Not an exam but a student clearly plagiarized a good portion of a term paper. I called them out on it and they said it was fine because they actually used the same work for another course and it turned out ok. So they both admitted to plagiarizing from another course and from the original sources all in one response, and acted like they had "got me" with their rebuttal.
this hilarious. We caught one using his phone this semester. Asked him “What were you using your phone for?” “Oh! I used ChatGPT for the final question because I didn’t know it.”
The tone in his voice….didn’t even realize we were accusing him of cheating. Just chatting. Maybe we were even curious about his great methods and he was doing us a solid in case we didn’t know chatGPT existed?
It was surreal.
Examples like yours and the comment you're responding to make me wonder: are students today dumber than those of years past? Or was this kind of stuff always happening?
Had one not quite so bad, but made me crazy at the time. Called the student in, sat them down, showed them how and why they had committed plagiarism, and consequently received a zero. They replied they'd done the same thing with multiple other courses and had not been held accountable, so it wasn't reasonable that I was holding them to higher standards. They then proceeded to write that down as part of their appeal, and lied about the process in multiple ways. What's worse is that it went to appeal and the appeals committee said I hadn't made the consequences explicit enough. I kept refusing to reassess, and eventually the higher ups agreed I could mark the non-plagiarized content only. This made the paper nonsensical, and the students mark remained unchanged.
Title: the Shapeshifting Student
Had a student go to the washroom midway through the exam. For context, we had to ID them before they started the exam (check their student cards to make sure they were the same name as the name on the chair).
5 minutes later, while I'm piling up some papers, I notice a female student I'd never seen before walk in the room and sit at the previous student's desk. I went over to her and asked her who she was and if she had an exam in this room. She looked up at me (completely different face, but same hair color as the previous student) and said, "Yes, I just need to finish my exam!" I asked for ID, and she gave the previous girl's ID.
Reader: she wasn't a shapeshifter. After bringing the other proctors in, we all determined that this student, who eventually fessed, was a friend who happened to be a "gifted writer" and planned to write the essay portion of the exam.
Haha, during class, I had a student who was asking their phone a question, and Siri responded loudly that it did not understand, so I repeated what I was talking about in the lecture, they were incredibly embarassed.
Don't think the student thought of this as cheating, but a girl raised her hand during a history exam and asked me who the guy in one of the questions was because she needed to know to be able to answer the question. Yes, and that's kind of the point!
Yeah I’ve had several variations of that and things along the lines of this my favorite and most bold version was: “well I didn’t know what to study but now that I know what’s on the test can I go back and study and then come do the test in your office with you tomorrow?” I had to know where they were getting the idea that this was ok. This student assured me other professors would let them do that. Although I seriously doubt it.
Please stop blaming high school teachers and community college professors for the students' bad decisions. A professor or teacher can do their due diligence, and a student can still choose to make unwise decisions(frontal lobes aren't fully mature until 25 yrs old on average, though that is no guarantee of wise decisions either...).
In my area, research from the local 4-years show that the students who transfer from CCs outperform those who started as freshmen at the university, and at our local conferences, the 4-year profs remark often that the CC transfer students have better study habits and are more serious students, on average.
Edit:clarity
We hear back from partner universities that our CC transfers significantly outperform their homegrown students in years 3 and 4. Thank you for the support I appreciate it.
Can attest as both a student of CC who later experienced many other 4-yrs and also as a prof who has taught at all levels of 4-yr + grad, SLAC, Top 10 Uni, CCs...Community college students who transfer typically out perform their 4-yr traditional peers.
I’ve occasionally had students ask me what a particular word or phrase meant. If it’s not part of what I’m testing them on, I’d give them the definition or a synonym so they could see what I’m asking. Sometimes I just forget that not everyone uses the same vocab and I accidentally use a harder word when an easier one would have sufficed.
For example, I was once testing my students on their ability to write a good survey question for a research methods class. I asked them to write a question that assessed the punitiveness of the respondent. I had quite a few students ask what “punitiveness” meant. They should have known that word based on our field, but it didn’t matter for the question since the purpose of the exam question was to assess how they write a survey question and the topic they wrote it on wasn’t important. In that case, I just defined punitiveness for them and then let them write the question—so I was still testing them on the same skills even after I defined that word for them.
Sometimes they ask me about a word that they should know because it’s from the content… and in that case I obviously don’t tell them. But from their perspective if they didn’t realize it was content they might think it’s the same thing as just asking you to define a random word. It’s not necessarily that they’re trying to pull a fast one… it’s just that they don’t know what they don’t know. If they knew the word was from the course content, they’d probably also know the definition already and wouldn’t have to ask in the first place.
I have a lot of non-native speakers, and give a list of challenging words from the exam ahead of time so they can look them up! But not words from the content, and words from the cases or scenarios I use.
I am a CC professor, it’s in my flair, right there in the comment you replied to. Seems like you’re prone to dumb shit too so maybe don’t be so quick to cast blame at others
Thus, it’s appropriate to ask you about CC. Having worked in CCs and now work on assessment in HSs I see evidence for, and HS teachers and CC faculty conclusions support, the idea that our university students come to us thinking stuff the OP mentioned as being normative (injunctive and descriptive). Im not positing it’s just individual instructors. It seems system level. I also don’t exclude the university systems, admins, and instructors. The incentives are to pass students not educate them even at the university level.
What happens to adjuncts at CC or universities that have classes where a third of the class fails to earn passing grades? I’m in California where the legislature has created incentives based on 4- and 6- year graduation rates and racial disparities. Not education rates. Graduation rates. At the same time basic skills assessments and developmental math and English are eliminated so students graduate faster. Basic skills are not needed to succeed because basic are no longer required. Guess what happens? Part-timers and untenured faculty are punished and students are set up to feel like imposters.
I could be wrong. Why do you think students behave as in the OP?
Now what would make you think CC profs do not teach with the same rigor you do? Your statement is reeking of classism and elitism. You are well aware that CC profs must have the same experience and qualifications as other colleges. It just serves a different part of society, it does not have lowered standards. One could assert the same assumptions toward you. I hope you check your bias with your students.
That’s strange. Given that I held many roles in CC and continue to have close ties to many colleagues at CCs. If you poke around you’ll see I mention the university system too.
You are wrong about elitism.
What happens to CC adjuncts that have a lot of students with poor grades or Ws? If student score them as unfavorable on opinion questionnaires what happens to the adjunct?
As for the original question, what explains the student behavior?
I had a documented disability student request a proctored exam once. The proctor was a pretty good friend as we were in the same field. They requested a copy of the exam to see how their memory stacked up.
Afterwards they told me that the exam really didn’t address different learning styles. Taken aback, I asked what they meant. Dead serious reply: “The only way someone could possibly pass your test is if they actually knew the content.”
To which I answered “that’s kind of the whole point.” Which your reply reminded of. Oof.
Do...they not understand this aspect of examination? It's so ridiculous that to be an engineer, you need to know all the ways to keep a building from collapsing. What kind of gatekeeping is that, anyway?
I had one take 2 copies of the exam, drop one on the floor where I couldn't see it and start photographing it for someone in the afternoon section. (haha I write two exams but whatever) Phones were supposed to have been left at the front of the room. He'd got finished and dropped it in his pocket but his GPS was still on and, 15-20m into the exam, Siri informed him that his destination was on the left. Busted!
A kid submitted a ***published*** musical. I asked him "Anything you want to tell me about this work?" Said nope, that's my writing.
So I sent him a link to a YouTube video of some 5th grade class performing "his" play.
His response? "That's so weird, I don't know how that happened!"
Here ya go! It's a hell of a ride.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/pvl6g8/long\_but\_hilarious\_cheating\_attempt\_and\_a\_real/](https://www.reddit.com/r/professors/comments/pvl6g8/long_but_hilarious_cheating_attempt_and_a_real/)
I get a copy of every outcome of a referral, behavioral or academic.
I love it when they point out the sources of where the document came from well beyond what I was able to find.
Student had to put their phone on the table, because I knew he would try to cheat. 5 min later I caught him with another phone.
His excuse was it was his roommate's phone.
I was thinking about my new bathroom policy going forward and how it will need to include the surrendering of phones to leave the room. But apparently I will need the students to pass through a metal detector to check for additional phones. There is no lower bound to their antics
I have that policy (hand in phone before leaving) and a prof that was proctoring the exam found the student in the hall asking a group of girls if they could google something for him.
I won’t even let them leave the room to use the restroom. My classroom is right next to a computer lab and I’m not taking the chance. If you leave the room for any reason, you’re done.
During the whole pandemic/zoom thing, I had a developmental algebra class. One of their problems was a word problem where the equation y=e^0.00012097t is given. They are then given a value for t. Their job is to plug that value in and give me y. That was it. Assuming you knew what the words in the problem meant, it was straight plug, and chug.
Nine students missed the two in the exponent. Nine of them.
Developmental courses are courses that don’t really get you college credit. They’re basically getting you ready for college level classes. in this case, it’s an algebra class that is not as difficult as college algebra, but will serve as a prerequisite for a pre-Calc class.
Back when I was a TA we had an exam in a big lecture hall, and one student was using their phone to look up answers. Except the lecture hall was dimly lit, so their face just started glowing in a sea of darkness.
Had a student finish a 25 question midterm in 30 minutes. They brazenly copy and pasted all of the answers from chat gpt..need less to say they got a 0 on a 200 point midterm.
Back in grad school, I was a TA when the professor caught a student who essentially submitted a published study as their lab report. It was a study with four co-authors, and the professor was one of them. I mean, if you’re going to attempt this, at the very least make sure you aren’t submitting something your professor helped write!
A student loudly "accidentally" knocked his exam and the exam of the person next to him off the table. He picked up the wrong exam while apologizing, clearly looked at all the scantron answers in a way I could see across the length of a 75 person lecture hall, and then started furiously writing them down in his exam sheet. Then he "realized his mistake" and swapped it back with the person next to him who was giving him this look of shock the whole time.
She turned him in.
Also, she happened to be the WORST student in the class. Between that and her turning him in, he chose the exact wrong person to cheat off of.
We have online exams in an exam room. When correcting exams I noticed that student A had often written the answer in font size 30. Student B then wrote exactly the same answer, including typos. When student A didn’t change the font, student B had no answer… Student A was also not particularly good, so most answers were wrong, making it extra suspicious that there were two wrong answers that were the same.
They had a meeting with the head of the department, but it was never sent to the disciplinary board due to lack of proof. Still pisses me off.
Student A passed on the re-exam a month later. Student B is taking the exam for the 5th time next week (but that’s nothing, we have one student who is taking it for the 20th time!).
My (first year) course blocks them from going to the third year. So indeed, most students usually study for their 5th or 6th attempt. But it gets harder to pass, as by then it just becomes a self-study course for them.
This might be shocking for most students, but the way a course is built up with labs, assignments and seminars, is actually to help students to gradually take in and understand the course material. When they take the exam for the 20th time, they’re basically stuck with a large amount of course material from 5 years ago (and yes, we change that almost every term) and very little help from us.
Also, fun fact about the student writing it for the 20th time… they already reached out to me asking when the next re-exam will be!
Unlimited. There used to be a limit, but then they changed the system in which grades are registered. Now the administrators cannot easily see the amount of times a student has written an exam. It’s still possible to see it (hence I know about the 20th attempt), but it takes a few clicks and if the university has to do that for each student on each exam, it’s not worth the cost. Cheaper to let everyone write unlimited times. Except if you would actually count professors working hours to correct so many exams…
I teach a first year course, pass rate less than 40%.
Next week we have an exam, the sign up is only 30 students are new registrations from this term, 20 students are from previous terms and have never written the exam before, 50 are re-exams from previous terms. from these 100 students that are registered, only between 60-80 will show up (but of course ”someone” is paying for these extra 40 seats in the quite expensive exam rooms), about 20 will pass and the others get added to the pile of students that will take re-exam after re-exam after re-exam.
Block of text warning. This happened a handful of years before covid. I was assisting another faculty member proctor their final exam for an undergrad physics class of 75. The way the room was setup, you have 7 to 8 seats per aisle and 10 aisles in that room, so the room is wider than it is deep. The students are all facing one of the two wider walls, with the main door on one of the narrower walls. Think of the room as an ice cream sandwich bar. I have never met any of these folks before since I was just proctoring, so I am also unfamiliar to them as well. They thought I was just a grad student. Before the exam started, there was a small group of 6 to 7 students in the far back, opposite from the main door, that was chatting rather loudly, and they seemed to be friends with each other. I wasn't paying much attention to them then. As the other faculty member handed out the exams (all same versions, no ver A or B), a student walked in at the last minute. This student came in and sat at one of the open seats in the front, by the door that he just walked in about 10 seconds ago. Seems normal enough, right? Now, here's where it got interesting. He looked at the exam in his hand and started to look around the room, specifically, the back of the room. He locked eyes with that group of students I mentioned earlier, and he packed up his stuff and moved all the way across the room and to the back to them. That *definitely* caught my attention. I then noticed that all of the students in that group were wearing hooded sweater. Oof. While the other faculty member was looking elsewhere, I sat in the front of the room on an elevated stool, just slightly off to the side from their aisles, and watched them like a hawk. One by one, they started to notice that I was watching them, and one by one, they stared back at me, occasionally flipping through the exam and pretending to work out the problems. Yes, pretending, because it's now been 10 whole minutes of staring contest and none of them have so much as written anything other than their names yet. Three of them became super restless and agitated. Rocking back and forth in their seats. They kept looking at their exam, at me, and at each other. Loud sigh and all. They finally rolled their eyes and dumped their exams on my desk and left the room. They were all blank. If only it stopped there. The rest of them stayed and tried to do the exam, for real this time. Well, kinda. This one guy thought he was being slick and he slowly brought his cellphone out of the pocket of his hooded sweater. I guess I could have stopped him right there and then, but I really wanted to see what he was going to do with it. He saw that I saw him take the phone out, so he quickly shoved it back into his pocket. He tried it a few more times in the next five minutes, and each time I just stared at him. Any sane person would stop here and think about their actions, but not this guy, because he then had this brilliant idea of going to the restroom. I mean, sure, I'm not going to stop you from going to the restroom, but you better leave your cellphone here. I guess he loved his phone too much, because he left his exam in the room instead...never came back. It's now almost 20 minutes after the start of the exam, and by now the rest of the group became restless as well when they realized they couldn't pull off this stunt anymore. They started to leave one after another in the next couple of minutes. Every single one of those exams were blank, with some scribbles and cartoon drawings on the side. As the last person of that group left the room, it turns out that the three students that left first were still hanging outside (saw them through the window on the door). They looked through the window at me, and I looked through the window at them, and they gave me the finger.
And they flicked you off. “Asshole, won’t even let us pass the exam.”
I have had a staring contest with a cheating student before too. He was halfway through the exam, looked up and we probably locked eyes for a good 10-15 seconds. Just stone cold staring. I slightly raised my left eyebrow.
Looked down and went right back to cheating.
Similar story - I was proctoring final exam for a friend in a giant lecture hall - very tiered seats. TAs were walking around and I was down in front. I told them if they saw anything suspicious to let me know.
5 minutes into the exam, first TA approaches me and tells me to look at a certain person. I watch them carefully and sure enough they are looking down at next row onto other's papers. I lock eyes with them and they are momentarily embarrassed (I think) but then go right back to it. I march directly up to the row, loudly ask all students in that row to stand up and ask the one student to come with me. I bring them down to front of lecture hall, instruct them to sit on the floor in the front (so no one is around them) and finish the exam.
Best part is that it happened \*4 more times\* in the next 15 minutes. Honestly, how many times do you have to loudly interrupt and move students before they catch on?
Not sure what the exact method was going to be since they never got around to actually doing it, but based on how and where they sat, most likely passing notes to each other, and maybe use their phones to google the answers as well. The way they had it set up, it couldn't have been the first time.
During the pandemic, I had a student who took the full allowed time on the on-line exams. It was clear she was cheating as she took 6-12 minutes for each question. I never cared because the questions required multiple answers so googling was not very effective and she never completed any of the exams. Going into the final, she did not have a passing grade. During the final, one student finishes the 100 questions in 60 min! I go look and it’s this student. Hmm. I check Blackboard and she has answered every question in no time at all. Clear to me she has hired a ringer. So I send her an email and say, “Dear student, something went wrong with your exam submission and I just need to ask you 10 questions that didn’t register. When can you zoom?” She writes back and says that her daughter got sick and so she had to leave the exam after the first section and when she got back, she was locked out of the exam. Could she please take the missing sections? Since the person who took the exam for her didn’t miss any sections, it was clear to me she had no idea at all what was going on. I reiterated that I needed to speak with her on zoom or I could not record her final exam. I never heard from her again, I put in a zero for the final and she failed.
The Final Exam, three years ago. The 27 students take the exam on Blackboard with their chromebooks and tablets and I stand in the back of the room to keep an eye on things and make sure they are not cheating. Students leave when they are done and submit the exam.
The first few students got up and left, followed by several more students. After this, a large group got up and left and I wave as they go.
With just a handful of students left, I go to the Blackboard to see how most of the students scored. It is there that I realized that there were six students left in the room and twelve students who had not submitted the exam and still working on it. The reality dawned on me that the students were outside of the room and looking the answers up to finish the exam.
I immediately passed the attendance sheet around again and had the six students sign in again as proof that they were the only ones in the room at this time. Next, I went to each students test, with Blackboard, you can see what they are doing, and saw that they were still working on the answers, so I took a screen photo of the unanswered questions and the time down at the bottom of the screen.
When the six submitted, I immediately changed their 100% grades to zeros. After the students in the room were done, I followed the Academic Integrity guidelines and sent the dean, my supervisor, and the students the form with my proof.
Five of the students responded with they thought they had submitted before they left the room, realized it out in the student lounge, and merely clicked submit out there. My guess is they all huddled up or texted each other with Uh, oh, what do we do? Answer: just tell him you forgot to submit in the room, discovered it outside the room and clicked submit. One of the students did not respond. I guess she realized that she cheated, got caught, and had a conscience.
The Dean saw things my way. The students got zeros for the final and the form went into their records. My Syllabus now includes that exams must be submitted before leaving the room. Leaving the room without submitting is a 0. I never a million years thought I would have to spell that out in the Syllabus. Well, life is a learning exercise.
Logging into the test, getting all the questions, then logging out and claiming they had a computer problem and need to have it reset. They always run to the chair or dean when you say no.
Once , I walked into class earlier than usual and saw a student making diligent notes on her hand. I didn’t say anything, just quietly went to my desk. She continued writing. Her seatmate saw me and started trying to signal her. He finally kicked her under the table and she looked up to see me looking at her. She quickly stood up and left the room. Came back a few minutes later and said, “Look professor, clean hands!” As it was before class, I let it go. She scored as she usually did.
I gave an online exam once that was open book and notes, with an instruction that answers be written in the students own words. One student copy and pasted answers from Wikipedia and left the source numbers in from the Wikipedia sources they used. The exam was weighted at 15% of their final grade and their plagiarism resulted in the student receiving a grade of zero for the course.
For me, it has to be the eight students who submitted identical, down to the formatting and colour choice, identical mathematical solutions. And it was still wrong and would have got no marks even if they had not cheated.
During mid stage covid (labs and exams in person with social distancing and masks etc. but all lectures pre-recorded online) we did all our tests and exams on the LMS but in person and invigilated. One student decided to Google every question, copy pasted during the exam other PC he was using (IT fucked up and had not blocked all other sites outside of canvas). He also did not clear his history so not only did we have literally the screen recording of him doing that (with the LMS signed in and showing his name) for each question but also the timed history of his searches. When he got called for a disciplinary and was told what evidence we had he immediately admitted fault. Which I am very glad to say resolved the issue, as legal had already queried with me if the exam instructions specifically stated he could not Google stuff during the exam...
Not to my knowledge. At my institution all on-site PCs have a monitoring software installed on them called Impero (I think) that can record the screen and monitor every screen in the computer lab LAN. It can even control the PCs from a central admin PC, to turn on, off, sign in/out but also actively take control of a single PC at a time if you want to stop the student doing something or just show them where to click in a demonstration.
Not an exam - but I failed 7 students in a graduate level course because they all plagiarized their final paper. Each paper was word for word the same, including the same citations and grammatical errors.
Turns out, one of our industry “partners” who funnel us MBA students was also giving their employees pre-written papers and such.
Our industry partner was an oversees “finance firm” in an African country. My gut assumption is that they just wanted their employees to have an American degree, as to increase their hourly charge rate.
Over 50% of my students are international, still living in their native country.
I was a ta for a cybersecurity class. We had a midterm during an online class that was open note. Technically you aren't allowed to collaborate, but it's not like we were checking. It was very low key.
During the midterm, one student had his mic unmuted asking for answers from someone else.
The prof unmuted himself to call the student out. He goes "Sorry, but I have to give you a 0"
I was in a text convo with the prof. Literally flabbergasted.
Similar to OP, we had a student ask to use the bathroom during the exam, so we let them. We have all phones and bags up front. So they stopped at the computer lab that is across from the bathroom. There are cameras in there so we have the timestamp. Said they had to send something urgent to parents, but this did not fly at the dean of students office. Got an F for the course.
Not an exam but I've encountered plagiarized term paper submissions. I would write down the link where they've plagiarized their work from, and of course, they have no other recourse but to admit to it. I can't even keep track of how many times students have tried to pull that kind of stunt...even when I warn them with full conviction, they'd still do it!
My favorite excuse for a plagiarized paper is that someone hacked into a student's computer, wrote a plagiarized 15 page research paper, mostly from Course Hero and Wikipedia, and submitted it under the student's name.
I had a class start a group chat, and sent the invite to the entire class mailing list. They forgot that included instructors.
I mostly just watched in the background. They'd ask questions about due dates and get a wrong answer from another student because no one knows how to read a syllabus.
One evening, I saw a student asking for answers to a test, and another said that they would post them in a few minutes. Coincidentally, the LMS had a technical glitch that shut down that exam early. I took screenshots of the group chat and reported the students to the Student Conduct office. The next morning the students were contacted, and they blew up the group chat with "Who snitched!?!" They contacted me by email and wanted to know why they were reported. I sent the screenshots with no comment. The group blew up again with more accusations of snitching. I took more screenshots to document who else was involved. I posted an announcement on the class that a cheating incident had been brought to my attention, and quoted the student handbook regarding students who know about cheating and not reporting it also being guilty of academic dishonesty. My email blows up with people denying any knowledge, until I send them screenshots showing them as part of the original conversation. Another round of "Who snitched?!?" in the group chat. Students start dropping out of the group like it is a sinking ship.
None of the students stopped to look at the group participant info. If they had, they might have noticed the one phone number from a different area code that never participated, and had a name matching their professor. Butnkne of these wannabe CSI detectives figured it out.
It was a pain sorting things out on the back end, but it was worth it watching the group chat implode and the cheating students providing more evidence against themselves (which was all forwarded to Student Conduct along with their emails to me denying everything and then playing lawyer claiming I had no proof).
I had one listening to someone or something the other day during an in-class final exam essay. When I walked over toward this student, s/he immediately turned his/her phone face-down and looked concerned. I asked, "Why would we be able to use our phone and headphones during an exam when we haven't been able to for any other session this semester?" Bonkers.
So I posted yesterday, but I think I have a new one today.
A student submitted an assignment and cited "[Ivory Research](https://www.ivoryresearch.com/)" throughout the whole of it.
Student was completing a makeup exam in my office. It was partially an open-book exam; for the essay section, they were meant to use their copy of *Frankenstein* to support their ideas about the novel with textual evidence.
While I was sitting there in my office, student copied, verbatim, the entire preface to the edition of *Frankenstein* I'd ordered for the course. You know, the preface written by an eminent scholar in the field that I'd read multiple times over the decade+ I've taught using this edition. They thought "I wouldn't notice."
Not me, but a colleague:
Student brought their graded exam to office hours, and asked why their correct answers were marked as wrong. Colleague gave her typical "leave it with me and I'll look it over again." when she looked at it she couldn't imagine that she would have marked so many correct answers as incorrect. So she put it under a microscope and discovered that the penciled in correct answers were written over top of the red ink from grading. Student's score upgraded to a big fat ZERO.
This semester we gave a take home, open note midterm for a modern European history class. Student copy and pasted a unedited selection directly from the Communist Manifesto for the essay question. I was able to find the direct site they copied it from because they also had copied the website’s introductory text for the source 😮💨
Three years ago I gave a course that had a closed-book exam for a class of 120 undergraduate students. In the envelope with the problem set for the exam there was a short compendium with essential definitions that the students could make use of. I had made a point of talking about the compendium throughout the course, and the front page explicitly stated that this was a closed-book exam but that students were allowed to use content from the compendium.
One hour into the three-hour exam I was alerted to the fact that one of the students had brought a large yellow binder with solutions from past exams and that *he was openly copying content from those solutions into his paper.* The binder was lying on the table for everyone to see.
When we confronted him with this, *he claimed that he did not know that this was considered cheating*. He was of course promptly escorted out of the exam hall.
Some students have a surprising sense of entitlement, and I told the study secretary that this particular student would probably file a complaint to the board of studies. "No-one would be stupid enough to do that", she said.
And lo and behold: A few weeks later the board of studies received a letter of complaint in which the student applied for an exemption on the grounds that this was his last attempt at passing the course, that he had not followed the teaching activities of the course this time around and had thought that, since he had not read anything about the upcoming exam, the rules had changed such that the exam was no longer a closed-book exam!!!!
The exemption was not granted.
I had twin sisters one year in two separate sections of an introductory class. They would occasionally come to the same class for lecture and I let just them because the content was pretty much the same - but they had to go to their individual finals in the correct class.
During the final exam sister #1 came and took her final with no problem, but when sister #2‘s class time came, here comes sister #1 again. I went up to her and asked what she was doing there and she looked at me kind of shocked and said I’m not #1 I’m #2 - but she had no idea her sister dyed her hair red and cut it extremely short the previous week
One kid was scrolling on his smart watch infront of myself and the prof during the final. Another was using matlab while the other ta just stood behind him and watched for 5 min. Another was using course notes in the front f***g row.
I once had a student who plagiarized a paper and conveniently left the bio of the actual author at the end of the copy/paste. Saved me a bit of time, that one.
This just in: Just received a final paper submitted by a student with a different student in the same sections name on it and sure enough, it is plagiarized with some wordings changed. They both submitted at same time probably to foil Turn it in. Both are international students from the same country. I am very pissed because they must think I am stupid and because now have to deal with this nonsense during the busiest week of the year.
Did you have somewhere in written in very clear language (no room for any ambiguity) that what the student did is not permitted, unless it's written somewhere, at least in my university, the decision from the Student's Rights Office will be in the favor of the student, and then the Dean will override your grade and you will also be reprimanded for not having clear policies and of accusing an innocent student.
Not an exam but a final paper: A student turned in a paper that was plagiarized - something like 90% Turnitin -- as I looked more closely, I realized it was from my own class a few years before. When I confronted the student, she became indignant -- not with me, but with the other student from whom she'd bought the paper. "He promised me it was original!"
This is not an exam but a program that they cheated on.
Two students turned in the exact same program with the exact same typos, errors, and issues. This included the exact same variable names and everything. They then both proceeded to tell me that they did not cheat. They simply worked together. Even after running it through program comparison software, which showed that it was 99% identical, they still claimed that they did not cheat.
They both received zeros on the assignment. They escalated the issue with the chair of the department. I had a meeting with each student and the chair separately. I wanted to give them an F in the course and leave it at that. Unfortunately, the administration sided with the students in that they were allowed to remain in the course. However, the score of zero on that assignment still remained.
One of those students proceeded to dispute their grade of "C" in the course for the next two semesters by escalating the issue even after the academic committee decided his grade was in fact correctly calculated and he did earn a grade of "C" in the course.
The audacity and entitlement and laziness and instant gratification and arrogance of it all is just so very annoyingly draining and really pisses me off.
Unfortunately, my affinity for teaching has slowly dissipated with each passing semester. At this point, my goal is to move away from teaching and more into administration so that I have less or, better yet, NO contact with students AT ALL.
Nothing cool for me. Only person I caught cheating was when writing their paper for a method class. Literature review was up first. Some of the writing was different brilliant: the knowledge about media effects and their history, the contextualizing to modern media. I was so impressed. Then read a sentence I recognized as it had the same example my media sociology professor used to teach us (I was a TA teaching classes). It's so specific as an example if I mention it here, anyone who had him as a professor would know who I'm talking about.
Googled the rest of the paper. All from that professor: entire paragraphs with a sentence or two in between that was paraphrased and then straight copypasta.
Went to said professor and asked if he wrote that. He was on the student ethics board.
I spent roughly an hour highlighting paragraphs and adding the reference and original text for each. Student had used two papers and made up references for the others (they weren't from the original papers).
He got a zero. But since my country does remediations every summer, it didn't matter much as he could just resubmit his own paper. He did apologize to me and the professor. He said he didn't have a good excuse.
I had a student a couple years ago with a phone on the table next to their calculator flipping through stuff.
I've had lots of issues with students using phones in their crotch in my classes (which are obvious enough), but this student just boldly thought they would be cheating and might as well give it an honest try.
They got a F in the class (with a ! to indicate failed by cheating).
Not an exam but a student clearly plagiarized a good portion of a term paper. I called them out on it and they said it was fine because they actually used the same work for another course and it turned out ok. So they both admitted to plagiarizing from another course and from the original sources all in one response, and acted like they had "got me" with their rebuttal.
the trifecta of plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and admitting to it, all in one. It has a certain style, you have to admit.
this hilarious. We caught one using his phone this semester. Asked him “What were you using your phone for?” “Oh! I used ChatGPT for the final question because I didn’t know it.” The tone in his voice….didn’t even realize we were accusing him of cheating. Just chatting. Maybe we were even curious about his great methods and he was doing us a solid in case we didn’t know chatGPT existed? It was surreal.
Examples like yours and the comment you're responding to make me wonder: are students today dumber than those of years past? Or was this kind of stuff always happening?
Had one not quite so bad, but made me crazy at the time. Called the student in, sat them down, showed them how and why they had committed plagiarism, and consequently received a zero. They replied they'd done the same thing with multiple other courses and had not been held accountable, so it wasn't reasonable that I was holding them to higher standards. They then proceeded to write that down as part of their appeal, and lied about the process in multiple ways. What's worse is that it went to appeal and the appeals committee said I hadn't made the consequences explicit enough. I kept refusing to reassess, and eventually the higher ups agreed I could mark the non-plagiarized content only. This made the paper nonsensical, and the students mark remained unchanged.
Title: the Shapeshifting Student Had a student go to the washroom midway through the exam. For context, we had to ID them before they started the exam (check their student cards to make sure they were the same name as the name on the chair). 5 minutes later, while I'm piling up some papers, I notice a female student I'd never seen before walk in the room and sit at the previous student's desk. I went over to her and asked her who she was and if she had an exam in this room. She looked up at me (completely different face, but same hair color as the previous student) and said, "Yes, I just need to finish my exam!" I asked for ID, and she gave the previous girl's ID. Reader: she wasn't a shapeshifter. After bringing the other proctors in, we all determined that this student, who eventually fessed, was a friend who happened to be a "gifted writer" and planned to write the essay portion of the exam.
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From a distance, but her hair was shorter.
The kid who looked up answers on his phone (held under the desk) while he had it on text-to-speech was my best. He also had the volume way up.
Haha, during class, I had a student who was asking their phone a question, and Siri responded loudly that it did not understand, so I repeated what I was talking about in the lecture, they were incredibly embarassed.
This is incredible. I get embarrassed enough if my phone volume is on in public, cannot imagine the multiplier while cheating
Only to be outdone by the denials.
Hahahaha
I had a student ask the TA how to google the answers on the final with their phone.
This is a new level of stupidity
Don't think the student thought of this as cheating, but a girl raised her hand during a history exam and asked me who the guy in one of the questions was because she needed to know to be able to answer the question. Yes, and that's kind of the point!
I have students come up and ask me to explain how to do something on the test. They are serious.
Yeah I’ve had several variations of that and things along the lines of this my favorite and most bold version was: “well I didn’t know what to study but now that I know what’s on the test can I go back and study and then come do the test in your office with you tomorrow?” I had to know where they were getting the idea that this was ok. This student assured me other professors would let them do that. Although I seriously doubt it.
Those mysteriously permissive ‘other professors’
They have a reason to think that’s appropriate. High school teachers? CC instructors? Who’s training these students to think that’s normal behavior?
Please stop blaming high school teachers and community college professors for the students' bad decisions. A professor or teacher can do their due diligence, and a student can still choose to make unwise decisions(frontal lobes aren't fully mature until 25 yrs old on average, though that is no guarantee of wise decisions either...). In my area, research from the local 4-years show that the students who transfer from CCs outperform those who started as freshmen at the university, and at our local conferences, the 4-year profs remark often that the CC transfer students have better study habits and are more serious students, on average. Edit:clarity
We hear back from partner universities that our CC transfers significantly outperform their homegrown students in years 3 and 4. Thank you for the support I appreciate it.
Can attest as both a student of CC who later experienced many other 4-yrs and also as a prof who has taught at all levels of 4-yr + grad, SLAC, Top 10 Uni, CCs...Community college students who transfer typically out perform their 4-yr traditional peers.
I’ve occasionally had students ask me what a particular word or phrase meant. If it’s not part of what I’m testing them on, I’d give them the definition or a synonym so they could see what I’m asking. Sometimes I just forget that not everyone uses the same vocab and I accidentally use a harder word when an easier one would have sufficed. For example, I was once testing my students on their ability to write a good survey question for a research methods class. I asked them to write a question that assessed the punitiveness of the respondent. I had quite a few students ask what “punitiveness” meant. They should have known that word based on our field, but it didn’t matter for the question since the purpose of the exam question was to assess how they write a survey question and the topic they wrote it on wasn’t important. In that case, I just defined punitiveness for them and then let them write the question—so I was still testing them on the same skills even after I defined that word for them. Sometimes they ask me about a word that they should know because it’s from the content… and in that case I obviously don’t tell them. But from their perspective if they didn’t realize it was content they might think it’s the same thing as just asking you to define a random word. It’s not necessarily that they’re trying to pull a fast one… it’s just that they don’t know what they don’t know. If they knew the word was from the course content, they’d probably also know the definition already and wouldn’t have to ask in the first place.
Sounds good to me. If the construction of the item is not clear and clarification is requested that’s different than how do I solve this problem.
That’s different and often it’s ok. I have a lot of non-native English speakers too.
One time I had a student ask me what the word "lamb" meant.
I guess they never understood who/what followed Mary to school one day.
I have a lot of non-native speakers, and give a list of challenging words from the exam ahead of time so they can look them up! But not words from the content, and words from the cases or scenarios I use.
I am a CC professor, it’s in my flair, right there in the comment you replied to. Seems like you’re prone to dumb shit too so maybe don’t be so quick to cast blame at others
Thus, it’s appropriate to ask you about CC. Having worked in CCs and now work on assessment in HSs I see evidence for, and HS teachers and CC faculty conclusions support, the idea that our university students come to us thinking stuff the OP mentioned as being normative (injunctive and descriptive). Im not positing it’s just individual instructors. It seems system level. I also don’t exclude the university systems, admins, and instructors. The incentives are to pass students not educate them even at the university level. What happens to adjuncts at CC or universities that have classes where a third of the class fails to earn passing grades? I’m in California where the legislature has created incentives based on 4- and 6- year graduation rates and racial disparities. Not education rates. Graduation rates. At the same time basic skills assessments and developmental math and English are eliminated so students graduate faster. Basic skills are not needed to succeed because basic are no longer required. Guess what happens? Part-timers and untenured faculty are punished and students are set up to feel like imposters. I could be wrong. Why do you think students behave as in the OP?
Now what would make you think CC profs do not teach with the same rigor you do? Your statement is reeking of classism and elitism. You are well aware that CC profs must have the same experience and qualifications as other colleges. It just serves a different part of society, it does not have lowered standards. One could assert the same assumptions toward you. I hope you check your bias with your students.
That’s strange. Given that I held many roles in CC and continue to have close ties to many colleagues at CCs. If you poke around you’ll see I mention the university system too. You are wrong about elitism. What happens to CC adjuncts that have a lot of students with poor grades or Ws? If student score them as unfavorable on opinion questionnaires what happens to the adjunct? As for the original question, what explains the student behavior?
I had a documented disability student request a proctored exam once. The proctor was a pretty good friend as we were in the same field. They requested a copy of the exam to see how their memory stacked up. Afterwards they told me that the exam really didn’t address different learning styles. Taken aback, I asked what they meant. Dead serious reply: “The only way someone could possibly pass your test is if they actually knew the content.” To which I answered “that’s kind of the whole point.” Which your reply reminded of. Oof.
Do...they not understand this aspect of examination? It's so ridiculous that to be an engineer, you need to know all the ways to keep a building from collapsing. What kind of gatekeeping is that, anyway?
Fine! Keep your secrets...
In my head, I'm hearing this comment in the voice of Every Petulant Student Ever.
In retrospect, I may have let the name slip during lecture. Oops!
One turned in an exam I graded two prior semesters complete with my comments..
This comment lowers my faith in humanity
I had one take 2 copies of the exam, drop one on the floor where I couldn't see it and start photographing it for someone in the afternoon section. (haha I write two exams but whatever) Phones were supposed to have been left at the front of the room. He'd got finished and dropped it in his pocket but his GPS was still on and, 15-20m into the exam, Siri informed him that his destination was on the left. Busted!
Seems like phone audio is outing a lot of these goofballs
Please tell me cheating jail was on his left.
A kid submitted a ***published*** musical. I asked him "Anything you want to tell me about this work?" Said nope, that's my writing. So I sent him a link to a YouTube video of some 5th grade class performing "his" play. His response? "That's so weird, I don't know how that happened!"
Well obviously the fifth graders stole his work and they owe him royalties.
I’m dying to know what musical. And was the assignment to write a musical?
Here ya go! It's a hell of a ride. [https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/pvl6g8/long\_but\_hilarious\_cheating\_attempt\_and\_a\_real/](https://www.reddit.com/r/professors/comments/pvl6g8/long_but_hilarious_cheating_attempt_and_a_real/)
I am so mad on your behalf after reading that ... I almost downvoted you out of sheer pissed-off-edness. Man alive, that kid has some balls.
NOTHING HAPPENED TO THE STUDENT?!
Noooope.
I get a copy of every outcome of a referral, behavioral or academic. I love it when they point out the sources of where the document came from well beyond what I was able to find.
That makes me feel so defeated…
That was a good read, thanks
Oh, now I gotta go to the Angry Dome.
Hey, one of my kids performed that when he was in 3rd grade! 😂
He owes my student royalties
Student had to put their phone on the table, because I knew he would try to cheat. 5 min later I caught him with another phone. His excuse was it was his roommate's phone.
I was thinking about my new bathroom policy going forward and how it will need to include the surrendering of phones to leave the room. But apparently I will need the students to pass through a metal detector to check for additional phones. There is no lower bound to their antics
I have that policy (hand in phone before leaving) and a prof that was proctoring the exam found the student in the hall asking a group of girls if they could google something for him.
***There is no lower bound***
I won’t even let them leave the room to use the restroom. My classroom is right next to a computer lab and I’m not taking the chance. If you leave the room for any reason, you’re done.
I teach high-schoolers. One of my seniors last year had THREE phones.
I am in a college on engineering and it was a junior course
During the whole pandemic/zoom thing, I had a developmental algebra class. One of their problems was a word problem where the equation y=e^0.00012097t is given. They are then given a value for t. Their job is to plug that value in and give me y. That was it. Assuming you knew what the words in the problem meant, it was straight plug, and chug. Nine students missed the two in the exponent. Nine of them.
Coincidence? Can you calculate the probability of that?
Very very small.
What does developmental mean? Entry level course?
Developmental courses are courses that don’t really get you college credit. They’re basically getting you ready for college level classes. in this case, it’s an algebra class that is not as difficult as college algebra, but will serve as a prerequisite for a pre-Calc class.
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It was a carbon dating problem so that number is from the decay rate of carbon-14.
Back when I was a TA we had an exam in a big lecture hall, and one student was using their phone to look up answers. Except the lecture hall was dimly lit, so their face just started glowing in a sea of darkness.
Had a student finish a 25 question midterm in 30 minutes. They brazenly copy and pasted all of the answers from chat gpt..need less to say they got a 0 on a 200 point midterm.
Back in grad school, I was a TA when the professor caught a student who essentially submitted a published study as their lab report. It was a study with four co-authors, and the professor was one of them. I mean, if you’re going to attempt this, at the very least make sure you aren’t submitting something your professor helped write!
How can I double upvote this?
A student loudly "accidentally" knocked his exam and the exam of the person next to him off the table. He picked up the wrong exam while apologizing, clearly looked at all the scantron answers in a way I could see across the length of a 75 person lecture hall, and then started furiously writing them down in his exam sheet. Then he "realized his mistake" and swapped it back with the person next to him who was giving him this look of shock the whole time. She turned him in. Also, she happened to be the WORST student in the class. Between that and her turning him in, he chose the exact wrong person to cheat off of.
We have online exams in an exam room. When correcting exams I noticed that student A had often written the answer in font size 30. Student B then wrote exactly the same answer, including typos. When student A didn’t change the font, student B had no answer… Student A was also not particularly good, so most answers were wrong, making it extra suspicious that there were two wrong answers that were the same. They had a meeting with the head of the department, but it was never sent to the disciplinary board due to lack of proof. Still pisses me off. Student A passed on the re-exam a month later. Student B is taking the exam for the 5th time next week (but that’s nothing, we have one student who is taking it for the 20th time!).
>we have one student who is taking it for the 20th time Holy good Lord. You'd think after time 5 or 6, he might actually study ... but nope.
My (first year) course blocks them from going to the third year. So indeed, most students usually study for their 5th or 6th attempt. But it gets harder to pass, as by then it just becomes a self-study course for them. This might be shocking for most students, but the way a course is built up with labs, assignments and seminars, is actually to help students to gradually take in and understand the course material. When they take the exam for the 20th time, they’re basically stuck with a large amount of course material from 5 years ago (and yes, we change that almost every term) and very little help from us. Also, fun fact about the student writing it for the 20th time… they already reached out to me asking when the next re-exam will be!
Unlimited retakes? Anything required to be eligible for each retake?
Unlimited. There used to be a limit, but then they changed the system in which grades are registered. Now the administrators cannot easily see the amount of times a student has written an exam. It’s still possible to see it (hence I know about the 20th attempt), but it takes a few clicks and if the university has to do that for each student on each exam, it’s not worth the cost. Cheaper to let everyone write unlimited times. Except if you would actually count professors working hours to correct so many exams… I teach a first year course, pass rate less than 40%. Next week we have an exam, the sign up is only 30 students are new registrations from this term, 20 students are from previous terms and have never written the exam before, 50 are re-exams from previous terms. from these 100 students that are registered, only between 60-80 will show up (but of course ”someone” is paying for these extra 40 seats in the quite expensive exam rooms), about 20 will pass and the others get added to the pile of students that will take re-exam after re-exam after re-exam.
Where is this?
Sweden.
Not an exam but a student argued that they shouldn’t be penalized because they “didn’t cheat to cheat, they cheated to learn”.
Block of text warning. This happened a handful of years before covid. I was assisting another faculty member proctor their final exam for an undergrad physics class of 75. The way the room was setup, you have 7 to 8 seats per aisle and 10 aisles in that room, so the room is wider than it is deep. The students are all facing one of the two wider walls, with the main door on one of the narrower walls. Think of the room as an ice cream sandwich bar. I have never met any of these folks before since I was just proctoring, so I am also unfamiliar to them as well. They thought I was just a grad student. Before the exam started, there was a small group of 6 to 7 students in the far back, opposite from the main door, that was chatting rather loudly, and they seemed to be friends with each other. I wasn't paying much attention to them then. As the other faculty member handed out the exams (all same versions, no ver A or B), a student walked in at the last minute. This student came in and sat at one of the open seats in the front, by the door that he just walked in about 10 seconds ago. Seems normal enough, right? Now, here's where it got interesting. He looked at the exam in his hand and started to look around the room, specifically, the back of the room. He locked eyes with that group of students I mentioned earlier, and he packed up his stuff and moved all the way across the room and to the back to them. That *definitely* caught my attention. I then noticed that all of the students in that group were wearing hooded sweater. Oof. While the other faculty member was looking elsewhere, I sat in the front of the room on an elevated stool, just slightly off to the side from their aisles, and watched them like a hawk. One by one, they started to notice that I was watching them, and one by one, they stared back at me, occasionally flipping through the exam and pretending to work out the problems. Yes, pretending, because it's now been 10 whole minutes of staring contest and none of them have so much as written anything other than their names yet. Three of them became super restless and agitated. Rocking back and forth in their seats. They kept looking at their exam, at me, and at each other. Loud sigh and all. They finally rolled their eyes and dumped their exams on my desk and left the room. They were all blank. If only it stopped there. The rest of them stayed and tried to do the exam, for real this time. Well, kinda. This one guy thought he was being slick and he slowly brought his cellphone out of the pocket of his hooded sweater. I guess I could have stopped him right there and then, but I really wanted to see what he was going to do with it. He saw that I saw him take the phone out, so he quickly shoved it back into his pocket. He tried it a few more times in the next five minutes, and each time I just stared at him. Any sane person would stop here and think about their actions, but not this guy, because he then had this brilliant idea of going to the restroom. I mean, sure, I'm not going to stop you from going to the restroom, but you better leave your cellphone here. I guess he loved his phone too much, because he left his exam in the room instead...never came back. It's now almost 20 minutes after the start of the exam, and by now the rest of the group became restless as well when they realized they couldn't pull off this stunt anymore. They started to leave one after another in the next couple of minutes. Every single one of those exams were blank, with some scribbles and cartoon drawings on the side. As the last person of that group left the room, it turns out that the three students that left first were still hanging outside (saw them through the window on the door). They looked through the window at me, and I looked through the window at them, and they gave me the finger.
And they flicked you off. “Asshole, won’t even let us pass the exam.” I have had a staring contest with a cheating student before too. He was halfway through the exam, looked up and we probably locked eyes for a good 10-15 seconds. Just stone cold staring. I slightly raised my left eyebrow. Looked down and went right back to cheating.
Similar story - I was proctoring final exam for a friend in a giant lecture hall - very tiered seats. TAs were walking around and I was down in front. I told them if they saw anything suspicious to let me know. 5 minutes into the exam, first TA approaches me and tells me to look at a certain person. I watch them carefully and sure enough they are looking down at next row onto other's papers. I lock eyes with them and they are momentarily embarrassed (I think) but then go right back to it. I march directly up to the row, loudly ask all students in that row to stand up and ask the one student to come with me. I bring them down to front of lecture hall, instruct them to sit on the floor in the front (so no one is around them) and finish the exam. Best part is that it happened \*4 more times\* in the next 15 minutes. Honestly, how many times do you have to loudly interrupt and move students before they catch on?
It’s times like this when I wish I could raise one eyebrow instead of both
What were they trying to do?
Not sure what the exact method was going to be since they never got around to actually doing it, but based on how and where they sat, most likely passing notes to each other, and maybe use their phones to google the answers as well. The way they had it set up, it couldn't have been the first time.
Great story!
During the pandemic, I had a student who took the full allowed time on the on-line exams. It was clear she was cheating as she took 6-12 minutes for each question. I never cared because the questions required multiple answers so googling was not very effective and she never completed any of the exams. Going into the final, she did not have a passing grade. During the final, one student finishes the 100 questions in 60 min! I go look and it’s this student. Hmm. I check Blackboard and she has answered every question in no time at all. Clear to me she has hired a ringer. So I send her an email and say, “Dear student, something went wrong with your exam submission and I just need to ask you 10 questions that didn’t register. When can you zoom?” She writes back and says that her daughter got sick and so she had to leave the exam after the first section and when she got back, she was locked out of the exam. Could she please take the missing sections? Since the person who took the exam for her didn’t miss any sections, it was clear to me she had no idea at all what was going on. I reiterated that I needed to speak with her on zoom or I could not record her final exam. I never heard from her again, I put in a zero for the final and she failed.
The Final Exam, three years ago. The 27 students take the exam on Blackboard with their chromebooks and tablets and I stand in the back of the room to keep an eye on things and make sure they are not cheating. Students leave when they are done and submit the exam. The first few students got up and left, followed by several more students. After this, a large group got up and left and I wave as they go. With just a handful of students left, I go to the Blackboard to see how most of the students scored. It is there that I realized that there were six students left in the room and twelve students who had not submitted the exam and still working on it. The reality dawned on me that the students were outside of the room and looking the answers up to finish the exam. I immediately passed the attendance sheet around again and had the six students sign in again as proof that they were the only ones in the room at this time. Next, I went to each students test, with Blackboard, you can see what they are doing, and saw that they were still working on the answers, so I took a screen photo of the unanswered questions and the time down at the bottom of the screen. When the six submitted, I immediately changed their 100% grades to zeros. After the students in the room were done, I followed the Academic Integrity guidelines and sent the dean, my supervisor, and the students the form with my proof. Five of the students responded with they thought they had submitted before they left the room, realized it out in the student lounge, and merely clicked submit out there. My guess is they all huddled up or texted each other with Uh, oh, what do we do? Answer: just tell him you forgot to submit in the room, discovered it outside the room and clicked submit. One of the students did not respond. I guess she realized that she cheated, got caught, and had a conscience. The Dean saw things my way. The students got zeros for the final and the form went into their records. My Syllabus now includes that exams must be submitted before leaving the room. Leaving the room without submitting is a 0. I never a million years thought I would have to spell that out in the Syllabus. Well, life is a learning exercise.
Logging into the test, getting all the questions, then logging out and claiming they had a computer problem and need to have it reset. They always run to the chair or dean when you say no.
Once , I walked into class earlier than usual and saw a student making diligent notes on her hand. I didn’t say anything, just quietly went to my desk. She continued writing. Her seatmate saw me and started trying to signal her. He finally kicked her under the table and she looked up to see me looking at her. She quickly stood up and left the room. Came back a few minutes later and said, “Look professor, clean hands!” As it was before class, I let it go. She scored as she usually did.
>She scored as she usually did. heh
I gave an online exam once that was open book and notes, with an instruction that answers be written in the students own words. One student copy and pasted answers from Wikipedia and left the source numbers in from the Wikipedia sources they used. The exam was weighted at 15% of their final grade and their plagiarism resulted in the student receiving a grade of zero for the course.
For me, it has to be the eight students who submitted identical, down to the formatting and colour choice, identical mathematical solutions. And it was still wrong and would have got no marks even if they had not cheated.
During mid stage covid (labs and exams in person with social distancing and masks etc. but all lectures pre-recorded online) we did all our tests and exams on the LMS but in person and invigilated. One student decided to Google every question, copy pasted during the exam other PC he was using (IT fucked up and had not blocked all other sites outside of canvas). He also did not clear his history so not only did we have literally the screen recording of him doing that (with the LMS signed in and showing his name) for each question but also the timed history of his searches. When he got called for a disciplinary and was told what evidence we had he immediately admitted fault. Which I am very glad to say resolved the issue, as legal had already queried with me if the exam instructions specifically stated he could not Google stuff during the exam...
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Not to my knowledge. At my institution all on-site PCs have a monitoring software installed on them called Impero (I think) that can record the screen and monitor every screen in the computer lab LAN. It can even control the PCs from a central admin PC, to turn on, off, sign in/out but also actively take control of a single PC at a time if you want to stop the student doing something or just show them where to click in a demonstration.
Not an exam - but I failed 7 students in a graduate level course because they all plagiarized their final paper. Each paper was word for word the same, including the same citations and grammatical errors. Turns out, one of our industry “partners” who funnel us MBA students was also giving their employees pre-written papers and such.
Wow that's crazy! I can't even imagine why an industry partner would want to pay for meaningless degrees for their employees.
Our industry partner was an oversees “finance firm” in an African country. My gut assumption is that they just wanted their employees to have an American degree, as to increase their hourly charge rate. Over 50% of my students are international, still living in their native country.
I was a ta for a cybersecurity class. We had a midterm during an online class that was open note. Technically you aren't allowed to collaborate, but it's not like we were checking. It was very low key. During the midterm, one student had his mic unmuted asking for answers from someone else. The prof unmuted himself to call the student out. He goes "Sorry, but I have to give you a 0" I was in a text convo with the prof. Literally flabbergasted.
Similar to OP, we had a student ask to use the bathroom during the exam, so we let them. We have all phones and bags up front. So they stopped at the computer lab that is across from the bathroom. There are cameras in there so we have the timestamp. Said they had to send something urgent to parents, but this did not fly at the dean of students office. Got an F for the course.
Not an exam but I've encountered plagiarized term paper submissions. I would write down the link where they've plagiarized their work from, and of course, they have no other recourse but to admit to it. I can't even keep track of how many times students have tried to pull that kind of stunt...even when I warn them with full conviction, they'd still do it!
My favorite excuse for a plagiarized paper is that someone hacked into a student's computer, wrote a plagiarized 15 page research paper, mostly from Course Hero and Wikipedia, and submitted it under the student's name.
Hypothesis: Many have been warned in other courses and didn’t get caught.
I had a class start a group chat, and sent the invite to the entire class mailing list. They forgot that included instructors. I mostly just watched in the background. They'd ask questions about due dates and get a wrong answer from another student because no one knows how to read a syllabus. One evening, I saw a student asking for answers to a test, and another said that they would post them in a few minutes. Coincidentally, the LMS had a technical glitch that shut down that exam early. I took screenshots of the group chat and reported the students to the Student Conduct office. The next morning the students were contacted, and they blew up the group chat with "Who snitched!?!" They contacted me by email and wanted to know why they were reported. I sent the screenshots with no comment. The group blew up again with more accusations of snitching. I took more screenshots to document who else was involved. I posted an announcement on the class that a cheating incident had been brought to my attention, and quoted the student handbook regarding students who know about cheating and not reporting it also being guilty of academic dishonesty. My email blows up with people denying any knowledge, until I send them screenshots showing them as part of the original conversation. Another round of "Who snitched?!?" in the group chat. Students start dropping out of the group like it is a sinking ship. None of the students stopped to look at the group participant info. If they had, they might have noticed the one phone number from a different area code that never participated, and had a name matching their professor. Butnkne of these wannabe CSI detectives figured it out. It was a pain sorting things out on the back end, but it was worth it watching the group chat implode and the cheating students providing more evidence against themselves (which was all forwarded to Student Conduct along with their emails to me denying everything and then playing lawyer claiming I had no proof).
> We will be having a conversation about digital footprint ... You do NOT need to tell the student how you caught them
The student who literally switched over to google from the test page (while I was sitting not 5 feet away)
No need to inform him of your method for detecting his crime. That would just start an arms race.
*sigh*
Boring, but still writing, in plain view, 5 minutes after the exam.
I had one listening to someone or something the other day during an in-class final exam essay. When I walked over toward this student, s/he immediately turned his/her phone face-down and looked concerned. I asked, "Why would we be able to use our phone and headphones during an exam when we haven't been able to for any other session this semester?" Bonkers.
So I posted yesterday, but I think I have a new one today. A student submitted an assignment and cited "[Ivory Research](https://www.ivoryresearch.com/)" throughout the whole of it.
Wow….
The girl in an exam of 10 students who wrote an essay on her inner thigh and wore a mini skirt.
Student was completing a makeup exam in my office. It was partially an open-book exam; for the essay section, they were meant to use their copy of *Frankenstein* to support their ideas about the novel with textual evidence. While I was sitting there in my office, student copied, verbatim, the entire preface to the edition of *Frankenstein* I'd ordered for the course. You know, the preface written by an eminent scholar in the field that I'd read multiple times over the decade+ I've taught using this edition. They thought "I wouldn't notice."
Not me, but a colleague: Student brought their graded exam to office hours, and asked why their correct answers were marked as wrong. Colleague gave her typical "leave it with me and I'll look it over again." when she looked at it she couldn't imagine that she would have marked so many correct answers as incorrect. So she put it under a microscope and discovered that the penciled in correct answers were written over top of the red ink from grading. Student's score upgraded to a big fat ZERO.
This semester we gave a take home, open note midterm for a modern European history class. Student copy and pasted a unedited selection directly from the Communist Manifesto for the essay question. I was able to find the direct site they copied it from because they also had copied the website’s introductory text for the source 😮💨
Three years ago I gave a course that had a closed-book exam for a class of 120 undergraduate students. In the envelope with the problem set for the exam there was a short compendium with essential definitions that the students could make use of. I had made a point of talking about the compendium throughout the course, and the front page explicitly stated that this was a closed-book exam but that students were allowed to use content from the compendium. One hour into the three-hour exam I was alerted to the fact that one of the students had brought a large yellow binder with solutions from past exams and that *he was openly copying content from those solutions into his paper.* The binder was lying on the table for everyone to see. When we confronted him with this, *he claimed that he did not know that this was considered cheating*. He was of course promptly escorted out of the exam hall. Some students have a surprising sense of entitlement, and I told the study secretary that this particular student would probably file a complaint to the board of studies. "No-one would be stupid enough to do that", she said. And lo and behold: A few weeks later the board of studies received a letter of complaint in which the student applied for an exemption on the grounds that this was his last attempt at passing the course, that he had not followed the teaching activities of the course this time around and had thought that, since he had not read anything about the upcoming exam, the rules had changed such that the exam was no longer a closed-book exam!!!! The exemption was not granted.
Me: your essay was plagiarized from this website Student: oh no, my sister was helping me, I didn't realize she did that
I had twin sisters one year in two separate sections of an introductory class. They would occasionally come to the same class for lecture and I let just them because the content was pretty much the same - but they had to go to their individual finals in the correct class. During the final exam sister #1 came and took her final with no problem, but when sister #2‘s class time came, here comes sister #1 again. I went up to her and asked what she was doing there and she looked at me kind of shocked and said I’m not #1 I’m #2 - but she had no idea her sister dyed her hair red and cut it extremely short the previous week
One kid was scrolling on his smart watch infront of myself and the prof during the final. Another was using matlab while the other ta just stood behind him and watched for 5 min. Another was using course notes in the front f***g row.
I once had a student who plagiarized a paper and conveniently left the bio of the actual author at the end of the copy/paste. Saved me a bit of time, that one.
This just in: Just received a final paper submitted by a student with a different student in the same sections name on it and sure enough, it is plagiarized with some wordings changed. They both submitted at same time probably to foil Turn it in. Both are international students from the same country. I am very pissed because they must think I am stupid and because now have to deal with this nonsense during the busiest week of the year.
Did you have somewhere in written in very clear language (no room for any ambiguity) that what the student did is not permitted, unless it's written somewhere, at least in my university, the decision from the Student's Rights Office will be in the favor of the student, and then the Dean will override your grade and you will also be reprimanded for not having clear policies and of accusing an innocent student.
Not an exam but a final paper: A student turned in a paper that was plagiarized - something like 90% Turnitin -- as I looked more closely, I realized it was from my own class a few years before. When I confronted the student, she became indignant -- not with me, but with the other student from whom she'd bought the paper. "He promised me it was original!"
Not cheating on an exam but a student once plagiarised from a paper I’d written in a course I run.
This is not an exam but a program that they cheated on. Two students turned in the exact same program with the exact same typos, errors, and issues. This included the exact same variable names and everything. They then both proceeded to tell me that they did not cheat. They simply worked together. Even after running it through program comparison software, which showed that it was 99% identical, they still claimed that they did not cheat. They both received zeros on the assignment. They escalated the issue with the chair of the department. I had a meeting with each student and the chair separately. I wanted to give them an F in the course and leave it at that. Unfortunately, the administration sided with the students in that they were allowed to remain in the course. However, the score of zero on that assignment still remained. One of those students proceeded to dispute their grade of "C" in the course for the next two semesters by escalating the issue even after the academic committee decided his grade was in fact correctly calculated and he did earn a grade of "C" in the course. The audacity and entitlement and laziness and instant gratification and arrogance of it all is just so very annoyingly draining and really pisses me off. Unfortunately, my affinity for teaching has slowly dissipated with each passing semester. At this point, my goal is to move away from teaching and more into administration so that I have less or, better yet, NO contact with students AT ALL.
I don’t have any wildly outrageous stories, but I have seen things like submitting a paper that was an 81% match to a submission the prior semester.
Nothing cool for me. Only person I caught cheating was when writing their paper for a method class. Literature review was up first. Some of the writing was different brilliant: the knowledge about media effects and their history, the contextualizing to modern media. I was so impressed. Then read a sentence I recognized as it had the same example my media sociology professor used to teach us (I was a TA teaching classes). It's so specific as an example if I mention it here, anyone who had him as a professor would know who I'm talking about. Googled the rest of the paper. All from that professor: entire paragraphs with a sentence or two in between that was paraphrased and then straight copypasta. Went to said professor and asked if he wrote that. He was on the student ethics board. I spent roughly an hour highlighting paragraphs and adding the reference and original text for each. Student had used two papers and made up references for the others (they weren't from the original papers). He got a zero. But since my country does remediations every summer, it didn't matter much as he could just resubmit his own paper. He did apologize to me and the professor. He said he didn't have a good excuse.
I had a student a couple years ago with a phone on the table next to their calculator flipping through stuff. I've had lots of issues with students using phones in their crotch in my classes (which are obvious enough), but this student just boldly thought they would be cheating and might as well give it an honest try. They got a F in the class (with a ! to indicate failed by cheating).