Professor Had Some Serious Revenge Against Students Who Cheated On His Exam

by Rachel

Anyone who has ever been a student has probably been tempted to cheat—even if they won’t admit it, or ever followed through; the temptation was surely there. It is a natural human instinct. Or that’s what would-be cheaters tell themselves.

Some students only cheat when they think they have devised a foolproof way to do so—otherwise the risk is not worth it. But, this story from a professor shows there is no such thing as a good way to cheat.

Teachers read on for a devious way to catch cheaters—and to reward the honest students. It is truly a genius use of technology! 

The post was captioned "Not my revenge. but my professor against cheaters"

The story was posted by User u/Mwxh.

It begins:

"I took the final for an engineering class this morning. Usually 1 or 2 people will go to the bathroom during class, however for totally unknown reasons, about half of the class needed to use the restroom during the exam. Obviously a vast majority of them were looking up the answers on their phones. This irritated me but I just stayed focused and barely finished since it was a hard exam. I remembered that there was one particular problem that was only barely related to the stuff we went over in class where part a was fairly easy but I had no idea how to do part b. I didn't fret over it too much though, since that part was only 5 points out of 100.Well our professor who is on the older side and I would have thought was somewhat ignorant of technology sent us an email just now explaining his diabolical plan to catch cheaters."

Never assume a professor is technology inept...

"Many of the students in this class use chegg (a website that has answers to lots of homework questions if you're not familiar). To be fair I have an account too though I only used it for studying and checking homework solutions. Anyway he explained that he was tired of people going to the bathroom and looking up answers on their phones so he made the question I mentioned earlier as a trap. He purposely made part b impossible to solve and about a month before the final, he got a TA with a chegg account to ask the exact question, which was distinctly worded to be unique. He then created his own chegg account and answered the question with a bullshit solution that seems right at first glance but is actually fundamentally flawed and very unlikely that someone would make the same assumptions and mistakes independently."

Oh damn....

"He said that out of 99 exams, 14 of them fell for the trap and that everyone who had his wrong solution on their exam was given a 0 and reported to the university for violating the academic honor pledge they signed on the front. He also sent an email to all the other professors in our department giving them the list of cheaters.Edit: I forgot to mention he gave full credit on part b of the question to everyone else"

Other people began to share their tough exam stories

yopd1:

In college, master's level heat transfer class. Professor gave a problem where the differential equation was impossible to solve. The entire class of master's and PhD candidates came back with the same issue. Professor told all of us to go back and try again, twice. After the third week of trying, he came back and said he finally tried the problem himself and it was impossible to solve. Never felt more proud in my college career.

I'm laughing at "Just call it"

Ixolich:

My BS Thermo class final, the professor had to leave for a meeting that started the same time as the final (he was Dean of the Natural Science division, so this was a fairly regular occurrence). Since it was a small school and small class where he knew all of us really well, he trusted us to not cheat (since he could ruin us if we did) so gave us the exam, said "I gotta go, it should only take you an hour or so, leave them on the desk when you're done."He comes back an hour and forty-five minutes into the two hour exam slot and nobody has left, we're all still working on (what we later determined to be) the same problem. Kinda laughs, like "Guys, what's the deal? Why are you still here?" Walks around a bit, looks at what we're doing, then sits down with a spare copy and starts working it out himself.Scribble scribble.... Scribble.... Taps his pencil a few times.... Scribble.... Grabs a blank sheet of paper and keeps going.....Ten minutes later he looks up and says "Huh, I guess I made it harder than I thought. Just call it, turn them in."

This teaching style rocks

dredreidel:

"I give my students extra credit if they point out errors/things like this. A) so I don’t embarrass myself in the future and B) if you spot a mistake I missed. It means you are paying attention- and that should be rewarded.I hope I never get to a point in my career where I forget the whole point of teaching is learning- for both sides of the classroom."

Mine do this!

Roughsauce:

"Vast majority of my profs have students turn in their phones and leave their bags at the front of the room during exams to prevent this exact scenario. I've had a couple classes where you can't leave whatsoever until you hand in the exam."

Cheaters NEVER get away with it

Roughsauce:

"I did witness an incident once following a lab practical exam. Earlier that year the prof had mentioned that the exams stay roughly the same each year which is why we aren't allowed to keep our graded practical sheets after learning of our scores. In the class following the exam, the prof took us in one by one to walk through our answers and get feedback on what we need to study. It went relatively quick with the exception of 3 or 4 students who walked out of the back room looking totally white in the face.Turns out said small group of students had tracked down a TA from last year and pooled money to buy the answer key from the TA... What they didn't know is that any TA who has worked with that professor is in on a scheme to catch cheaters, so they essentially revealed themselves even prior to taking the exam. Accordingly, the prof wrote 4 entirely new and unique exams ONLY for those students who he was made aware of were trying to cheat. Needless to say, they failed the exams, were outed, and faced pretty gnarly academic punishment as a result. The reason for him writing 4 unique separate exams was he could tell who actually ended up trying to memorize and utilize the answer key. Of the 4 involved, only one of them remained in the class after that day, so I'm guessing he was the only one who had the brains to realize how stupid cheating that way was. He did however only score like a 65% (prof made those 4 exams inordinately difficult) and it tanked his grade, so he did face some sort of fallout from the whole thing."

Mine is the same!

RegularWhiteShark:

"At my uni, you’re not allowed your bags or your phones. They stay at the front of the room. If your phone rings, you’re disqualified. Clear pencil case. No cover on your calculator. Water bottles must be clear with no labels. Real strict."

Another idea:

insanetwit:

"I once had a Prof hand out 4 copies of a test. One on white paper, one on Yellow paper, one on green paper, and one on pink paper.When we got our marks back, someone asked how he knew which scantron went to which test. That's when he told us that they were all the same test, just the paper was different. This got people to stop looking at their neighbours work.It was pretty clever."

Alternatively...

trailmix_pprof:

"Instructors who actually use four different exams print them all on white paper.That way you copy off the wrong exam."

Huh!

volcanii_:

"Reminds my of something we do at my university, although not quite as brilliant.I’m an undergrad TA for a general chemistry lab. Each section has one grad student in charge, and usually 2-3 undergrad assistants who answer questions, grade assignments, etc.At the beginning of each class the students have to take a quiz on their laptops through Canvas, which is the course site used by my university. These quizzes are to check that they understand the day’s lesson before they do the experiment, and are usually pretty difficult. Because of this people usually google the answers.We let them cheat on their first quiz, and after they finish, the grad student says something like“sorry I forgot to mention earlier, but Canvas has a feature that allows us to see when someone navigates away from their quiz. We can see which question you were on, and how long you were away from Canvas for. We’ll let it slide today but for future quizzes we’ll count this as an honor code violation.”The professor who oversees the lab devised this as a strategy to mess with people’s heads. She says the best punishment is for them to know we know they’re dishonest, so they’ll feel ashamed and will be less likely to cheat later on.Then the undergrads have to go through the activity logs for all the quizzes and see who was cheating for that first quiz. Usually it’s like 30% of the class. They’re the only ones who get their logs checked for the rest of the semester, and if those students are a few points short of a letter grade at the end they don’t get bumped."

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