There’s an old saying - if you ain’t cheatin', you ain’t tryin.'

As technology now allows students to learn from professors continents away, it also allows students to take tests from the comfort of home and other locations. And it can also facilitate something as old as education itself - cheating. Hoover-based ProctorU has seen the lengths that people will go to in hopes of gaming the system.

The stories range from the unshaven guy who wore a wig in hopes of posing as a woman to take a test, to enlisting the dog as an accomplice.

The company, with offices in California and the Philippines, oversaw 1.45 million exams in 2018. ProctorU uses human proctors, along with a proprietary software that employs artificial intelligence to recognize behavior that might indicate cheating. Of those exams last year, 7,632 had confirmed and documented breaches, the company says.

See also: Alabama company charting out the science of cheating

Proctors sign on with a test taker. After the person’s identity is verified, the proctor, using a computer webcam, looks at where the test is being taken. Once the test begins, the proctor is watching, as is the program. And both have seen their share of would-be cheaters.

Steve Morgan, vice president of operations, remembers when people used to simply station Post-It notes within a glance. Others would have string tied to cards they might pull down for a cheat sheet.

One time a proctor, suspecting something, asked for a look beneath the desk of one test taker. There was a sharp, sudden bump - and the person stationed beneath the desk, who would have passed along answers, suddenly had to skedaddle.

As the years have progressed, the cheating has gotten gradually more sophisticated. Some test takers have used drones to get a look at the test that could then be broadcast back to would-be cheaters. Another employed a network of mirrors to capture the screen. Still another had a camera positioned through a hole in the wall.

A more tech saavy plan involved attaching an extension cable to a monitor in another room where an accomplice could see the test and look up answers to transmit. The company uses IP tracking to recognize if a certain location is reoccurring for any other reason than convenience.

Not all the methods are hi-tech. Co-founder and Chief Technical Officer Matthew Jaeh remembers one cheater who enlisted their dog. When the canine wandered in for a pat or a rub from its owner during a test, the owner would lean down … and grab sticky notes attached to the dog’s coat. Another cheater attached notes and prompts to a pen. One reason for the identity verification is one of the oldest methods – sending someone else to take the test, with or without wig.

But just because you’ve found a way around the test doesn’t mean you’re smart. Ashley Norris, the company’s chief academic officer, recalled a case where a student had finished taking a test but was unaware the proctor still had access to his screen. While the test was being submitted, the student then began a side chat with another student – about how he had just cheated. This caught more than one cheater.

Several ProctorU employees echoed the words of company’s Vice President Debra Fowler-Sandford:

“The effort that people put into it is just insane,” she said. “The lengths and the amount of time that people will go to in cheating instead of just studying and preparing to take the exam….if you’d spent all that time studying, you’d be fine.”

Another recurring phrase on many employee lips is “cat and mouse game.” Seeing how creative cheaters can be, ProctorU has to stay ahead of them. Jaeh said there are various ways, like scouring the Internet, and sites like Reddit or social forms, to find people who talk about cheating. They also regularly run statistical analyses on exams.

Say a certain volume of students finished an exam in 90 minutes, but a core group was able to get through it in half that time. They can then dip back into the library of exams and look for any anomalies. Finding out those tricks also leads to finding ways to avoid cheaters succeeding in the future.

“How we stay ahead,” Fowler-Sandford said, “is by making sure we’re not looking for one specific incident. How do we continually make the solution more secure. If I chase a specific behavior, I’m going to miss others. How do we create an environment that catches more than one. AI helps with that.”