3 ms·

Oh yeah, I used to do that quite a lot. At first, just a docx file of random jumbled characters was enough, as everyone was used to compatibility issues around

by franga2000 5y ago

Oh yeah, I used to do that quite a lot. At first, just a docx file of random jumbled characters was enough, as everyone was used to compatibility issues around the Office 2003 -> 2007 migration. After everyone moved on to 2007, corrupting the file and saying "I did it on a Mac" was a common excuse, since everyone knew the Mac version of Office was kind of trash. I figured out a way to get Office to give you the "corrupted file, attempting repair" dialog and have it actually succeed, but then the contents was just random unicode with a couple sentences from Wikipedia in between, so it looked like there was something there, but the auto repair couldn't quite recover it. Teaching others to do this, even classmates teachers knew I wasn't friends with, meant that there wasn't a pattern for them to see and so they never suspected we were faking it. They just assumed "it's just a thing that happens sometimes".

tomjen3 5y ago
That is brilliant. Especially the part where you teach this to others. I can't help but wonder, how much more time did you spent on all of this, since you would presumably still need to do the assignment?
- franga2000 5y ago
  Not too much, especially after the first few times. And I had the bad habit (still sort of do) of spending far more time avoiding things that I found boring than it would take to actually do them. And yes, I did have to do it eventually, but this helped stretch the deadline by a week or so, which is quite nice when you get like 4 assignments dumped on you in the same month (because god forbid the teachers work together and make us an evenly-loaded schedule).
Macha 5y ago
On the other side of avoiding it, I started college using OpenOffice, which worked fine until one day I got queried from a professor about why I had opted to go with a 5 column layout for the assignment submission when he opened it in MS Office for Mac. The content was all there, so it clearly wasn't a case of "Oops, corrupted, let's resubmit after the date". The doc in OpenOffice that I had made had the most basic formatting, just headings, a table of contents, paragraphs and the required double line spacing. Certainly no columns of any kind. After that I switched to PDF submissions for every module where they would be accepted.

tomjen3 5y ago

That is brilliant. Especially the part where you teach this to others. I can't help but wonder, how much more time did you spent on all of this, since you would presumably still need to do the assignment?

franga2000 5y ago
Not too much, especially after the first few times. And I had the bad habit (still sort of do) of spending far more time avoiding things that I found boring than it would take to actually do them. And yes, I did have to do it eventually, but this helped stretch the deadline by a week or so, which is quite nice when you get like 4 assignments dumped on you in the same month (because god forbid the teachers work together and make us an evenly-loaded schedule).

Macha 5y ago

On the other side of avoiding it, I started college using OpenOffice, which worked fine until one day I got queried from a professor about why I had opted to go with a 5 column layout for the assignment submission when he opened it in MS Office for Mac. The content was all there, so it clearly wasn't a case of "Oops, corrupted, let's resubmit after the date". The doc in OpenOffice that I had made had the most basic formatting, just headings, a table of contents, paragraphs and the required double line spacing. Certainly no columns of any kind. After that I switched to PDF submissions for every module where they would be accepted.