‘I now routinely do this, just in case.’ Teacher Rewrote A Final Exam After They Discovered A Cheating Plot

I’m gonna give all you students out there a little bit of free advice: don’t cheat!

For one, you’ll regret later on in life that you didn’t actually put the work in when you should have.

And two, you might get caught…and then you’re really screwed.

A teacher took to Reddit and told readers about what they did to a group of would-cheaters in their classroom.

“I see quite a few stories in here about students taking revenge on their teachers. I thought it was time I posted a story about instructors taking revenge on their students.

They have a policy that actually sounds pretty good for students.

I teach part-time as adjunct faculty at a business school. I have a policy in many of the courses that I teach that if you do better on the final exam than on the midterm, your final exam grade replaces your midterm exam grade.

But some kids tried to take advantage of them…and they got an anonymous tip.

One semester some students decided to exploit this. Apparently in an earlier semester, a student took photographs of his exam paper. (This is absolutely against the rules.) Somehow I didn’t discover it at the time. A student sent me an anonymous tip that my exam was compromised. I was actually going to write a fully new exam for that section that semester, but I decided to test the student’s assertation.

Time for a rewrite!

I took the exam in question that was compromised, and I completely and subtly rewrote it. I made it so that it looked the same as the old exam. However, if you actually read it you’d see that the questions (or sometimes answers, on multiple choice questions) were subtly changed, such that the correct answer would be very different.

Any student who wasn’t familiar with the old exam and wasn’t relying on it would do fine, because none of the wording was misleading or anything – it was just very misleading if you expected the previous exam to be that day’s exam.

Funny how this worked out…

The class average was a little lower than average, but most students did about as I would have expected.

However, about seven students that clearly knew each other pretty well got very, very bad grades on the exam and failed it.

None failed the course, but all of them had their overall grade go down significantly.

These kids knew what was up…

I never heard a word of challenge from any of them. I’ve no idea if they figured out what I did, but I’m glad that student gave me the tip.

I now routinely do this, just in case. No idea if it’s helping, but an instructor has to keep his students on their toes.”

Check out how folks reacted on Reddit.

This person said the students deserved this.

Another Reddit user made a great point.

One individual said they do this all the time.

And this reader shared a quote we should all take to heart.

Go ahead, kids…make my day…

That’s what I imagine this teacher saying!