[LukeShu]

Many flip phones had cameras by then. For instance, the Razr V3 was the best selling phone of 2005, and had a 640×480px camera.

[doublerabbit]

It's not that Cameras didn't exist, more that the technological features were not sophisticated enough to enlist cheating compared to now. A personal OCR Python library wasn't a thing back then.

Not saying that cheating was impossible but uneasy unlike to now where there's a library for everything.

[xattt]

AABBY FineReader was very pirate-able since the early 2000s. The workflow would have been a bit clunky, but it was still very doable.

[throwaway290]

If you think every student had a razr (btw good luck reading text on tiny screen photo from 640x480 camera) you're pretty privileged;)