When I was a graduate student I spent a year marking weekly first year quizzes. To minimize the chance of copying off a neighbour, two different quizzes were made up each week, put on different colored paper, and distributed in a checker board pattern. So all the immediate neighbors of any given student would be writing a different quiz. One week I was puzzled that a student had crossed off a perfectly correct solution to his quiz. On closer inspection, he had replaced with another perfect solution - to the other quiz!
For 10 years I had thought this was the worst ever attempt at cheating, until a friend recently shared a recent experience from his own class. After giving a final exam he received three different anonymous phone calls accusing the same students of copying (snitching in itself is extremely rare). His procedure had been the same as for the quizzes I marked earlier - two different color exams etc. In this case it was a machine marked multiple choice exam. He compared exam results and sure enough the three students had identical answers, but they had different color papers. So the two 'copiers' had failed the exam, and now that they were caught they were facing expulsion. It turns out however that these two were much stupider than the one I had caught 10 years earlier. On a hunch, my friend went back and compared the Christmas exams for the same three students - same result. These students had obviously not clued in that there was a problem with their system when it caused them to miserably fail an earlier exam.
Of course there are many silly tales of students doing themselves in when attempting to cheat. Another friend of mine told how he as he was entering the examination room he noticed one of his students near the door inside an adjacent room. The fellow was furiously scribbling away onto his hand. I guess that you could say that once the exam started he was caught blue handed.
The following tales come from Maurice Barnhill mvb@UDel.Edu, and are reprinted with permission after appearing on the discussion group PHYS-L.
This one comes from Jeff Marx marxj2@ciue.rpi.edu:
Here's a true story that happened here at Rensselaer.
An assistant professor gave his mandatory final exam for Physics I last December during final exam week. As is prone to happen here in Troy, NY it snowed, hard. The professor noted during the exam that a few students (who as it happened all knew each other) were missing. The next day he got a phone call. Needless to say it was one of the students who missed the exam. He claimed that he got stuck in a friend's apartment in Albany (only about 15 to 20 minutes away barring snow) and was wondering if he could take the exam now? Very reluctantly, the instructor told the student he could come in and take a make-up exam. The next thing the professor knew, he not only had the student who called but the rest of his gang of friends all claiming they were stuck together in Albany. Well, the instructor was livid. Not knowing what to do he sent them all away and told them to come back in 30 minutes.
When they came back he was ready for them. He told them before they could take the make-up exam they had to pass a small quiz. He set the four students down in opposite corners of a room and handed each of them a blank sheet of paper and instructed them to write their names and the answers to the following questions...
- What color was the car you drove in to Albany?
- What floor was the apartment on?
- What color was the apartment?
- How many rooms did it have?
He told me that some the guys didn't even try to answer any of the questions!!! They just knew they were exposed. He sent them on their way and failed them all.
Interestingly enough this true story may be based on a not-so-true story. The professor told me that in the 30 minutes he had to try and figure out what to do a story came to him about a similar situation that supposedly happened here at Rensselaer, involving a rather famous teacher here... Four students come to the instructor and say they couldn't make it to a test because while they were on their way to the exam their car go a flat. The professor sat them in the four corners and asked them each to write the answer to one question: "What tire was it."
I doubt that this second story is really true. I have a natural tendency to be on the watch for urban (university) myths. I think they are fun to collect. Here at RPI, like just about any other school, we have a ton of them. The thing I find the most interesting is that some people buy into every one of them hook, line, and sinker. Perhaps there is a lesson in that for us physics instructors!
These come from L. Burns lburns@idirect.com:
I gave a multiple choice test with several versions of the test to prevent roving eyeballs. Unfortunately, there were a few typographical errors on the tests, so I put corrections on the board.
When I collected the papers, I found one student had corrected his question sheet not only with considerable zeal, but with intelligence commensurate with his other marks.
He had been give test one, but had changed **ALL** the questions to those of test two, and then answered them in a manner which resonated with that of his friend, who had been given test two.
*****
I thought it as funny (arggh) as another time another student came to me and told me his mark on a test was not the 8 / 40 I had recorded, but 37. I said bring me the paper, so he showed me "this" paper - lo and behold, his name on a paper I had given 37 to.
After a period of self doubt, I started to examine the exhibit. The student's name was written in a different ink, on top of white-out that did not completely cover the last few letters of the name of the only student in the class who had received 37 / 40.
Arrgh ! :-)