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Stuyvesant HS students have long had a formula for success — and it’s been written on their ankles, bathroom stalls and bottles of Wite-Out.
In the wake of a recent cheating scandal that has rocked the elite TriBeCa school, alumni and ex-staffers revealed to The Post ingenious ways that students have used their noodles to game the system.
“They are brilliant at cheating,” marveled former English teacher Douglas Goetsch.
Long before cellphones became the implement du jour for cheaters, there was Wite-Out, said Goetsch, 49, who taught at the school from 1987 to 2001.
“One kid would write the letter answer [to a multiple-choice question] on a bottle of Wite-Out and pass it back to a friend — who would paint over it and pass it back. It’s so simple, but elegant, when you think about it.”
Back in 2001, Goetsch wrote an editorial in The Spectator, the student newspaper, decrying the culture of cheating at the school — one of many such articles that show school officials were aware of the long-standing practice.
Case in point: Goetsch discovered two students in his and another class who plagiarized passages on their senior thesis. He gave his student an F but was pressured by an assistant principal to give him a passing grade, he said.
“I was told I was being too Draconian,” Goetsch recalled.
The only thing surprising about the recent cheating scandal in June, he added, “was that it was limited to 71 students.”
Former students didn’t have to rack their brains to recall how classmates pulled it off — or why.
“The best education you got from Stuyvesant comes not from the classroom, but from the street smarts that you pick up being in that environment,” said a ’91 alum.
“Stuy is highly competitive, and the one-point difference between a 99 and a 100 might mean admission to Harvard or Yale.”
Another ex-Peglegger — the school mascot is Pegleg Pete, after New Amsterdam governor Peter Stuyvesant — said tricks have evolved.
“Kids would store text and formulas on their TI-83 Plus graphing calculators and use them on math, physics and chemistry tests,’’ said a 2003 grad.
The ex-student said the school made a halfhearted effort to police the problem, demanding that students wipe their calculator’s memory. Of course, clever eggheads still managed a way to stash the formulas on their machines.
“Teachers seemed more concerned with kids playing ‘Tetris’ with their calculator than cheating with it,” he said.
Old-school methods were also popular. “Cheating was done by getting a pass to go to the bathroom where the formulas would be scribbled on the stall,” recalled Gary Shteyngart, class of ’91. “Only I was too stupid to figure out which formula was which, even when I saw one.”
And in some cases, a pen was mightier than an all-nighter.
“The best place to tattoo is on your ankle and legs, which can be covered by pants and socks — you can cross your legs and have easy access to your cheat sheet,” said a ’91 grad who requested anonymity..
Girls had an additional “leg up” — if they flirted with male teachers, he claimed.
“One teacher promised to give A’s on the next exam to any girl that came in with a short skirt,” he recalled, not joking.
During a June 18 language test, junior Nayeem Ahsan was nabbed using a cellphone to send pictures of the state’s Regents exams and answers to dozens of classmates. Ahsan and five others face suspensions. In total, 71 students had their tests tossed.
Former 13-year principal Stanley Teitel, who announced his sudden retirement last month, waited nearly a week to reveal the incident to the Department of Education, which is now probing him and other exams.
The DOE said Chancellor Dennis Walcott is working with Stuyvesant’s acting principal, Jie Zhang, to “ensure that protocols are being followed and there is integrity in the school’s testing process.”
Just a few months ago, Teitel sounded stunned when the school newspaper reported that a new survey found that “110 percent” of Stuyvesant students cheated.
“There are many things Stuyvesant is known for . . . but cheating is just not one of them,” he declared.
Additional reporting by Susan Edelman