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- From: rmangaha@ucsd.edu (Agent Blue)
- Newsgroups: alt.2600
- Subject: My known Scantron hacks
- Date: Sat, 04 Nov 1995 23:33:23 -0700
- Organization: Unknown Soldiers
- Lines: 42
- Message-ID: <rmangaha-0411952333230001@rmangaha.extern.ucsd.edu>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: rmangaha.extern.ucsd.edu
- X-Newsreader: Value-Added NewsWatcher 2.0b27.1+
-
- Okay, there are so many of you high school and college kids that
- desperately want to beat this little buggers. I figure what better hack
- can there be than to hack your way through education?
- Now the following info is not something I've taken from some stinkin'
- text file. This is info that I have spent months gathering through
- experimentation with REAL scantron and an ACTUAL scantron machine. And I
- must say that scantron is one of the toughest things out there to hack.
- Well, now for the info you've been waiting for. Along the left side of
- most of these scantron forms, there are short black horizontal stripes.
- These tell the scanner where to scan (I think, it's just logical according
- to my experiments). Now, what you should do is make a pencil mark within
- the black stripe. I don't know how this works, but one out of every four
- times you do this, it skips over the question and leaves it unmarked
- therefore making you a genius in the class. IT DOESN'T ALWAYS WORK BUT
- IT'S THE MOST RELIABLE!
- Another way to hack through is by finding a shade of grey that is dark
- enough to make the teacher think you really filled it in, but light enough
- so that the scantron machine can't tell, therefore the machine skips over
- again. This works one out of ten times.
- Yet another thing to try is erasing the big black block. It is one of
- the strip before the #1 strip. When you can get this to work you get a
- 100%. If it doesn't you get 0% no matter if the answers are filled in
- correctly or not. So if you are a gambling person, go ahead.
- I've also found that cutting out the big block mentioned above works
- much more often than erasing it, but you leave evidence that is too
- visible. I do not recommend either of those above two.
- And still there is another hack. What you need to do for this one is
- make crosshatches in the bubbles. This is almost impossible to get
- working, but the pattterns I've found to work best are diagnals crossing
- and just horizontals.
- That is all the hacks that I know are possible. I would like to point
- out that CHAPSTICK DOES NOT WORK. There may have been a time that it did,
- but it doesn't now. Perhaps it would if you get a really thin coating
- that will actually reflect the light, maybe...but I have never gotten it
- to work.
- If anybody out there finds this useful, please send me an e-mail. I
- just want to get an idea of where my work has gone. I want something that
- I can see. That's all. Now go out and cheat yourself out of an
- education!
-
- --
- Uh...I still need to work on making a cool picture dammit!
-
-