‘Out of 99 exams, 14 of them fell for the trap.’ A Professor Got Sneaky Revenge Against Cheating Students By Setting A Hilarious Exam Trap
by Matthew Gilligan
Alright, friends, it’s time for an entertaining story of “Pro Revenge” from the pages of Reddit!
And this one took place in a college classroom and involved a group of cheaters and a pretty smart professor who’d had enough.
The person who wrote the story was a witness to the events and they shared what went down in the classroom.
The events took lace during a final in an engineering class.
Not my revenge, but my professor against cheaters.
“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.
But it seemed like this crafty professor was a lot smarter than some students gave him credit for.
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.
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.
The professor was one step ahead of the cheating students who were running to the bathroom to look at their phones and it turns out that he was anything but clueless about technology. Score one for the old folks!
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 ridiculous 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.
And the students who fell for it got what was coming to them.
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 zero 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.”
Here’s what people had to say.
This Reddit user shared their own story.
Another individual told a tale from high school.
This reader had to retake a test…bummer!
This person shared a story from a PhD class.
And this individual sounds like one heck of a teacher.
Cheating will get you nowhere.
Let this be a lesson to all students out there!
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