No peeping now! University students slip into hilarious ‘anti-cheating’ hats shaped as Angry Birds characters or crates of beer – to stop them looking at their classmates’ exam answers

A university has found a peculiar way to stop students from cheating on exams: by making them wear ridiculously large hats to prevent them from spying on their classmates’ answers.

Students in the Philippines wore a series of huge “anti-cheat hats,” including some inspired by animated characters and random objects like a case of San Miguel beer.

Their teacher, Angelo Ebora, asked the students, who study agriculture at the Batangas State University, to wear the novel hats.

Almost all 70 students participated, designed their own helmet and wore it during their exam on March 19.

Bizarre images show one student wearing a hat shaped like a giant chainsaw, another wearing a Game Boy console hat, and another wearing a Pikachu hat.

Others opted for hats of cartoon characters like Angry Birds, Corpse Bride, a Creeper from Minecraft and Patrick from SpongeBob SquarePants.

There were also hats with Anonymous masks, photographs of Einstein and a hat with the words “future farmer” written on it.

Mr. Ebora wanted to help “relieve his students’ stress during exams” while teaching them about academic integrity.

The hats prevented the students, aged between 18 and 19, from looking at their classmates’ answers to copy them.

“I was also very proud of them,” Mr. Ebora said after seeing that many of his students had participated. The tradition reportedly goes back several years.

But while the hats may prevent students from reading each other’s work, many online noted that they may have been able to put notes inside.