Late in life I sought to complete community college. The RHEL degree path included a Calculus requirement that I could not evade. I had progressed somewhat beyond Calc in the first and second iterations, somehow.

So this Calculus class was 100% online. I discovered only at finals week that the instructor was firmly based at a distant satellite campus.

The class was brutal to me, and I needed a lot of time in the tutoring hall just to barely grasp concepts as they paraded past us. I used my calculator in good faith.

I discovered that there were websites that would solve integrals and complex equations, but I recognized that as outright cheating, so I resisted those tools.

However, the online LMS was set up with frequent quizzes with unlimited attempts. Not being penalized for attempts meant that I could brute-force every answer for every quiz throughout the course and get perfect scores. Though I felt kinda evil, I did just that.

When the final exam came around, our phantom remote instructor suddenly expected everyone to show up on her campus in-person. This was absurd to someone who was (1) on FAFSA funds and (2) riding the bus, and when I protested, the solution was a proctored session in the Disability office, all alone.

I solved every last question on that thing with paper and pencil and I required every single minute of the extended 3-hour limit they granted to me. I got an A- or whatever final grade.

Perhaps I didn’t deserve it, because all those learings drained out of my skull within 3 months, but it was a textbook example of gaming the system without strictly cheating, and since I was not aspiring to a math career, who cares?

The department deleted the Calculus requirement shortly after I finished that semester.