How to Cheat on Homework

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Last Updated: January 4, 2024

Sometimes it's just easier to not do the work. According to a recent study, 42% of freshmen at Harvard admitted to cheating on homework assignments, putting you in good company if you often feel like you've got better things to do than another worksheet.^{[1]
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Research source} Instead of going about it foolishly and copying off your friend right before class starts, get smart about your cheating. You can learn the best ways to finish off your math homework, your reading, and even cut some serious corners on your essays.

Method 1

Method 1 of 3:

Cheating on Math or Short-Answer Homework

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1
Copy the answers from a friend. The easiest and quickest way to cheat? Copy the answers from a friend who knows how to do the work. Whether you're working on a worksheet with short answers, multiple choice answers, or working the same math problems, the best way to get the correct answers is to find someone who did them right and get the answers safely.
- First, you've got to make friends with the smartest kids in class, who always do the work correctly. It helps if you can share in the workload sometimes, alternating who does the homework and who copies, night to night. Don't be totally useless.
- The best times to copy homework are on the bus on the way home, or on the way to school. It's usually better to do it on the way home, so you can still try to actually do the homework if you need to. Never copy homework in class before class starts. Never talk about copying the answers in public, to your parents, or to other students. Keep it quiet.
- If you use this method, paraphrase. It does cause a little suspicion when two students have the exact same answer.
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Work on the assignment with a group. Doing an assignment in a big group in which everyone contributes is a good way to make sure that everyone gets the right answers and the assignment gets done quickly. Do it in the safety of someone's home, or on the bus after school to stay safe. Never try to do this in class.
- To make the homework go faster, split up all the answers among the group. Have one person do the first five, another do the next five, and so on. You should be able to finish before the bus ride is over. Try to keep the group as small as possible.
- Don't make the group too big. If everyone names the first president of the United States as "George Washington Carver" on the homework, your teacher might be suspicious that something strange was happening. After you copy it, go back over it once by yourself to fix any obvious mistakes and make little changes to make it your own.
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Change the wording of your answers. Whenever you copy answers from someone, whatever the assignment, change the wording of some of the answers, or change some of your answers slightly to avoid suspicion. You never want your answers to be completely identical to your best friend's.
- Even just fixing the order of words in short answers can throw a teacher off the scent, if the answer is correct. Change "John Glenn was the first American in space" to "The first American in space was John Glenn."
- To stay extra covert, try to copy off of someone that your teacher doesn't think you're friends with. The teacher may be more likely to look more closely at the homework for signs of cheating if you're neighbors with someone, or if you're sitting next to someone.
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Google the answers. Sometimes if a certain homework assignment has been used for enough semesters for a while, the solution may be floating around on the internet
- If you find your answers off the internet, make sure to paraphrase it so your teachers don't find out. Teachers are smart these days, so if you copy it directly, they could definitely find out.
If you're not a great student, it can seem kind of conspicuous if suddenly you turn in homework with all correct answers. If you're going to cheat, be smart about it, and get a few of them wrong. This will lower the suspicions of your teacher, making it more likely that you'll get away with it. Pick enough that you'll still get a good grade, but let some be wrong. If you've got a B+ without doing any real work, it's worth it.
If your teacher catches you copying answers from a friend, you'll likely both fail the homework, might even fail the class, and might face stronger punishments. Is skipping a couple math problems worth a possible suspension? And think about your friend who did the homework correctly, was a good student, and will face the same punishment as you. Bad news. It's probably better to just do the work, and it'll take just as long as figuring out where to get the answers, finding the answers, copying the answers, and obscuring your answers.
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Think about getting tutoring help instead. Many schools offer after-school homework help that will make the homework easier, by providing someone to help you figure it out, but without the possibility of getting into trouble over it. If you've been in trouble for cheating in the past, this can also be a great way of showing your teachers that you're turning over a new leaf.
- Online tutoring even exists in some places. Some college students will sometimes answer homework questions or offer assistance online, sometimes for a price.^{[2]
  X
  Research source} If you can send copies of the questions, you might at least get some help figuring out the answer for yourself.

Method 2

Method 2 of 3:

Reading Fast

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1
Skip everything but the first and last sentence of each paragraph. If you've got to read the textbook or a novel really fast for class, you need to be smart about it and get through it as much as possible. One of the fastest ways to get a sense of the major concepts and the scope of the book without really reading it is to read the first and last sentence of each paragraph. You'll miss a lot, yes, but you'll at least have flown over the mountains and seen them from above.
- Skip everything but the vocab words in a textbook. The skipping-around method tends to work better with textbooks, in which the actual explanations aren't that important, but the names and the vocab words are. You can read the textbook very fast this way, and not miss much information.
- Alternatively, depending on the kind of class, it might be better to read the first and last chapter of a novel, or focus all your attention on a single small part of the book and bring it up in class, to look as if you've read the whole thing and are prepared for discussion.
Instead of struggling through reading a whole chapter in the textbook, skip to the end. Most chapters usually have short summaries of the chapter at the end, so you can know exactly what it is you should have learned by reading the chapter, without actually having to read the chapter. You will also usually get a list of the vocabulary words, some sample test questions, and other good information. It's not even really cheating, just smart reading.
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Read the Cliff’s Notes of a novel or story instead. The classic friend of the lazy reader: Cliff's Notes, Spark Notes, or other shortened summaries of long classics, available at most bookstores and libraries. Even if you do plan on reading the book, these are excellent study guides, giving you great questions to ask and symbols to notice in complicated books. These will help to point you in the right direction.
- It's also easy to find a long plot synopsis online, so you can at least get a good list of the characters and the style of the novel.
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Break up the reading with friends. Forgot to read Great Gatsby over the summer and have to catch up on the last day before school starts? You're probably not alone. Get together with a group and break up the reading into sections, so you can all compare notes. Stagger the reading, so one person will read the first 50 pages, then the next person will take over and summarize the rest of the book. Who knows, if you get invested in it enough, you might just want to read it anyway.
- Ask your friends to summarize their 50 assigned pages (or however many it works out to be) and take good notes on the section, then copy out the notes for everyone in the group. After that, each person's work will be done. It's like reading a whole book by only reading 1/3 or a 1/2.
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Watch the movie. Check to see if a good movie has been made based on the book that you're reading for class. If there is one, check it out, pop some popcorn, and watch a flick instead of reading the book. Take good notes, just as you would if you were doing homework, but it'll only take you an hour-and-a-half to "read" the whole thing.
- It's still a good idea to do some research and figure out whether or not the movie is accurate. Lots of movies take serious liberties with the plot lines of books, and you'll likely miss the names of characters and other minor plot points that might get cut out of the movie but be important for the book.
- Good movies based on books commonly assigned for school include: Grapes of Wrath, Romeo & Juliet, Lord of the Flies,'Pride & Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Of Mice and Men, and To Kill a Mockingbird.
- Bad movies to watch instead of reading the book include The Iliad ('don't watch 'Troy, starring Brad Pitt), Fahrenheit 451, Catcher in the Rye, Beowulf, Romeo & Juliet, and The Great Gatsby. These are good ways to prove you haven't read the book.
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Find at least one thing to say in class. If you're struggling with having half-read an assignment and are worried about being exposed, try this time-worn trick: scan through the book quickly, just before class, and focus on one extremely small thing from the reading. It should be preferably deep in the reading, many pages beyond what you've actually read. Early in the class discussion, raise your hand and ask a question, pointing specifically to the page. Everyone will think you've read it, and then you can chill out and stop participating.
- It's also a good idea to look for possible talking-points online before you even do the reading, so you can know what to look for and have a good idea of something to say in class. Participation points with no actual work.

Method 3

Method 3 of 3:

Cheating on Essays

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1
Make friends with an older student or sibling with old essays. Papers and essays are like the Mount Everest for cheaters. Climbing it is difficult, dangerous, and tempting. If you want to get away with cheating on an essay, the best way to cut corners is to find an older sibling or older neighbor who hung on to their copies of the same assignment from years past.
- Many older teachers will assign the same papers year after year, and won't keep copies of them, making it very difficult for them to remember one students paper after a year or two. Never do this if your teacher collects essays online, or saves digital copies. This makes it very easy to do a quick file search and find copied passages.
- Buying essays online is basically a scam for chumps, so don't get schemed out of your hard-earned lunch money by some enterprising con artist. If you don't know the person you're getting the essay from, write it yourself. In general, paying to cheat is a bad idea, friend, sibling, or otherwise.
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”Translate” the sentences into your own words. When you get a copy of the old essay, you do have to do at least a little bit of work to change things up and make it your own. The best way to do this is to retype the essay, changing each sentence as you go. You can retain the good ideas and the order of most things, and also change up the exact wording to make it slightly different.
- Make sure the response to the topic is still up-to-date and not incriminating. If you see opportunities to expand and make more current references, do it to bring everything together.
- Never copy-paste from online and turn it in without revising. If you do, go over the font and the size to make sure everything is uniform.
- Copying passages or whole chunks of text from online is always easy to find quickly. If you try this, you risk lots of trouble.
After going through the essay, read it alone to make sure that you're really understand what it's saying and that everything makes sense. If you turn in a paper and you're unfamiliar with the topic, it might become obvious if your teacher wants to talk to you about it or ask you specific questions about what you meant. Don't get caught by being careless.
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Make sure to follow the instructions of the assignment. If you try to get fancy and patch together an essay from multiple sources, it might seem great to have a bunch of expert level discussions about gun control, but you still might end up with a terrible grade if you haven't provided a possible solution, like the assignment required.
- Read the assignment sheet closely as you go over the copied essay, making sure that it does everything that it needs to for you to get a good grade. If it doesn't, you need to add that in. Hey, at least you didn't have to start from scratch.
Stealing material from someone is against the rules at every school, and can get you into serious trouble–we're talking automatic failure of most classes, most subjects, and possible expulsion from school. It's probably better to just write the thing.

Did You Know? In countries such as Bangladesh and Singapore, this is criminalized and carries severe penalties.

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Tips

Copy down friend's work the day its assigned because most people do it in class.

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If your homework questions are straight from a textbook, the internet will most likely have answers for them. If you are lucky, you can find a PDF of the teacher’s textbook, which has all the answers.

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Tips from our Readers

The advice in this section is based on the lived experiences of wikiHow readers like you. If you have a helpful tip you’d like to share on wikiHow, please submit it in the field below.

If your homework questions come straight from a textbook, you can often find the answers online or in a PDF version of the teacher's book. But just copying the textbook's answers word-for-word is dishonest. Use any answers you find as a guide, but explain things in your own words.
If an assignment's got you stumped, get help ASAP instead of waiting until the last minute. Talk to your teacher, go to tutoring, or study with friends who get the material. Being proactive will leave you truly prepared, not desperately seeking shortcuts.
With group projects, make sure everyone pulls their weight. Don't let some kids copy your work while they slack off. Set ground rules for dividing up the work and keeping each other accountable.
If you get busted copying someone's work, don't make excuses or blame others. Own up to your mistake, take the consequences, and learn from it. Your character matters more than one assignment.
Prioritize homework by due dates and percentage of each one's worth. It is better to fully complete a big project than rush through busy work just to check it off. Use your time wisely.
Break up long readings into 30-45 minute chunks. Take short breaks between sessions to stay focused and absorb more than just cramming it all in one mega study blast.

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Warnings

Be discreet. Don't suddenly start getting top marks, ensure you make a slow and steady transition or everyone will know you are cheating.

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Some teachers understand that there isn't much they can do to prevent students from copying solutions either from friends or off the internet. Instead, well-written exams will enforce the no copying solutions policy better than the teacher can. Homework will be worth only a small portion of the grade while exams will be the main grade determiner. If you have been copying homework solutions, you may be in trouble when it comes to the exams.

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Just because you aren't caught directly cheating doesn't mean that people don't know that you're cheating. News about who cheats gets around the school fast. Don't be surprised if people seem to not want to trust you anymore.

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