The concept for the episode developed from writer Jon Vitti coming up with a long list of bad things Bart would do for attention imagining the potential consequences. The only idea that developed into an interesting episode concept was Bart's cheating on an IQ test. This idea was based on an incident from Vitti's childhood when a number of his classmates did not take an intelligence test seriously and suffered poor academic treatment because of it. Because Bart was already obviously unintelligent, Vitti reversed the problem for his episode. Vitti used all his memories of elementary school behavior to produce a draft script of 71 pages, substantially above the required length of about 45 pages.