Whats the best way I can avoid the consequences of cheating?

You might be able to fool the teacher, and even get away with it. You can fool yourself that you escaped the consequences, but you still haven’t learned the material correctly and that is the real consequence.

The only real way to escape the consequences in class and in the future is to learn the material. Ask for help if you need it.

Don’t cheat.

Is there a way you can learn how the special calculator solved the problem?

Learn the material today! Do a few examples so you can describe it with your eyes closed.
Who knows, this might just become your best subject.

@coffeenut i posted this in general for a reason, because im looking for ways to apprehend the situation, not patronising from evangelists. @others: thanks thats actually a pretty good way to save myself. if i learn how to do it over the weekend, i can show both the guy and the teacher if they ask me how i did it. i can say i simply didnt have time to write it out neatly so i just left the answer, and thats partially true since writing that up would be tedious and it was the last question

You cheated. Stop pretending otherwise.

@worriedguy Learn the material today! Do a few examples so you can describe it with your eyes closed.

And do it on the blackboard/whiteboard. Like a movie, they accuse you of cheating and you get up and show them! That’s the best way out.

@jaytkay technically i did cheat, but i have no reason to give myself a hard time since i had to learn how to use the calculator [that was much harder than it might sound], i paid a lot for it, lots of people cheat in worse ways [ie one person actually went to wolfram-alpha on his phone to try to do it,but got stuck when entering the ^ sign] and im more likely to enter numbers in a calculator in real life instead of expanding binomials. but yes i agree that i have to learn the problem now just in case :/
anyway the question was :(1+((1/(x^2+2))))^6
any of you folks know how to crack it?

@bigjay Yes, you cheated. No, you don’t have to give yourself a hard time.

I’m just giving you a cinematic way out. You wanted the best way. You can be Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting!

“As a note to the self righteous, its not really cheating by the way…”~~ Note to those in denial, using tools you are prohibited from using is cheating. You could try coming clean to the professor/teacher.

(1+((1/(x^2+2))))^6 expand the polynomial?

Start by substituting a simpler expression: let a = 1/(x^2+2)
That gives you (1+a)^(2×3) ... You know how to expand a polynomial in the form of (1+a)^2 i hope.

(1+2a+a^2) ^3 There’s a short cut to doing this but I don’t remember it, so do it by hand.

This will get messy…. and since you prob need to turn this in, i wont do the hard part for you. After you finish this problem, combine like terms, then substitute 1/(x^2+2) in for all the a’s, and again simplify.

@bigjay – So… if other people murder people, does that make murder okay? It’s not really murder if other people are doing it? Your logic is flawed.

I’m not perfect, either. I speed, I say I’m sick when I don’t want to go somewhere. But don’t kid yourself that you weren’t “really” cheating. “Man up”, accept that there are consequences for your actions. And learn the material.

You did cheat. You did break a rule.

My advice, if you want to try and get away with it is, know that problem backwards forwards and sideways by Monday. Be able to explain how you pull the information provided in the question into an equation, and show every step needed to get to the answer.

Dude, if you didn’t cheat, then why are you on here looking for someone smarter than you to figure out what the loophole is to get out of trouble?

Rule #1 to make your life easier: The Rule of Absolutes: If 1,000 people do a stupid thing, it’s still a stupid thing. If it walks likes a duck, quacks like a duck, the likelihood is, it’s not an elephant. If 1,000 people cheat and you cheat too, you still cheated.

The only salvation that you have is to work your ass off tonight and tomorrow to learn how to solve the problem, so you can work it if they ask you to work it. Which is probably what you should have been doing all along—studying, not cheating.

Why waste the effort of trying to do yet another wrong thing?

@llewis: i mentioned the word ‘cheating’ on the heading itself, in order to better explain the situation in our school, i added the last part. i already admitted it was cheating, and i also admit that im mnot above it and guilt is the last thing in my mind, right now its about survival and getting away with it. lol and its a bit ironic that youre calling my logicflawed when you think i should be ‘manning up’. in what rationale? so that i can personally help the others guys vindication and make myself the first person to be prosecuted for unlawful calculator usage? like i said, the calculator is banned in ‘official exams’, that is, exams conducted by the board. the school itself has never had anything concrete when it comes to calculator rules.

@barnaclebill: nah its not the same, this time round i know whats going to be coming, unlike an exam where you have to trudge through the entire syllabus as revision. i honestly dont think this has anything to do with morals, and its not stupid, doing what i did gave me a whole 10 extra percent, even if it means now i have to work a few hours in the weekend [hell i might even learn how to do it now]. frankly the calculator has been blissful and i dont regret using it the slightest. those questions i knew how to do, i did halfway, and let the calculator figure out the rest.i sheared minutes [thats ages in an exam] by letting the calculator do the crunching while i just laid out the baackbone on paper. the other kid may keep an eye on me now, but if i feel the situation to be under control, i will continue using my baby :3

Hmmm you got 10% on something that you don’t know…

Edit: never mind—not worth it.

I’m confused. Is the calculator allowed or not? No song and dance, what is the rules for the specific test you took?

learn it over the weekend so you can explain yourself if necessary on monday.

its funny on this thread people acting like goody goodies like they never cheated on a test. come on. high school….really?

my school follows the ib program [not ap] so there are two distinct sets of rules for everything.
1) uptight ib rules where everything has to be perfect – these are enforced at the end of the year when the ib exams take place as sometimes ib invigilators come over to see if everything is how they want it
2) the normal school rules.
many rules are defined for the ib that are not for the school – ie the calculator one
the thing is, this guy seems to have taken it personally, so im worried that if the cat comes out of the bag, this guy will make a scene and he might get the math teacher to reconsider and take back the marks, thereby instilling a calculator rule in school. right now its an ambiguous case.

@deni lmao thats an internet forum for ya XD ive come to accept this but i personally keep it real by not being to afraid to say that yup i cheated and its awesome!

@deni I cheated once on a test in jr. High, and was such a nervous wreck, I never did again. Never in high school, never in college. When I hear kids do it on a regular basis, I am shocked.

@bigjay if you didn’t break the rules you are fine. Your teacher is not going to give a shit about that kid being upset. I would still be sure to study the exam again, so you feel confident you can demonstrate your knowledge and how you arrived at your answer, even if it is using the calculator, since the calculator is allowed. Seems like trying to lie about the calculator would be a bad idea, since you did not show your work.

@JLeslie i guess i never did it on a regular basis…but classes where i knew i wouldn’t be continuing in the subject because i didnt like it or was terrible at it and didn’t want to totally blow my GPA because of the class, i would give myself a little extra help. but i guess if i were majoring in chemistry say, i wouldn’t cheat in chemistry because it would just catch up with you later.

@bigjay say you did cheat and somehow the teacher did find out, what would the consequences be?

@coffeenut well i could make my case and say that i didnt know that that particular model was on the list. he could either take off points where he thought i used the computer-algebra-system or if he was feeling particularly nasty he’d make me resit. but he didnt. i took a risk and i got the reward. now that i think about it, its unlikely hes gonna catch me. ive kinda figured out how to do the problem by now, so i have that base covered. and what can that guy say? he saw me with a great big ugly machine wherein i was suspiciously typing in strange numbers? ummm its a calculator, just like anyone else’s XD
@deni i completely agree. there’s a lot of stuff you do in school thats just useless in your future. i mean come now i dont think ill be finding the tangent of every curve i see XD in these cases, i personally think they’re asking you to cheat! its a test of mettle, of who is a risk taker, of who has the bigger balls. i mean say you have a ridiculous, stupidly hard question. theyre not expecting some 17 year old kiddies to redefine mathematical constants. they want to see how far you’ll go to win.

But if you get caught your screwed. I can’t see how it is worth the risk, especially in college, but even in high school I would imagine it goes on your transcript, or you fail that class? Not sure what the usual consequence is, and then you have really messed up your GPA. I guess I worry more about consequences.

I was watching Judge Judy today, and she said, “people don’t get caught every time they do something against the law, if they did, no one would be breaking the law.” I guess I am always in the frame of mind that I could get caught doing something wrong, or something might go wrong in general, not just with rules and laws, but that things go wrong in general.

@JLeslie yeah i cant say its easy i mean every second i worry that the overseer might be ib-rule compliant and catch me in on the act. from the outside all ti calcs look very similiar but anyone worth his salt will know its illicit nature.
@tigress3681 wow superb idea. with a substitution, it becomes like anyother binomial [[a+b]^n] and so it can be solved using pascals theorem to find the coefficients and using the form a^x*b^y to find each term.
this comes to a^6+6 a^5+15 a^4+20 a^3+15 a^2+6 a+1. i dont even have to expand (1+2a+a^2) ^3 thanks to the straightforwardness of the theorem.
thanks a lot for the idea

@bigjay – You said: P.S. As a note to the self righteous, its not really cheating by the way, since lots of people have done it before and admin doesn’t ever enforce calculator laws strictly, just that I have someone who’s making it a big deal, and people usually don’t get full points for just writing the answer [even I didn’t really expect that to be honest]

It sounded to me like you did something you knew was wrong and were trying to make it not-wrong. “Manning up” is a term for accepting responsibility for your own actions. I really don’t care if you go tell your instructor you were cheating or not (I sure don’t track down cops to tell them I was speeding), but making excuses (“lots of people have done it”), asking for help avoiding consequences (“getting away with it”) without acknowledging that the consequences are justified, just sounded – well, it didn’t sound good.

I think @BarnacleBill has the right of it. Do what you should have done in the first place – learn how to solve the problem. I’m glad @tigress3681 was able to help with that.

@llewis: so i should or shouldn’t do something based on how ‘good’ it sounds? im sorrry but i cant even begin to explain how invalid and bogus that argument is. i know there may be consequences, and i am ‘manning up’ by trying to deal with them by finding potential tactics to deal with whatever unfavorable outcome may come from this. by doing so, i am accepting full responsibility for my actions – i dont have to let the thing bite me in the ass and then pick up the pieces from there to ‘accept responsibility’. i dunno if life is a teen drama series to you, wherein whatever goes around comes around. but for me personally, i knew what i was doing, and i can sleep at night knowing that im a cheater so i dont see what the problem is. i mean dont get me wrong dude, i appreciate the fact that you care enough to give me life lessons, but i just dont need them.

No, not based on how “good” it sounds. I was avoiding saying you had various bad characteristics. I didn’t want to call you names. Couldn’t think of another way to say it.

This last post actually “sounds” a lot “better” than your previous ones.

I’m not a dude. (Not offended at the term, it’s just I’m a female. Make that “old lady”. How about “curmudgeonly old lady”?)

“Teen drama series”? Not even sure what that is. Like Twilight? Were you just looking for some way to insult me? Sorry.

It’s not a matter of what goes around comes around. It is just a matter of asking for help while complaining about a mess you got yourself into without acknowledging that you had done so. That’s what it sounded like you were doing, based on what you said previously. This last post sounds like you are more responsible than the previous ones indicated, even though it is a little disconcerting because of a lack of ethical consciousness…

Soapbox alert: I see so many young people (ie, under 40) today whining about not having this or that toy or outcome when they are not willing to work to get it. Our whole society is collapsing because people are not willing to work or to take responsibility, but they want the rewards for doing so. I miss the old days, when a person’s word meant something, when it was safe to let children play outside by themselves, when water was safe to drink and air was safe to breathe, etc etc etc. Soapbox End

So, you hit me in my Soapbox Bone, and I was trying to right the world one person at a time. Never mind. (I’m sure you won’t.)

@deni I actually think I never did cheat in high school or college. I can’t think of one instance where I did. Seriously. Kind of weird, since I know most people have at some point. It’s not even because I’m super ethical, I just think I never tried to figure out a good way to do it.