Teacher catches 14 students cheating with genius exam question

A university professor has become the stuff of internet legend for cunningly exacting revenge on his dishonest students.

The unnamed teacher allegedly grew tired of his pupils going to the bathroom during exams and looking up answers on their phones, so he took matters into his own hands.

According to a post on Reddit, as he was putting together a final exam paper, he created a two-part question and made sure that “part b” was, inconspicuously, impossible to solve.

He then asked a colleague to enter the question into a homework support site that many of his students were secretly using during tests to search for solutions.

The teacher then created his own account on the site and answered the question with a “bulls**t solution that seems right at first glance but is actually fundamentally flawed,” the Reddit user, who recounted the incident, wrote.

They added that the fake answer was sufficiently weird that it was “very unlikely that someone would make the same assumptions and mistakes independently.”

Then, after the exam was held, the professor shared his detective work, with the class.

Out of 99 exams, 14 students allegedly “fell for the trap” and “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.”

The professor-turned-sleuth also emailed his departmental colleagues to share the list of cheaters with them.

There's a clear moral to the story: don't cheat(Marco Verch/Flickr)

The post has done the rounds on social media, with readers recalling their own experiences of impossible questions and sneaky classmates.

One shared details of their teachers’ own ingenuity, writing: “[I witnessed] 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.”

There's a clear moral to these stories... Do the work. And don't cheat.

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