#726 – Dupe
Posted on March 24, 2009 at 12:00 am by Chris
Chapter: Comics
I never cheated on tests but I certainly saw a lot of it in high school. There was one class where the teacher gave a pop quiz every Wednesday. The problem was that he gave the same exact test for two periods in a row. Someone from the first period would always forward the answers to the next one. When I would get to that classroom on Wednesdays there would always be a group of kids huddled at the back passing around the answer sheet. I wonder if he ever noticed that the second period class always tested better than the first.
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This is Mid-terms week!
mid-terms? nah, i think just high-school week, sides, what the hell are mid-terms anyway?
Mid-terms are exams given at the middle of the term. They’re the evil twin of Final Exams because they appear much sooner.
I too saw this alot in highschool. The sad part is that I never saw the under-achievers do it, it was the oppressed “honor” students that huddled before 2nd period. They might’ve graduated above me, but in college, they won’t have eachother to be so “Honorable” with.
It’s definitely high School tricks week
One thing always bothered me about my exams in high school, and some teachers are starting to realise this too. If you’re an engineer, it’s not like you won’t have a good dozen textbooks in your office to refer to, or like you won’t have some standard formulae on your PAD. Why, then, are people forced to recall from memory complex equations? When I was in my final year, we were allowed to take in one hand-written single-sided A4 sheet of notes to our maths and physics exams. I guess the thinking was, a standard form of an equation isn’t going to give us the answer to any questions. More often than not, information was presented verbally, and we’d have to choose the appropriate approach to solve problems. Having a list of standard formulae was hardly as helpful as it sounds.
Haha! the combination of the milk splashing on Biff (I think it’s milk) and the ad at the top of the page makes it look like the ‘milk’ is a fishing rod holding the bug in the ad as a lure…
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a154/general0ne/biffbug.jpg
Alas, my test is tommorow, and all of Biff’s wonderful test taking strategies are wasted on me. At least I’ll be ready for my final when that comes along. Don’t fail me now Biff.
I’d say it’s more “Study week” rather than any specific exam period.
And it’s quite surprising, but I never actually saw any cheating going on in high school. I always feel like I missed out on an essential part of growing up when people list all the methods of cheating they saw other people using 🙁
I call B.S. on this not being mid-term week. This is the time of year for Spring Midterms. I had two before my Spring Break and now I have two after. COINCIDENCE that this theme comes this time during the school year? No. It’s not. Take it from a college student. This is mid-term week.
Biff isn’t even studying in this one.
Heheh… Chris said period.
That’s my FIRST random act of taking people’s text out of context today!
School week?
We’re usually allowed two sides of an A4, handwritten page for maths exams. Our exams are at the end of each semester and we only have the exam on what we did in that semester, so I’ve yet to see anyone ever use more than one side of the page.
However, the poor Physics students aren’t allowed a cheat sheet (as we call them, for some odd reason). They have to rely on memory.
I never pulled any of the cute stuff on tests, like notes or getting the answers from a friend. I do remember cheating a couple times, but just the old-fashioned wandering eyes rather than anything else. My teachers now always say cover up your answers and keep your eyes on your own test, but if someone’s determined to take the easy way out then that’s certainly not going to stop them.
I wrote stuff on my hand one year for my music reading class. None of that stuff was actually on the exam. I was so pissed.
In elementary school, when we had the desks that opened and we could keep stuff in them, I would always bring a piece of paper with the answers and put it just inside, on top of everything else. Then, when the teacher wasn’t looking, I’d open the desk just a little and pull out the paper so that it hung out from the inside of my desk. If the teacher ever came by my desk it was easy enough to push it back in before they got to me.
Cheating week.
Not cheating week… I don’t think ingesting liquid books counts as cheating.
Hey, Chris. How did your teacher even graduate?
…And I never, EVER get to understand U.S.A-styled school. Really, I try. But you/they guys… aargh, my head’s gonna split for random fact things!
Yeah, for PISA-tests, Finland got rank #1 in the best school system. But I don’t really believe it… Still, shows what kind of thing I think is normal. So maybe I don’t get these jokes. Who knows.
Oh, and by the way, it IS test-weeks around here in about a week too. Creepy timing Cris.
Wow Chris, you’re describing just what happens to me all the time! For the past two years I’ve been in a later english period while another half would have it earlier. We (those of us in the later period) thought we were slick asking what was coming up in class- answers to extra credit, etc. Even the test scores reflected that. In fact, it was becasue the teacher was getting on the earlier period because their grades weren’t as good as ours that they stopped informing us.
But we knew we were smarter anyway. >:D
school week…
This week is definetly school week cheating,studying and the other stuff.!
AAH!!! Midterms!
Oh man…so many memories.
I think I only actually tried to cheat once, during the local equivalent of American HS (here it lasts 5 years, 13 to 17yo give or take, right after 7 of elementary). It was algebrae, and I squeezed down the lessons we were supposed to know, into something short enough to fit on the half-inch wide edge of my table.
That kind of cheating is pretty ironic, ‘cos it makes you process and synthesize the teachings in such a way that you end up learning them anyways, thus cheating actually becomes a highly effective (if rough) form of study.
Spanish’s the local language, but in my HS we had a big presence of koreans and other asians. Many of them actually spent their childhood back in those countries, or otherwise received the culture heavily from their parents, being first-gen local citizens at most. I remember them using their own ideograms to write down notes around the place for cheating. One of them constantly wrote a lot of those, but always ended up learning as I did with my own once-time cheating.
In retrospective, it spoke very poorly of the teachers, to miss such a thing. Sure, you don’t have to understand what it says, but 6 rows of ideograms, with 15+ ideograms each, should be pretty obvious… It’s not like the clasrooms were covered in urban art or something.
The best one cheating though, happened when this guy was in front of the class, facing the teacher giving an oral exam. He was being pretty good at it, sneaking glances at the notes he wrote in his arm and palm.
Eventually though, the teacher started pushing more and more with questions that he didn’t have the answers written for, until he snapped and complained that she never taught that in class. He was actually right, but in his desperation to prove it, he showed her his notes, pointing with his other hand, saying “See? I got everything here, but what you’re asking me for. You never taught that!”
Collective facepalm moment.
@Tasha: Yeah, Diablo 2 ruled. I stopped playing it when clearing my way through a sizeable piece of the game started requiring 8+ hours of non-stop gaming (thanks to only being able to save progress via waypoints). Guy’s got a life too lol. But it’s one of those few games I openly and thoroughly went fanboy all over… I must’ve worn down 2-3 mice with the Diablo series alone heheh.
I’ll have to wait for the right moment to catch Kurast’s attention, clearly he doesn’t read other peoples’ posts. Gonna be tricky but I’m nothing if not persistent.
I remember we used to have a system for high school for multiple choice tests. A tap at the front of the desk was A, to the right was B, etc. I’m almost certain that the teachers knew about it but didn’t care enough to do anything about it.
Brings back memories- i helped half my class cheat their way through pre-cal and chemistry. THey’d borrow my calculator and put the question they wanted answered in memory, i would do the problem and pass the calc back. In Sociology, one girl would just put her very long hair to one sie and copy m test every week, missing a few so she wouldn’t look like a genius. The guy sitting behind me complained he couldn’t see over my shoulder if i hunched over too much, and once when i sat up quickly i banged his forehead- he’s gotten out of his seat to see what i was writing!. That got the teacher’s attention! Ah, high school.
I had finals last week. I forgot to take off my hat, but my professor didn’t say anything.
When I was teaching math 101 in grad school, I would give two different tests to the same class, making sure they alternated. 🙂
You can see his mouth over the pages.
Biff doesn’t have ears..?
…I wish i’d thought of that back when I was in school…
we had a math teacher that let us grade our own papers or simply had us trade with the person next to us. that was the only math class i ever took that i passed with flying colors. half of the class would be erasing the wrong answer as she wrote the right one on the board. or we would be making deals with the person next to us “Get me at least a 70% and i’ll get you the Essay question in tomorrows english class…”
I never cheated, never really had the need to. What’s seems sad to me is how obviously dependent on cheating my college classmates are. These people get excited if they get a 70%… Honestly if you can’t get at least a 80% with next to no effort, in a class where 9/10s of the material is just review from High School, then you have no business being in college in at all.