A university professor once managed to catch out a huge chunk of his class for cheating on a test and this is how he did it.
Now, students trying to swindle their way to top exam marks isn’t exactly a new phenomenon.
According to a study published in the Journal of Academic Ethics, a whopping 44.7 percent of students were willing to admit to cheating in online summative exams.
Interestingly, maths and science papers are usually the courses in which cheating occurs most often and it’s said that cheating among high school students has risen ‘dramatically’ during the past 50 years.
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Unfortunately, one teacher has some first-hand experience with student deception.
The unnamed man took to Reddit last year after he noticed a bunch of his university class mysteriously asking if they could relieve themselves during an in-real-life test.
The educator believed that the hoard was heading to the bathroom to search for quiz questions and decided to take matters into his own hands.
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His genius plan involved creating an impossible question and adding it to the test.
To seal the deal and catch the culprits, he also posted the fake answer to a website he knew his class would often use to study.
Of course, this meant that anybody who had provided the ‘correct’ answer to the unworkable question had cheated to get it.
Smart, right?
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The college teacher took to the social media platform to explain how he intentionally ‘made part B impossible to solve’.
He wrote that a month before the exam was due to take place, he enlisted the help of a colleague who already had an account on this particular website.
He asked the teaching assistant to write a quiz question in a very specific and distinctly worded way.
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The teacher himself then went onto the site and answered the question using the fake solution.
He wrote it in a way which could easily be seen as correct if you weren’t paying too much attention.
You know, just like those who pretended to need the bathroom so they could check up answers.
Of course, the educator’s plan worked and he managed to catch out a staggering 14 students.
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All of them had taken toilet breaks during the test and used the time to search for the ‘wrong’ answer.
The 14 cheaters were later awarded a total of zero marks for the exam and were reported to the unnamed university for breaking its academic pledge.
Meanwhile, everyone who attempted the unanswerable question was given full marks for honesty and integrity in giving it a go.
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The moral of the story? Just don’t cheat!
There really is a lesson to be learned here for all of us…
Ella Scott