During my Freshman year of college (2002), I was taking Econ 101. It was a class of probably 500 students, and our tests were multiple choice. By the time I got back to my dorm room, the answers to the test were always up on the course website (I'm not sure when they actually were posted).
After the first two tests, the professor must have noticed that something wasn't right. I finished the third test quickly, and was pretty confident that I had done extremely well. We used scantron sheets for our answers, so we got to take the paper with the questions home after the test. I had marked all of my answers on both sheets, so I loaded the course website and started checking my answers.
My heart sank as I went through the answers. Somehow I had managed to get every single question wrong. I figured that there must have been something wrong with the answers, and when I matched the answers (not the letters), I realized that I had actually gotten every question right.
The prof swapped the letters, so the kids whose friends were texting them the "answers" got screwed. It was pretty funny, even if it increased my blood pressure for a little bit.
For freshman year math courses, we wrote two versions of each test. They'd be nearly identical, but with a few of the numbers and variable names modified. We'd alternate passing them out so that people sitting next to each other had different tests. We'd also go around the room and write down who was sitting where. This made it really easy to catch the "look at your neighbor's paper" sort of cheating. (It's really hard to text answers to a calculus test, and taking a photo of your page would be really conspicuous.)
Other departments had their own anti-cheating methods. Kids coming straight out of high school, who were used to less sophisticated cheat-detection methods, tended to get burned pretty bad their first semester.
After the first two tests, the professor must have noticed that something wasn't right. I finished the third test quickly, and was pretty confident that I had done extremely well. We used scantron sheets for our answers, so we got to take the paper with the questions home after the test. I had marked all of my answers on both sheets, so I loaded the course website and started checking my answers.
My heart sank as I went through the answers. Somehow I had managed to get every single question wrong. I figured that there must have been something wrong with the answers, and when I matched the answers (not the letters), I realized that I had actually gotten every question right.
The prof swapped the letters, so the kids whose friends were texting them the "answers" got screwed. It was pretty funny, even if it increased my blood pressure for a little bit.