I was looking through another entry about the word "botch" and saw that pfuschen was listed as a meaning for to botch.

This surprised me because I learned the word pfuschen while attending Gymnasium in Kerpen, near Köln in the mid-'70s. There, I heard the word pfuschen only in the context of cheating. I also remember hearing the Denglisch word Teamwörk to refer to cheating in school (I believe I also remember seeing the word Teamwörk in print in a Hörzu magazine advertisement for a TV program about rampant cheating in schools.

I spent a few minutes hunting around the internet and saw that pfuschen is generally used to mean something more like botch, but also saw some people claiming that they heard the word locally as meaning cheating. Some people claimed that it was locally in Austria, some in the Rheinland, some as being local to the France border regions - didn't seem to be consistent.

Is anyone else familiar with the use of the word pfuschen to mean copying off of a neighbor on a test in school? Teamwörk? Are these outdated usages, local uses?

I imagine that I have probably been misunderstood at some point in the past if I used pfuschen to mean cheat - and never noticed - or it didn't matter enough to clear up.

What are your experiences?