One teacher was so sick of his students using their mobile phones to get the answers for his exam that he devised a plan to catch the cheaters. The trick turned out great results, as he caught 14 students by planting an impossible question.
An Exam Question With a Planted Answer Online Sprung the Trap
In the days before smartphones, cheaters had to get creative to sneak answers into the exam and avoid the watchful gaze of the teacher. However, in modern times, the iPhone or any other device could easily be connected to the Internet and supply cheaters with the answers they need to go through an exam. So, one teacher figured that modern problems required modern solutions and got to work to catch the students who were cheating on his exam. The genius plan involved adding an impossible question to a test and planting the fake answer online. So, anyone who would answer the question using the planted answer would definitely have cheated by looking for it online.
The Answer Was Posted by a Teaching Assistant Who Was in on the Ploy
The teacher posted the answer to the bogus question on a website where students go for help with answering exam questions. While they believed the teacher knew nothing about the site, they were wrong, and he was ahead of them. So, when the exam was over, students who’d answered using the fake answer were emailed and told they’d been caught. The students then took to Reddit to explain how the teacher made part B impossible to solve and set up the scheme about a month before the final.
Apparently, the teacher got a teaching assistant who had an account on the website to ask the question, which was distinctly worded and unique. The teacher then created his account, answering the question with a fake solution that was correct at first glance but was ultimately wrong. The clever trick worked, and out of the 99 students who were taking the exam, 14 used the fake answer the teacher had created.