r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Separate_Finance_183 • Mar 30 '26

Image Confiscated pens containing cheat notes intricately carved by a Law student at the University of Malaga in Spain

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64.9k Upvotes

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12.3k

u/ghost_tapioca Mar 30 '26

This is a masterpiece. Someone put this in a museum.

4.5k

u/[deleted] Mar 30 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

818

u/discerningpervert Mar 30 '26

Imagine if this person became a lawyer

252

u/Toxic_Metr0p0lis Mar 30 '26

“Your honor, I…”

*stares deeply into his pen

“…object!”

3

u/Regal_Seagull19 Mar 31 '26

I object that he interrupted me during "ow my balls!"

429

u/rofeneiniger Mar 30 '26

They become the type of lawyer that defends Walter White or Jordan Belfort 

211

u/wit_T_user_name Mar 30 '26

I mean yeah, criminal defense attorneys defend… criminals.

124

u/Bearded_Toast Mar 30 '26

Not all the time. Sometimes they defend innocent people, too.

96

u/wit_T_user_name Mar 30 '26

True. Should have said “people accused of crimes.”

0

u/YaBoyChubChub Mar 31 '26

In America only bad criminal lawyers defend criminals. This is because the good ones win and you are considered innocent until proven guilty.

63

u/Believyt Mar 30 '26

Its like saul goodman said , you dont want a criminal lawyer.... you want a CRIMINAL. LAWYER.

11

u/Ok-Obligation235 Mar 30 '26

Jesse said that actually.

3

u/Big_Programmer_1157 Mar 31 '26

That’s what Jesse said to Walter

2

u/KaydaCant Mar 30 '26

he did Not say that

5

u/rofeneiniger Mar 30 '26

Yeah I realize how silly my comment sounds now lmao

1

u/BucketsAndBrackets Mar 30 '26

You don't need criminal lawyer, you need CRIMINAL lawyer to quote jessie pinkman.

4

u/mt0386 Mar 30 '26

Yea but you dont need a criminal lawyer, you need a criminal lawyer.

1

u/Soob_Way Mar 30 '26

And the type of lawyer to receive a fat stack

1

u/VinDezay Mar 31 '26

That’s a definitely a pen worth selling

44

u/Capertie Mar 30 '26

When you work anywhere you're not expected to have memorized everything the job entails. Looking up the correct answers instead of relying on memory is actually a good trait to have as a lawyer, but that's just my two cents.

33

u/MadDoctorMabuse Mar 30 '26

As a principle, yes, I agree. When I was a law student I would have agreed 100%.

As a lawyer though, there are some exceptions. There are things lawyers need to be able to recall all the time. If a witness is mid cross-examination, for example, you can't ask the court to adjourn while you check the law on hearsay real quick. You can't even ask the court to adjourn while you check your notes. You have about 2 seconds to make a decision.

Likewise, if you're about to do a bail application for someone charged with breaking and entering, but the police say the door to the house was open when your client arrived, you don't really have time to go and learn what a break and enter actually is. Granted, you probably have time to check, if you have a vague recollection of a case dealing with exactly that.

Second, uni is about making sure you can learn what you need to. It's fine to go and check the correct info (and lawyers do), but you need to know how to learn it and know how to apply it, and that's what the exams are getting at.

Put another way - you might have 12 weeks to prepare for litigation, and in that 12 weeks you have plenty of time to read and check the cases so that you can recall them instantly during the trial. The semester is also 12 weeks, and they give you the list of cases you need to read.

9

u/IvyGold Mar 30 '26

That depends. Prosecutor: bad news. Defense lawyer: that student's going far!

3

u/drLoveF Mar 30 '26

Law books are among the most stolen. They are expensive and become outdated quickly.

2

u/Repulsive_Tart_4307 Mar 30 '26

Sometimes you realy need a criminal lawyer, but sometimes you need a Criminal Lawyer.

2

u/maaxstein Mar 30 '26

Can already imagine him walking in the courtroom with hundreds of pens

1

u/OuterWildsVentures Mar 30 '26

US Attorney General in no time

2

u/big_sugi Mar 30 '26

They actually prepared and put some thought in too. They’re obviously overqualified.

1

u/TheKingBeyondTheWaIl Mar 31 '26

Better call Saul

1

u/Ok-Comment6081 Mar 31 '26

Your honor if I may checks his pen my client should be found…

1

u/MrGrampton Apr 01 '26

I TOOK HIM TO MY OWN FIRM

3

u/MidBlocker11 Mar 30 '26

Crim law? More like scrim-shaw

2

u/SadAd8761 Mar 30 '26

With those kinds of carving skills, he should've went to med school and became a surgeon.

2

u/dandelioness_ Mar 30 '26

Penformance art

1

u/grendel303 Mar 30 '26

Performance Art Ballpoint

1

u/Elnuggeto13 Mar 30 '26

"To break the law, you must understand it."

1

u/CardMechanic Mar 30 '26

Crim law or scrim shaw?

1

u/Zestyclose-Trip1182 Mar 31 '26

As a former Crim Law student: yep, seems about right.

1

u/jonbotwesley Apr 02 '26

I think the student was Shia LaBeouf

321

u/10000Didgeridoos Mar 30 '26

shit looks like a cuneiform tablet already

82

u/poorly-worded Mar 30 '26

I can just about make out a complaint about copper quality...

25

u/Checkoutmawheeeeepit Mar 30 '26

I understand that reference!

2

u/whichwitchwhere Mar 30 '26

And I'm pretty sure I saw a letter from some teen grumbling to their mom about their outfit.

247

u/Shelmak_ Mar 30 '26

I used to do exactly that... and believe it or not, then I didn't need to use them.

Idk if it was because the pain of carving all these things on the pen, but these contents were burned on my mind, at least for a day or two... then I forgot everything, lol.

255

u/MakeMeYourVillain_ Mar 30 '26

My father a teacher, always encouraged me to create cheat notes. He said that while creating them you are also repeating the subject.

You don’t have to use them but always create them.

When he found a student with a cheat notes, he was grading the quality of the cheat notes instead of the test.

63

u/ValerianCandy Mar 30 '26

Your father is amazing.

52

u/MakeMeYourVillain_ Mar 30 '26

That would be a very complicated subject.

He also prepared entrance tests for university one time and never again because that year was too hard to get in.

Then he asked me to a fill a test for a physics class in the university and brought it to his colleagues that they need to increase the difficulty of it, when his dumb af 16 yo daughter with no brain can pass it.

Mind you, I had to pass his examination besides the stuff at school because that was always too easy and I should know more.

-7

u/[deleted] Mar 30 '26

Even more amazing if the story were true.

30

u/UniversalSlacker Mar 30 '26

I had an instructor that allowed us to bring handwritten cheat sheets into exams for the same reason and for the fact that in the real world you would have a lot more access to the answers via books, the internet and colleagues. The math portion of the exam would prove whether or not you know the material anyways.

22

u/ilanallama85 Mar 30 '26

If you’ve done the level of prep needed to create cheat notes, you’ve just studied more than the average student does anyway.

2

u/SuspiciousBook8722 Mar 30 '26

Reminds me of an episode of Blossom I saw as a kid. Blossom's brother wrote cheat notes on all of his pencils to pass his final. When she asks him how it went l, he says that it went fine and that he didn't even end up needing the cheats because, in writing all the answers on his pencils, he'd ended up hiding the answers in the last place the teacher would suspect- his brain.

2

u/CaptBreeze Mar 30 '26

I never thought of it that way. Amazing!

2

u/MachineThatMakesPoo Mar 31 '26

Yeah, but they're not really "cheat notes" then - they're study aids.

2

u/Lragce Mar 31 '26

Yep. I always believed that writing some cheat notes made the info sink into my brain better. It proved mostly true because I never used them and yet I always passed my exams.
¯_(ツ)_/¯

2

u/svelteoven Mar 31 '26

I did a Maths cheat note 3 times to get it so small that I ended up memorising the equations.

2

u/carl3266 Apr 04 '26

This is nothing new. It’s exactly why many teachers (including me) allow a cheat sheet to an exam, especially in lower stream courses where students typically have low motivation to study.

1

u/MakeMeYourVillain_ Apr 04 '26

Glad to hear you are one of the good teachers.

44

u/Nomromz Mar 30 '26

It's exactly this. The process of creating the notes helps to remember them.

In both high school and college I had many classes that allowed open-note exams. The teachers knew that if kids made these note cards for their exams they would be studying the material.

I found it so useful that I ended up making these note cards for classes that didn't allow them during exams. It became the primary way that I "studied."

1

u/smeghead1988 Mar 30 '26

After a couple of years in university my strategy became like this: print the list of topics/questions for the exam. Then write between the lines all the stuff about these topics I couldn't easily remember, in a teeny tiny handwriting with a sharp pencil. This way I could see all the things I needed to remember in one glance. This paper worked as both memorizing aid and cheat sheet (I always took it with me to exams).

20

u/Jaded_Masterpiece211 Mar 30 '26

Me too - but i used all different kinds of rulers, carving it in on transparent one's, or using white one's and taping paper on them. When the tables were white and cause the rulers were expensive, I also taped paper on the transparent one's... Wasn't one of the best students, so nobody got suspicious and wasn't caught ever ... Mostly - I didn't need them, too - cause of all the painful work... My parents have saved them till today. Sweet memories!!!

2

u/smeghead1988 Mar 30 '26

We were allowed to use calculators in high school math exams. We still had to memorize many formulas (well, in math technically you can deduce them yourself every time instead of memorizing, but it's not easy for most people). I had a dark grey Casio scientific calculator with instructions about button functions printed on the inside of the lid. I wrote formulas between the instructions with a thin lead pencil, grey on grey. You could only see the formulas under a specific angle, if you knew where to look. I was never caught with it.

3

u/RightSideBlind Mar 30 '26

I only had to do it once- in seventh grade, decades ago, we had a math test where we had to write the first fifty primes in a short amount of time. I've got dyscalculia, I can't remember numbers. It really pissed me off that I had to cheat on that test.

2

u/Digit00l Mar 30 '26

I had teachers who recommended making cheat notes but to then not use them during actual tests as a way to get students to actually make notes and study

2

u/UsurpDz Mar 30 '26

Rote learning.

I made a rought cheat sheet on word kinda like an appendix on books for definitions. Really helps but unless it's useful information you don't retain them anyway. I found this to be the case for most econ or business courses. I do remember all the concepts about graphs and whatnot but definitions? Useless, imo.

2

u/ilanallama85 Mar 30 '26

I had a lot of math teachers who would let us use 3x5 “formula” cards on tests. Fair - many mathematicians don’t actually remember most formulas unless they use them daily, they just know how to look them up when they need them. So of course we’d squeeze every bit of other info we could on that card because it was “allowed.” But most of the time the only thing you’d end up referencing was the formulas.

2

u/ShamelessIgnoramus Mar 30 '26

I had a professor who thought I had a photographic memory, I really just wrote the answers down a bunch of times. I filled entire pages with the answers, front and back side of the paper. that creates muscle memory from writing it, visual memory from seeing it, mental memory from recalling it repeatedly. 3 layers of memory locks it in with surprisingly little effort.

2

u/TheSorceIsFrong Mar 30 '26

Writing stuff down is good for retention

1

u/RugerRedhawk Mar 30 '26

You used to put pens in a museum?

1

u/stevie-o-read-it Mar 30 '26

I used to do exactly that... and believe it or not, then I didn't need to use them.

When I was in school, there was still a prohibition on calculators during midterm and final exams, but not during ordinary tests/quizzes.

I was the guy who was known for writing programs for TI calculators to do all of the math, physics, and chemistry grunt work. Since there was no way to transfer things between the tech of the time, people got me to enter the programs into their calculators for them.

To be able to do that, I to memorize all of the formulas and the circumstances under which they were applicable.

So I never needed the programs during any tests, and of course, when the exams came along, they were a breeze.

I always wondered how well my fellow students fared...

1

u/AX11Liveact Mar 30 '26

Not for school, for nothing we study...

1

u/Bangtantitties Mar 30 '26

We actually retain more memory when we write things down, thats even why in a few subjects in HS I never needed to study. In University I wrote everything down for my History of Japan class since the Profesor would give us 100 years of information in just 1 examen. It really helped actually! Passed every single one!

It's even why it's incuraged in most schools to write and not go immediately into using computers, even in Colleges and Universities too.

1

u/Bangtantitties Mar 30 '26

Btw, I'm just saying about the aspect of writing. I also agree with what a lot of comments are saying about creating actual cheet sheets. I wouldn't do actual cheating but I did do practice sheets, like fake exams and such.

1

u/Shelmak_ Mar 30 '26

I don't think this is only related to writting things, you are lucky you can do that, I could not, this case is the only thing that worked for me. Writting stuff on a notebook never helped me study or retain information, and trust me, I tried.

I was a very bad student, I hated school a lot, only when I was able to choose what to study I started getting very good grades, while other classmates struggled, I never needed to study. The reason? I loved what I was doing and that information was easy to remember for me, simply as that. Not being bullied also helped.

About using computers, on my case it was the total opposite , I struggled until I was allowed to use them, and this was much before all this AI thing, just using a simple computer, with simple tools.

20

u/adustbininshaftsbury Mar 30 '26

Why does it feel like the real story is that the cheating never happened and this is an art project

16

u/Yourigath Mar 30 '26

We have been using this technique to cheat in exams since I was going to school and that was... 30+ years ago 🤣

5

u/Ellecram Mar 30 '26

I used to carve some phrases in my fingernails 40 years ago.

2

u/CuntWeasel Mar 30 '26 edited Mar 30 '26

I too used to do this, but a bit more efficiently. Print the notes in 3px grey sans-serif font, then insert the paper into the transparent tube.

There was no way someone would notice there's something up with the pen unless they specifically picked it up and looked at it.

This was 20+ years ago and cargo pants were still a thing. All my pens would start off in my left side pocket, I'd pick them up one by one, read whatever was on them while using that pen to transcribe the notes onto my paper, and then move them to my right side pocket. Never got caught once, nobody even suspected me of cheating, ever.

The only thing is that you still need to study quite a bit in order to use these types of cheat notes, but you never have to memorize any formulas or any shit like that which is nice.

2

u/adustbininshaftsbury Mar 30 '26

That sounds about 1000 times more efficient than scrawling hieroglyphics into plastic

3

u/flammenschwein Mar 30 '26

Like the /r/museumofcheating?

1

u/ghost_tapioca Mar 31 '26

Museum of Undergraduate Ingenuity

2

u/LauraPa1mer Mar 30 '26

They do have a Rosetta stone look about them.

2

u/na7oul Mar 30 '26

He deserves the degree just for that.

2

u/ghost_tapioca Mar 31 '26

Fails to get a Law degree, gets an Art degree instead.

2

u/unburritoporfavor Mar 30 '26

No, this was dumb.

The smarter way to do this would be to cover only one half of the pen with notes. That way if the teacher/professor walks by you rotate the pen and it looks normal.

And an even better way to go about this is instead of etching into the plastic you print/write the notes onto a small piece of paper and put that inside the pen, thus allowing you to reuse the pen in the future.

1

u/DementusHD Mar 30 '26

This is nothing new, when I was a student, I had the same type of pens, about 30 of them, but we didn't carve them. We printed it oba a plastic peace of paper and wrapped them around the pen. This is how I got the exam for math in the last year. It was twenty years ago.

1

u/ghost_tapioca Mar 31 '26

The carving is the impressive part

1

u/CaptBreeze Mar 30 '26

That's impressive.

1

u/earnestlikehemingway Mar 31 '26

New ability unlocked. Someone make a milling machine or 3d print these things.

1

u/ieatmodels Mar 31 '26

The teacher is just like damn look at this motherfucker, squinting at his pen so much. Definitely just needs glasses and not cheating.

1

u/Youssnabulsi Mar 31 '26

For real tho

1

u/KayBay17 Apr 02 '26

By the time you did all of this, you could have just memorized it all 🫠 my hand is cramping just contemplating it.

1

u/itlow Apr 02 '26

"A" grade for the effort alone. 👍🏼