like studying beforehand. I might be telling myself, "yeah, I might have cheated, but it's not like I have any trouble with the material. I just didn't feel like studying last night, I'll go back and actually learn the material tomorrow."

Meanwhile, if I'm cheating on something that's actually HARD and that is causing me to struggle, I'd be way more inclined to think, "I'd better just keep on trying to learn this for real, because if I cheat and end up going forward then I'm going to be in an even worse situation later on."

People shouldn't cheat on ANYTHING. But I think it's more important to not cheat when it comes to the really hard stuff. Stuff that you find easy? You might be able to cheat and then just learn it later. But stuff that you're actually have a really hard time understanding? You'd better actually learn how to understand it or else you're potentially setting yourself up for a BIG fall later on down the road.

Adding on to that, people can do whatever they want. Even breaking rules and laws (which I am obviously not advocating), people can spend all day telling themselves that the rules or laws are BS.

Just a word of advice though: don't expect anyone to give a S*** about your justifications if you eventually get caught. Try your hardest to argue that your cheating was acceptable, or that the rules against what you did are BS, the fact still remains that if you get caught then all anyone else is going to care about is the fact that you were breaking the rules. If you're not comfortable with that, then don't break the rules.

Personally, I'm just of the opinion that breaking rules and laws generally isn't worth it in the long run. Even if you think the rules and laws are BS, you're probably going to eventually get caught if you keep on breaking the rules. If it's "just one time", then sure, MAYBE you can get away with it. But I think we all know how easy it is for "just one time" to turn into a common thing. I mean, if you can justify doing it the first time, then you can probably justify doing it one more time after that. And then the third time is just "one more time" too. It's like saying, "I'll just have one more potato chip" and then before you know it you've eaten the entire bag.

And then you keep on doing it and then you're eventually going to get caught.

Again, I'm not telling anyone what to do or not do. After all, if the rules and laws aren't enough of a deterrent then surely nothing I say is going to make a difference. But whatever rules and laws a person decides to break, they'd better expect that they're eventually going to get caught if they keep on doing it, and that if they're willing to do it once then they're probably going to be willing to do it again. After all, prison is full of people who would have gotten away with it if they really did just do it once. People are going to do what people do. But whatever you do, expect to get caught. If you're not comfortable with what happens if you get caught, then you're really better off not ever doing it even once.

I don't know about that, I think that if you see people getting ahead in life by skirting the rules that you should at least consider emulating their behavior. I don't believe that you should go and break the law or anything, but rules made by school or companies? Perhaps those aren't worth following, but again, consider the consequences and use good judgement.

Well, a lot of people who "get ahead" by skirting the rules are creating time bombs in their careers that are just waiting to go off at any moment.

And even then, we're talking about just the people who "get ahead". It like, we can look at some drug kingpin and talk all day about how awesome it was that he got successful by breaking the rules. But for every drug kingpin who got successful and never got caught, there are a BUNCH of criminals who NEVER got successful and ended up ruining their lives with a prison sentence and a criminal record.

It's like playing the lottery, if losing the lottery meant that you don't only lose out on the money that you spent on the lottery ticket, but that someone ALSO comes along and steals a bunch more of your money just to penalize you for losing. For every person who actually DOES get ahead by breaking the rules, there are usually a bunch MORE people who tried to get ahead by breaking the rules and ended up F****ing themselves up.

When I was in college I never went to class, always copied stuff from other students, and studied it before the tests. I always passed. This wasn't exactly cheating but I still cheated myself.

I always thought if I got my degree it was going to be the end of my suffering. Sadly it wasn't, it just got worse. Shool and college are not only there for learning, they are also a good measurement of what you can handle. Most jobs don't pay you more money because you have a degree, they just come with more responsiblity, and higher difficulty.

When I was younger I wanted to be a lawyer or an engineer, because it made money, little did I realize I was actually a lazy bastard, no matter my intelligence, you need to have the character to do the work as well. When I worked people always said I could manage difficult problems, but I couldn't get a lot of work done, in the end I became like a crisis engineer, problems that no one else could solve ended up with me, it resulted in a lot stress.

Stress I couldn't handle , when I was in college I just had tests twice a year. Now everyday was a test. Sure, you can get used to your job but higher level jobs tend to change a lot and you need update yourself. Since I wasn't a workhorse and relied on my intelligence completely, i was faced with jobs on a daily basis that didn't involve any routine, but very difficult troubleshooting.

After two nervous breakdowns I realized I had to find another career. Fact is , I couldn't do anything else, and I couldn't even manage to work in burgertent. People may be looking down on some low level jobs, but even those jobs require a certain skillset, a skillset that lot of people with high degrees wouldn't be able to manage. You could say what you want about peole flipping burgers all day but it takes character to do such a thing on a daily basis.

I ended up on disabilty, and that doesn't give me a lot of money, I do some trading whenever I can but even that is hard to manage. I do know one thing, I was healthy when I started my career and now I'm not. When people say do something you like, they are not kidding, if you have to do something everyday that makes you overexert yourself you're not on the right path.

Shool is actually made to help you find the right path, it's not a ticket to a better life. I remember a little story a teacher always used to tell me about student that couldn't even write his own name. He became rich by selling soup, and started of with a big bowl of soup attached to a bike, and drove around selling soup.

Well, sure, people bend the rules or even break them and get away with it to get ahead all the time. The question is; can YOU do it? Are you able and capable of being that guy? If not, then focus on what you CAN do. It is an exercise in futility to worry about things that are beyond your control.

There's a thing that I like to say rather frequently: "We all do what we can to do what we must." The "we can" part is just as important as the "we must" part. Can you play tennis like Roger Federer, formulate theories on gravitational singularities like Stephen Hawking, or even sell drugs and evade the cops like "El Chapo" Guzman? If not, then find something else you can do. All I'm saying is: know your own limits and make the best of them.

I tend to agrree with you serraph, the notion of following rules just because someone says so seems asinine to me. Not to mention if a particular rule does not fit my moral standard then why bother(like smoking weed in a red state). As long as you arent hurting anyone who cares?

And I like your analysis, how rules and laws change.

No. I always preferred learning and knowing how to get to an answer on my own rather then cheating and getting an answer without really understanding it.

GS just alerted me they are sending the contents of this thread to our past/present schools/universities

I wish them good luck combing the East Anglian countryside for my prep school. I also wish them good luck pronouncing the name of my first high school - I think I learned to sing the New Zealand national anthem in Maori just from saying the name of my school regularly.

But seriously, I don't do it's because it's not worth the risk. In the college I went to. there's a testing center where we take exams, and there's cameras all over the place aimed at the students, yet there are some people that try to risk cheating anyway.

They surely didn't have you go there for all of your exams, right? Not encouraging you to cheat at anything, but that room had to constantly be occupied to the point of constantly being overbooked.

@hallenbeck77 said:

But seriously, I don't do it's because it's not worth the risk. In the college I went to. there's a testing center where we take exams, and there's cameras all over the place aimed at the students, yet there are some people that try to risk cheating anyway.

At my uni that was only for make up tests lol. Although I had to do a math test in a similar situation....still cheated lol

@Serraph105 said:

They surely didn't have you go there for all of your exams, right? Not encouraging you to cheat at anything, but that room had to constantly be occupied to the point of constantly being overbooked.

@hallenbeck77 said:

But seriously, I don't do it's because it's not worth the risk. In the college I went to. there's a testing center where we take exams, and there's cameras all over the place aimed at the students, yet there are some people that try to risk cheating anyway.

@Serraph105: They did, and they still do. Quizzes were given in class (or online if you took online classes), actual tests and exams had to be taken there. They give you a window of time to take the test--usually a few days or a week depending on the professor--and the rooms were continuiously monitored. Phones have to be shut off prior to entering, and they make you power down in front of them. They have a full time staff of monitors, and hours were from 8 am to 6 pm. The rooms are big enough that overbooking isnt much of an issue, most tests were walk-ins.

@hallenbeck77: Ah! Okay, so there was more than one of these rooms. I kind of figured, but last night was a long ass night, literally no sleep. And not that stupid thing where literally means figuratively either.

I was extremely lazy for most of my academic career, but smart enough to get by without cheating. honestly, i was just too lazy to think of a clever way to cheat, and I always seemed to get by without cheating even though I never really studied for tests.

I'm not bragging though, my grades were extremely mediocre, and I came pretty close to failing several classes.

I also actively avoided tough classes like physics and calculus where I would have had to 'try.' the tougher classes I did take in later high school and during my undergrad I typically scraped by with a C or C-.

I got into a college where the only entrance requirement was graduating high school, then transferred to a better university for 3rd year when the requirements for getting in were much lower than getting in right out of high school.

I eventually had to put in real effort in a post-grad program when I needed to learn some hard skills to get a job but I can't believe how long I got away with being a super lazy student.

I did the whole go to a school with easier entrance(my SAT was really weak as im an awful standardized tester), and then I transferred spring semester of my 4th year and did two more years.

Did you find yourself working harder at a bigger school like I did?

the opposite really, I had to work a bit harder at the college before I transferred to get my grades up enough to get accepted into the larger school.

once I got there, my motivation to work hard faded again (also in part because the school I transferred to tended to 'curve' grades to fit some kind of expected distribution for each class, so I felt like I could half-ass a paper and get a OK grade, or work really hard and only get a slightly better one).

I put in more effort into some of the classes that genuinely interested me but my study habits probably got worse again. I don't think I did a single assigned reading unless it was on a topic that was of particular interest to me. some classes I don't think I even opened the 'required' text book a single time.

I was cheated on in high school. ?

In terms of classes, yeah I used to sneak in notes for the oral French tests.

You must have missed the memo, everyone is polyamorous in High school and college.

Geometry I had to cheat in order to pass, its quite peculiar in my situation. For example classes that were less challenging towards a lot of people I was actually struggling at but classes that were considered arduous and challenging like Calculus - I was doing remarkably well at.

@Mercenary848: Oww right, always missing the damn memos haha.

Some teachers are pretty good about it. I'm taking analytical mechanics right now and the professor gives us a whole sheet of formulas for the test. My calculus professor, though, was insistent that we just had to have everything memorized, which can be a pain with things like sum and difference formulas, half angle formulas, power reducing formulas, not to mention all the different derivative rules and limits laws. I spent more time figuring out mental tricks to remember equations than I actually did learning what the equations meant and how to use them.

As to the cheating, my teacher wrote "see me after class" on the paper, and I was a certified badass back then so I just walked out of class. I don't know if she ever reported it or not. I was able to enroll in community college and got accepted to a university, so if she did report it then I was never impacted by it.

I went to a great deal of effort. Sometimes I think I was more concerned with the actual act of cheating than I was with passing. I wasn't a great student at all at the time and I'm pretty sure I had already settled on a trade career, so I don't think I was stressing about passing chemistry. I probably just just felt bad about not being able to memorize it and found a creative way around it because I didn't give a crap about authority. Ironically, I think the way that she caught me was that the print was so small I had to hold the pencil up to my eyes to see the answers.

@theone86: Jeeze, glad it was a final exam

Though I did not cheat in school it's really up to the individual if they believe they are cheating or not, Some may think they are using the tools they were given when others may think they are cheating.

It's really up to you!

In middle school I remember scribbling initials for countries and capitals on my desk before a test. Best part was that my dumb ass cheated for the wrong test and did poorly on it. I think there may have been a couple of instances in high school and/or university where I wrote formulas on a small piece of paper and taped it to the inside of my calculator cover. I know I had the unit circle for trigonometry all drawn out but I can't remember if or how much that was cheating. Pretty sure I could draw it from memory at the time so it was probably just more for the convenience of it.

Lastly, there was that time in high school where I re-used some of my own work for this thing we had to do in my english class. It involved finding certain magazine articles and writing about them. I found it to be a pain in the ass and was also just lazy, so the last time we had to do it I just went through and picked ones I already did and just figured she wouldn't notice and I got away with it.

Once and awhile. Gotta do what you gotta do sometimes.

I think I have studied the wrong chapter for a test as well......that was in college; I was heated.

Though I did not cheat in school it is really up in the air what constitutes as cheating, everyone views things differently.

It wasn't. In fact, it might have been one of the first quizzes in the class. I think she just decided after that, "whatever, I'm just going to pass this little shit so I don't have to deal with him again." I was like that in high school. Or maybe she didn't. Like I said, I don't really know if anything ever came of it or not, just that I never heard anything else about it.

My anxiety is too bad to go through that, but its better then my senior year. If i was in your shoes I would have died lol.

I'm probably a lot more like that now. Back then I just had a "screw everybody" mentality. I think a lot of it comes from my middle school teachers being a bunch of authoritarian jerks, so I just got accustomed to disobeying them as a matter of fact. Then by the time I got to high school I couldn't actually recognize that most teachers were actually trying to help me, I just went on being a jerk to them. I have tons of stories like that, actually. Now I think I have the opposite problem where, even when a teacher is being a jerk, I'll just assume they're not doing anything wrong and only realize how poorly they were acting a lot later.