(June 4, 2004) — Cheaters have existed in the world since the dawn of time. They come in all shapes, sizes, races and ethnicities. From wily baseball players to Martha Stewart, all kinds of cheaters have been documented. What may be more significant than these figures are the sure-fire tricks of the trade, or so they seemed, that they applied to their profession. While baseball players had corked bats, sandpaper and the influence of steroids, Martha had her insider information and Enron had those executives who lied on their earning statements. Traveling down the social hierarchal ladder, we come to students in our school system. There is no doubt that students have their techniques as well. There was a time when cheating techniques were simple and mundane acts. Sometimes the act of cheating only required a quick peek to an unsuspecting, or sometimes suspecting, accomplice who sat an eyeshot away from where the cheater sat. Because of its simplicity, this method still exists. Other techniques, such as obtaining answers to the test a few days prior to the big day, are more complex due to the difficulties that might arise as one tries to smuggle in the solutions. This is where students can use their corpus callosum and let their creativity shine. Cheat sheets are sometimes created, some as small as a thumb print, so they can be easily stored in a mechanical pencil, a make shift pocket in Magic Rub eraser, under watch straps, in a pocket, taped to a body part or even just laid on top of the desk under the test paper. The lengths students may take when push comes to shove are staggering. According to one student, she took the time to tape the cheat sheet with clear scotch tape, as a homemade lamination device, and snuck in the answers to a test in her mouth, snugly placed under her tongue. Once the test and the teacher turned around, she simply slipped it out of her mouth. As technology has evolved, so has the seemingly sacred art of cheating. With teenagers getting their hands on technological items such as cell phones, PDAs, digital cameras and even high end calculators, cheating is becoming a technology revolution all its own. Cell phones are a handy tool if one had the extra time to actually text answers to one another. But if the person didn’t even take the time to study, extra time on tests may be out of the question. Cell phone cameras can be used to smuggle certain questions out of the classroom. PDAs have the functionality of sneaking in answers into the class. A student from Hoover High School explained to me one evening about her adventures using her PDA and how her teacher thought it was an innocent calculator. Oh how wrong that teacher was. Math teacher Charles DeVore told his classes about a student who took a digital camera into class and took pictures of his first semester final exam. Obviously this student was caught, but it also revealed that taking such leaps of fate has occurred at our humble little high school. A more common technological gadget Clarkies use is the seemingly omnipresent TI calculator. TI calculators are to Clark students what the shield and sword combination was to warriors of old. TIs range from the highly economical and the highly dependable, comparable to a Honda Civic, TI-83 Plus or Silver Edition, to a more expensive and more versatile Lexus version, the TI-86 to the Mercedes-Benz of calculators, the TI-89. Truth be told, all these calculators have the capacity to hold memory and of course can be used for evil deeds under the wrong influences. Also, plagiarism, the English teacher’s archenemy, still shows its ugly head. Hundreds of websites such as www.netessays.net, www.cyberessays.com and www.cheathouse.com, according to google search engine, offer “free essays, free term papers and researcher papers.” Of course copy-pasting information from online encyclopedias or some other source provide the easiest outlet for plagiarism. The knowledge of cheating isn’t only limited to students. Overpriced and over hyped teeny-bopper retail stores such as Urban Outfitters know the cheating epidemic has spread throughout campuses. They sell spoof novelty cheating products that mimic some of the aforementioned techniques. One of the products is a hollow pencil where a person can easily sneak in a cheat sheet. Of course, these are just gags and aren’t created for the die-hard cheaters of the world. No doubt that the powers that be, the College Board and school administration, are cracking down on such rascals. Teachers can log on to turnitin.com and combat plagiarism. Also, the College Board uses strict guidelines, such as giving their AP tests during a certain time frame to limit insider information from the East Coast and gag orders to test takers, to control the test-taking environment.