Photo by Brett C Vermilyea
Taking the Devil’s Road
A chance discovery reveals how a long-forgotten attempt at cheating bestowed one of life’s most crucial lessons.
By D.P.Rigg
As an employee of a private university in New Jersey, I’m often able to maintain at least a tentative grasp on portions of American youth culture. I’ve found that if you strip away their electronic gadgetry and pull up their pants, today’s young folk aren’t much different than us—minus about 35 years.
Not long ago, as I was entering one of the campus buildings, a young man brushed by in great hurry. Yelling “S’cuse me” over his shoulder, he dashed down the pathway, shedding bits of paper as he went. I thought of calling to him, but he was gone. “Hot date,” I remember thinking.
Later, while passing those dropped scraps of paper, their unusual appearance caught my eye. Getting out my glasses, I stooped down for a closer look. “Gyp notes,” I said with a broad grin, suddenly finding myself staring all the way back to 1967.
The greatest challenge to spuriously enhancing one’s exam performance, which many of my high-school contemporaries never quite understood, was in maintaining an innocence of body language. To be successful, cheating students needed to appear natural in posture, completely oblivious of the proctor, and focused entirely on the examination before them.
Displaying any undue interest in comrades, body parts, items of clothing, or especially prowling monitors could immediately mark one as suspicious and in need of closer scrutiny. More experienced practitioners would often wait for the less adept to begin attracting attention before launching their own operations. Indeed, survival of the fittest was never practiced more ruthlessly than on exam days at St. Augustine High School in Brooklyn.
Since none of the Ten Commandments expressly forbade the use of gyp notes (some called them crib notes or cheat sheets), our industrious masters, the Christian Brothers, figured they could cover all the bases of sin by equating our use of scamming tools with stealing — a sort of Seventh Commandment rider.
“When you cheat, you steal,” began the usual talk. “You steal not only from your classmates, but also from your teachers and your parents. More importantly, you steal from God, and from yourself.”
None of this really made sense to us. If you copied some of your buddy’s answers, he didn’t lose anything. Neither did the teacher. As for God and parents, well, we rarely saw bolts of lightning strike down guilty comrades, and parents couldn’t make you pay for exploits they knew nothing about. As for cheating yourself, that went lame way back in the fourth grade when we started to experience the heady and satisfying bliss of not getting caught. For us, the potential benefits seemed to grossly overshadow any possibility of punishment. Cheating, we therefore reasoned, was a victimless and rewarding crime.
The Brothers went all-out after cheaters. Unless you were caught doing something extremely bad like smoking reefer in the back staircase, you would never receive a more guilt-inspiring and damned-to-hell lecture than the cheating speech. It took some time for us to figure out that the intensity of the performance was part of the plan. With it, the Brothers hoped to intimidate most of us into abandoning any ideas of cheating, while unnerving the rest into making ill-timed mistakes and getting caught. The system could be chillingly effective.
But as sharp as our teachers were, they sometimes forgot that most of us came from local Catholic grammar schools where we literally cut our teeth on the use of moral threats and guilt as behavior-modification tools. By the time most Catholic school kids of the 1960s entered high school, we were as desensitized to the notion of “sin” as today’s children are to violence in the media.
In practice, few guys cheated off other students – unless, of course, they were conspiring partners. Most of us used self-manufactured aids of one kind or another. These ranged from the crude scrawl of answers written on hands and ankles to intricately prepared devices secreted about the body.
A very disinterested academic performer, I excelled as a gyp-note maker and user, often preparing custom-made notes for less-skilled classmates. Sometimes my efforts brought financial reward, but the true extent of my facility and creativity was in successfully employing these instruments right under the noses of distrustful teachers. Throughout my high-school career I manufactured scores of gyp notes in a wide variety of styles. I had never been caught, although I did feel the heat once when a frightened customer believed that fingering me would save him. It didn’t. A search of my bag and locker turned up no cheating materials, not even the correct color pen. I had learned to use materials supplied by my clients when doing consulting work.
I specialized in two types of notes: watch disks and tie sheets. Watch disks were paper circles cut just a bit smaller in diameter than the average wristwatch. The note artist would usually write data on both sides of the paper and seal the disk with clear plastic tape so the ink wouldn’t smear. The disk was hidden under the watch where it could be easily retrieved and replaced, especially if you subscribed to a fashion trend of the day by wearing your watch on the underside of your wrist. This method worked great for small to moderate amounts of data.
For larger information needs I’d use tie sheets. At all-male St. Augustine, the dress code required us to wear sport coats and neckties. This apparent disadvantage favored cheaters with a wide selection of places to hide exam aids. My tie sheets were larger, oval-shaped cousins of watch disks that attached to rubber bands and were pinned up inside my tie. Using this technique, I could easily pull the sheets down for viewing and, when released, they would snap back into the tie in a flash. It was effective and ingenious, I must admit.
My greatest cheating challenge ever came in my senior-year chemistry final. Brother David was a wise and experienced adversary. Quick of eye, he was adept at picking up subtle cheating movements and would stand untiringly at the front of the room during exams, scanning his young charges with the precision of Doppler radar. Swift and terrible justice befell those who tried to take “the Devil’s Road,” as he called it. Even my friend Eddie, a respected cheater with the grace and stealth of a Times Square Monte dealer, had been caught using his brilliant elastic armband device. Now, disgraced, battered, and labeled, he was forced to knuckle down and study.
I had been unsuccessful in employing any of my usual techniques in Brother David’s class, and was therefore carrying a failing grade. The inconceivable possibility of not graduating with my friends and having to attend summer school loomed before me like a putrid bowl of cafeteria pasta. My choices were few: I could crack open the books and actually study hard, pray for divine intervention, or develop a new and undetectable cheating device.
Choice number one would require me to admit defeat and was therefore unacceptable. Although the Good Lord didn’t chuck many lightning bolts at us, He rarely dealt out unearned rewards either, which ruled out choice number two. My path was clear: Brother David, prepare to meet thy match.
I had been searching several weeks for a new method before coming across The Pen. My dad had received a unique little ballpoint from one of his customers. Each depression of the button on this sleek beauty not only extended or retracted the writing point, but also presented an advertising pitch through a small window built into the barrel.
On dismantling the pen, I found that the window was actually a nifty little magnifying lens, which enlarged the printed advertising copy on an oversized ink cartridge. A gearing system at the top end rotated the cartridge one-quarter turn for each click, sequencing four different messages into position under the lens. I had found my new cheating system.
The technical challenges were formidable but hardly a barrier to one so determined as I, and I soon found a way to remove the original printing and wrap a super-thin piece of paper around the cartridge. I would need to print my data painfully small on the paper and then glue the note precisely to the cartridge. I had tried tape, but it proved too thick, causing the cartridge to jam inside the barrel.
My biggest problem was in selecting the information to be included in the very limited space. I had to devise what was essentially a code system to limit the number of characters, yet have enough readable data to provide answers.
The result was a masterpiece of cheat engineering. Each depression of the pen’s button brought a crisp turn of the cartridge and a plethora of chemistry formulas and jargon under the magnifying lens – all beautifully scribed and carefully arranged to provide the keys I would need to beat David’s exam questions.
Test day came and I was quietly confident. I shared my secret with no one – so important was this challenge and examination. Those in the cheating circle knew I had something up my sleeve (or perhaps in my pant cuff) but I maintained a strict silence.
I had been clicking my pen occasionally in class so the sound would not appear foreign; it seemed to blend in nicely with the usual ambient noises. As exam papers were distributed, the instrument of my salvation sat openly on my desk, nondescript from a distance, appearing as benign as any writing implement could be. Brother David was in top form at the start of the exam, his senses heightened and ready.
The first question was a breeze, as was number two. I smiled to myself as I went through my first pass answering the easy ones because there’s no sense in taking a risk for stuff you might actually know. I started my second pass, taking time now to look more closely at questions that had seemed initially difficult. Number eight wasn’t too bad. Number 14 became clear with a second glance, as did a few others. In part two, we needed to complete three of five multipart problems, and I began work on the three that seemed most familiar.
Time raced by as I went back to start pass three, the cheating pass. But wait. All of the questions had been answered – I was done! I finished the entire exam without looking at my cheat pen once. Not possible, I thought as I double-checked part one. But it looked good. So did part two – three problems tackled, and completed. This couldn’t be … David’s exams were always very tough.
Bewildered, I looked around and saw that everybody else was still working. My eyes turned up and were seized immediately by Brother David’s hard gaze, which had obviously been trained on my incredulous flurry of work for the last few minutes.
“Are you finished?” he mouthed silently.
I nodded.
He walked up and asked me if I had checked my answers. I mustered another stunned nod.
“All right,” he said, scooping up my papers. “Go to the study hall and prepare for your next exam.”
What had happened was simple: My preparation of the gyp note was so thorough and intricate that I wound up absorbing much of the material. In arranging the data, determining what was important, and writing it down meticulously, I went so far as to actually learn some chemistry.
A few weeks later we tossed caps and spilled into the early summer evening, imbued with the euphoria of graduation. Amid the flurry of back-slaps, handshakes, and well-wishes, I spotted Brother David standing alone, cross-armed and stiff, scanning the crowd. As I approached, his stare locked on, probably trying to ascertain my purpose. I walked up to him and smiled. In his usual cold manner he asked: “So you made it, huh?” I replied truthfully that I couldn’t have done it without him. Then I held out my class book and pen and requested his autograph. He looked at me a moment before he took my stuff and then took my stuff and started writing.
“You almost aced the final,” he said, handing back my book. “Let me ask you, now that it’s all history, did you have any special help?”
“Brother,” I answered, “hard work alone got me through that exam. And you can keep that pen, I don’t think I’ll be needing it.”
