A teacher who had become sick of students using their mobile phones to cheat in exams managed to catch 14 of them red-handed by plotting an ingenious trick.
For those of us over a certain age, the idea of cheating on an exam must have seemed completely impossible. You'd have to have notes, or a secret calculator, or some other intricate form of plan to get away with it.
However, 2019 is something of a golden age for the aspiring cheater. Now, we've all got smart devices in our pocket that can yield the answer to just about any question in a matter of seconds.
That was a source of much discomfort to one teacher. Having become irked by the constant dishonesty from students in a particular class, he decided to teach them a different sort of lesson.
According to Mirror Online, the suspicious educator spotted that an unusual number of students needed to use the bathroom during exams. Whereas there would normally be just one or two, suddenly half the class would hear nature call when an exam was on.
After deducing that they had to be nipping off the illegally obtain an answer, he formulated his plan.
It involved creating an impossible question, then adding it to a test. Through that logic, anyone who managed to find an answer that was planted online must have arrived there through nefarious means.
In a Reddit post, one of the students wrote: "Usually one or two people will go to the bathroom during class, however, for totally unknown reasons, about half of the class needed to use the restroom during the exam.
"Obviously a vast majority of them were looking up the answers on their phones."
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The question that had been planted 'barely related to the stuff we went over in class', the student continued.
So, once the exam was over, those who'd answered correctly were emailed and told they'd been busted.
The teacher apparently posted the bogus question on a website students sometimes use for help with answering homework and exam questions.
Obviously, they'd have thought the teacher knew nothing about the site, but - as is often the case - the older man was way ahead of them.
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The student explained how the teacher 'purposely made part B impossible to solve', and about a month before the final got a teaching assistant with an account on the site to ask the exact question, which was distinctly worded to be unique.
The teacher then created their own account and 'answered the question with a [made up] solution that seems right at first glance but is actually fundamentally flawed and very unlikely that someone would make the same assumptions and mistakes independently'.
Of the 99 students that sat the exam, 14 used the answer he'd created. They were given a mark of zero and reported to the university for violating the academic pledge they'd signed.
Everyone who got it wrong received full credit for the question.
Let that be a lesson to you, cheaters never prosper.
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