A Spanish law school teacher recently shared one of the ingenious methods that one of her students used to cheat on an exam –  a dozen of artistically etched BIC pens.

Yolanda de Lucchi, a teacher at the University of Malaga, in Spain, recently shared a couple of very interesting photos on her Twitter account. She was apparently cleaning up her drawers when she came across one of the more ingenious cheating methods she and her colleagues had confiscated. A few years back, one of her students tried to cheat on an exam by finely etching the Criminal Procedural Law onto eleven BIC pens. A close-up of the pens really showcases the skill of the student, who obviously put a lot of time and effort into his intriguing cheating technique.

Photo: Yolanda de Lucchi/Twitter

“The criminal procedural law in BIC pens. What art!” the Spanish teacher tweeted, adding the hashtag “cheat sheets aren’t like they used to be”. She only shared the photos to show other fellow teachers the ingenuity of her students, but the tweet kind of took a life of its own. It received over 280,000 likes on Twitter alone, as well as tens of thousands of retweets.

Interestingly, one of the people who replied to Yolanda de Lucchi’s viral tweet claimed to know the student who had created and tried to use the BIC pens and even posted another photo of other similar pens the man had allegedly created.

Photo: Yolanda de Lucchi/Twitter

“Hello Yolanda. I know the author of that wonderful work perfectly. In fact, he has authorized me, ignoring his name, logically, to show you some more that he still keeps at home,” the Twitter user wrote. “The technique used by the artist, as he himself tells me, was to replace the graphite lead of a mechanical pencil with a needle, which made it super easy for him to etch the pen.”

Gonzo, the artist’s friend, also posted a photo of the improvised etching tool and added that his buddy would arrange the pens in order, to make them easier and less conspicuous to read during exams.

Photo: Gonzo/Twitter

The artistically-etched cheat sheets drew a lot of attention online, with many praising the “artist” for his patience, and others claiming that it would have been easier to study for the exam than to etch all those pens. De Lucchi herself praised her student, even if she did fail him that year.

“That could not happen today,” the teacher wrote. “Now students would not make an effort to have such a detailed cheat sheet for an exam. They live at the click of a button, by what happens instantly; that is impossible to see today.”

This is just one of the ingenious exam cheating techniques we have featured on Oddity Central over the years. In the past, we’ve seen exam answers painted on nails, Bluetooth devices surgically implanted in ears, and even Bluetooth-connected flip-flops.