Shutterstock
One thing that teachers and professors learn early on in their careers is that most students will try to cheat if they think they can get away with it. Another thing is that their parents will generally defend their kids, even when it is clear that they were in the wrong.
So, when the professor in this story set up his class, he did it in such a way as to allow the students to come in as often as they wanted, and he even let them take their quizzes without supervision, knowing that they would cheat.
While this didn’t make sense at first, he announced a grading curve at the end of the semester that helped boost everyone’s grades up so they couldn’t complain about their scores, but would still give the cheaters and poor performers a score low enough that they would have to retake it.
This is a genius way to deal with a common problem in schools. Read through the full story below and see what you think about it.
Cheating students with aggressive helicopter parents? Not a problem for my math professor.
I needed to take an upper-level math class required for my degree, and thought I’d have the best chance at passing it if I took it on its own, with nothing else to distract me, so I signed up for the summer session at my university.
The class ran five days a week for six weeks, and consisted of myself, three other regular summer students, about 20-25 incoming freshmen who were living in the same dorm as part of an early start program, and a professor so old he remembered teaching one student’s mother in the same math class over 20 years prior.
The class syllabus indicated that we had three exams and a final, and then we’d have 25 quizzes, about one on each non-exam day, and the quiz portion of the overall class grade was weighted fairly heavily.
It must be a popular class.
The professor also informed us that he wouldn’t be requiring or grading homework, but that if we found anything difficult, we should work through the corresponding homework question and go to office hours if we still didn’t understand.
So, the first day of the class, everyone attended, and there were more students than desks, so we dragged enough extras in from an empty classroom.
The second day of the class, the professor gave us the first quiz as promised, but there were a couple empty desks, so not everyone had returned.
Odd that people are just coming and going like this.
This wasn’t unusual, sometimes students would realize they were in over their heads, or the long days of summer classes weren’t for them, and drop or switch it immediately.
The third day, there was another quiz, and the people who were absent the second day had returned, but there were even more people absent.
Within a week, it was obvious that the professor had been telling the truth about a quiz every day, but only the four of us regular students had showed up every day and an average of 2/3 of the early start students would skip at any given time.
On the day of the first exam, everyone showed up and like the first day of class the room was full.
They aren’t even trying to hide the fact that they are cheating.
The professor passed out the exams, announced he’d be in his office if we needed anything, and left the classroom.
We worked in silence for a few minutes, and then one of the early start students quietly asked “Does anyone know the answer for the question #2, with the circle?”
A second early start student answered with an incorrect answer, which the first dutifully wrote down.
A third early start student asked “What was the first step again?” and the second student repeated his incorrect answer.
This is not going to go well for the cheating kids.
Through this entire time, the other regular students were staring at each other, first in abject shock that cheating was happening so openly, and then in barely concealed amusement as they continued to share wrong answers because we realized that since most of these students had not been in class, they’d all get the same incorrect answers, which would be a dead giveaway to the professor that they’d been copying from each other.
The next day, the professor handed back the graded exams to the handful of us in the classroom, and said nothing about cheating or academic dishonesty, so we said nothing, thinking that maybe he didn’t mention it to us because we weren’t involved.
The next days, and the next weeks, he still said nothing, as the early start students continued to skip classes more than they attended them, and unknowingly share wrong answers on the other exams.
The day before the final, almost everyone was in the classroom again.
Well, the students who were there every day will be happy.
The professor said that, since he knew it was a fast-paced class, and not every student was able to make it to class every day, he would be curving our grades up.
Instead of making the quiz portion of our grade the cumulative total of all 20+ quizzes we’d taken, he’d only count our top 10 quiz scores and average them.
The three other regular students and I had all hoped that if we worked hard, perhaps we could get a C required to use the class as a pre-requisite without re-taking it, and this was an incredibly generous curve and would effectively guarantee we’d pass, and could potentially even allow us to still earn an A if we did well on the final!
This will not go well for the students who rarely attended. Which is exactly what the professor wanted.
Much later I realized that the professor was using the homework questions as quiz questions, so if we’d had difficulty on a topic and did the homework question as he recommended, we’d have learned the solution to the quiz question.
Some of the students who cheated and skipped frequently not only had low grades that were failing with no chance of redemption, even with a perfect final before the curve at this point, but they’d missed so many quizzes that even with the curve, some of them had to take 0’s for some of their “top 10” quiz score.
In the end, it turned out that all four of us regular students got high B’s or A’s, while the early start students’ grades almost all got curved to D’s or low C’s.
So, what makes this a tale of petty revenge, and not just consequences of not attending and paying attention in class?
The professor knew exactly what he was doing.
If the professor had simply graded according to the original rubric, then many of the students would’ve failed, and since this was an expensive university, some of them would’ve had parents* who’d have called up the university and made a scene and appealed the grade, and perhaps may have gotten them reversed.
If the professor had turned in everyone who cheated for academic dishonesty, which was an automatic failure, then the fallout would be even worse: Almost every single student’s parents would be calling to appeal the decision, and in fact parents had threatened or attempted legal action over failing grades for academic dishonesty before.
The academic dishonesty charges would likely be overturned because everyone would claim that they were the ones being copied from instead of the ones doing the copying, and if someone caved and admitted what the others had done, us four could’ve even potentially got dragged into it because we witnessed it and didn’t report it.
These students did not expect this.
So, by using the curve that he did, the professor made their grades high enough that the students didn’t fail the class, yet low enough that if they wanted to use the class as a pre-requisite or to fulfill a degree requirement, they would have to re-take it the same as if they’d failed any other way.
Also, if parents attempted to file complaints with the university regarding their children’s low grades, the professor would be able defend his actions by pointing out that he in fact curved their grades higher than they would’ve otherwise been.
This professor may be old, but he used that experience to ensure the students couldn’t get away with cheating.
Read through the top comments on Reddit below to see what other people think of this story.
This is how it should be.
The students should be treated like adults, but that rarely happens.
This commenter says that this would have never happened when he was in school.
He gave them the exam guide, but they still couldn’t pass.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about neighbors who couldn’t ignore reckless neighborhood driving after an accident occurred.
This commenter says that teachers do this all the time, though.
It is sad that universities have to resort to this type of thing these days. They would be much better off just standing firm against the parents (and students) to force them to have consequences for their actions.
Of course, it is the parents and students who pay to go there, so the administration wants to keep them happy.