Teacher creates ingenious exam question to find cheaters and catches 14 students

A teacher so utterly sick of students using their mobile phones to cheat on exams caught out 14 culprits with one ingenious question.

Back in the days before the iPhone, cheaters had to be properly creative in their constant duel to sneak answers into the exam hall and avoid the watchful eye of the invigilator.

Of course there was the classic 'look at someone else's paper', but more advanced cheaters would write hints and answers in all sorts of places, and the invigilators would hit back by banning calculator covers and labels on water bottles.

Some students even went as far as hiding calculators up their sleeve and hoping the thing didn't slide out mid exam.

However, these days aspiring cheaters have a tiny calculator and a computer in their pocket where the answer to just about any question can be found in a matter of seconds, provided the teacher doesn't spot you with it.

Charlie Newham / Alamy Stock Photo

One teacher reached their wits end with all the technology based cheating, and decided to teach their students a different sort of lesson.

According to the Daily Mirror, 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, when an exam was on half the class would suddenly have to answer the call of nature.

Deducing that they had to be nipping off the illegally obtain an answer, he formulated his plan to catch them out.

The genius plan involved creating an impossible question and then adding it to a test.

Working by that logic, anyone who managed to find an answer that was planted online must have cheated to get it.

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.

Avpics / Alamy Stock Photo

Obviously, they'd have thought the teacher knew nothing about the site, but - as is often the case - he was way ahead of them.

Taking to Reddit, students explained how the teacher 'purposely made part B impossible to solve', and set up the scheme about a month before the final by getting 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 fake solution that seemed right at first glance, the sort a student who'd nipped out to the loo to look at their phone might give, but was wrong and would be clearly wrong to a teacher giving it proper thought.

The subterfuge clearly worked because of the 99 students who 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, unless you count planting a false question in an exam to catch people out as cheating in which case yes they do.

Topics: Education, Students, News, Weird

Joe Harker

Joe graduated from the University of Salford with a degree in Journalism and worked for Reach before joining the LADbible Group. When not writing he enjoys the nerdier things in life like painting wargaming miniatures and chatting with other nerds on the internet. He's also spent a few years coaching fencing. Contact him via [email protected]

@MrJoeHarker