Cheating is the bane of any exam and a growing access to the internet is only making things worse.
Rather than using their brains and the information they'd learned at school to think of an answer, a quick Google search for answers ought to do the trick.
In real life, you can Google a lot of the answers you're seeking, but it'll do little for your ability to solve problems and answer questions put to you using your own smarts.
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It also rather comprehensively demolishes the point of taking any sort of exam, since you're not really showing you know how to work out the answer without the crutch of cheating for it.
We're in the day and age where teachers are having to worry about students using AI to write their answers out for them, so laying some clever traps to catch them out is part of the job now.
That's why one teacher came up with an ingenious solution to catch out the cheaters among his students and tricked 14 of them into revealing their nefarious ways.
When the teacher noticed that a lot of his students were taking toilet breaks during exams, he started getting suspicious.
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Wondering whether his students were disappearing not to answer the call of nature but to cheat on their exam by searching for answers, he cooked up a trap.
He did this by adding his own 'impossible' question to the quiz which his students wouldn't be able to solve, then made sure anyone looking up the answer would get caught out.
About a month before the exam he got a teaching assistant to put the question online and ask how to solve it, the teacher then posted his own answer which would look pretty plausible to anyone not thinking too much about it, like a student cheating on a test by quickly sneaking a look at their phone on a loo break.
With the trap set, all that the teacher had to do was wait and see which of his students would take the bait and put in the fake answer to the impossible question.
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The only way they'd get the answer was to look it up online, and out of 99 students taking the test, 14 of them ended up being caught.
They were given zero marks on the test as a punishment, and opinion was split over whether the teacher was right to trick his students or not after the teacher's message explaining things was posted to Reddit.
Some people figured it was a 'pretty smart and fair move' and it was 'well played' by the teacher, but others reckoned it was a 'dick move'.
"What if someone wastes their time on this question and doesn't have enough for the rest," one person wondered, and someone else said the teacher was on a 'power trip'.
Joe Harker