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This Student's Witty Exam Hack Will Help You Ace Every Test You Take This Year

by Brenda Santana
Have a nice day Photo/Shutterstok

One of the most annoying parts of going to school was the reality that every few weeks or so, your teacher or professor would force you and your classmates to test how well you retained the knowledge you picked up. Every once in a while, you find an amazing, life-saving professor that allows you to use notes while taking your test. A professor from Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland allows his accounting students to take the first test on the syllabus with a note card, and one of his students has a viral notecard exam hack you wish you would have thought of.

Reb Beatty is the professor in question, and he told BuzzFeed that every semester, he allows his Financial Accounting students to take the first test of the semester, with the help of a three-by-five inch notecard. All the information they can fit on that notecard is fair game, and Beatty allows students to use a notecard because this exam tests the most important information accounting students will need while taking future courses.

Recently, one of Beatty's students hacked his exam rule and has naturally gone viral doing so. Elijah Bowen is the genius student who saw that his professor allowed the use of three-by-five notecards on the syllabus and showed up to take his first exam using a three-by-five foot poster board. See the hilarious photo below:

Beatty wrote,

First test day of the semester and as always, I allow a 3x5 notecard. Today, a student shows up with this. Sure enough, it is 3x5... feet. As precise as I am, apparently I never specified inches and therefore yes, it was allowed. Well played and lesson learned for me.

I honestly wish I would have been as clever as Bowen back in my day.

Beatty tells BuzzFeed that when he originally saw Bowen arrive with his huge poster board, he thought Bowen was just trying to do some last minute cramming before the exam. Then, Beatty realized that the board was actually three-by-five, and since he never specified inches or feet on the syllabus, it was only right to allow Bowen to use his huge notecard during the exam.

Beatty says that in all of his years teaching this class and distributing similar syllabi to former students, no one had ever mistaken three-by-five inches for feet. And because Beatty was smart enough to recognize the loophole and bold enough to bring the huge poster board into class, he would allow him to use it this time.

Very well played, but this is not the first time a student hacked an exam. Early this summer, we reported a story about another student who hid the answers of his exam on the back of his recently manicured acrylic nails. How did he do it? Simply by cutting tiny pieces of paper that fit into his nail. See the photo of the genius hack below:

OK, these kids are genius! The level of patience one must have to accurately jot down answers and cut out tiny pieces of paper and glue said pieces of paper meticulously to the back of a nail must be really high. Of course, we must acknowledge that this is a form of cheating, and though cheating is absolutely wrong, if you are going to do it, you might as well do it with a beautiful and informative manicure.

If I had to go back to school, I could only do it using these exam hacks.

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