30 College Professors Reveal the Dumbest Things Their Students Did
Hopefully the kids here learned something from these incidents and are more responsible adults today because of it. Although there's a good chance they're still out there acting a fool.
1.
I had a student who told me, being 100% serious, that he wouldn’t be presenting on his assigned day because he 'didn’t do the assignment and he’d go the next day.'
2.
I had a girl come in with a research paper bibliography that listed "my mom" as a source several times.
When I pressed, she told me her mom looked up everything and sent it to her and she just...put it in the paper. She told me she had always done it that way.
3.
I once got an exam essay that mentioned how much Mandela hated the Jews. After scratching my head for a bit and wondering if I’d missed some obvious signs of his anti-Semitism I realized she meant Mengele.
As in Josef Mengele, the Nazi “Angel of Death.” Hard to think of a worse person she could’ve confused him for.
4.
A friend who taught in the politics department received a paper about ‘gorilla’ warfare in South America. It was so poorly written she couldn’t tell if it was a typo, or if they genuinely thought Colombia had been overrun by a Planet of the Apes style revolution.
This was in the UK and English was the student’s first language.
5.
I worked with students in a class that was supposed to prepare them for real life. Things like making resumes, finance, etc. Part of the class was job interviews.
One of the stress questions often asked in interviews is, "What's your biggest weakness?" I always told the students to have something prepared for that because the only wrong answer is, "I don't have any weaknesses."
So I'm doing mock interviews and I get to this guy and throw out that question. Without missing a beat, he says, "I steal sometimes."
I now tell my students that there are two wrong answers.
6.
I had a student put in their presentation, 'Women's suffrage has destroyed the American family structure,' and 'feminism has turned women away from their naturally obedient nature.'
7.
There have been disturbingly high numbers of students on a performance based music degree who can't read music.
Not musicologists or conceptual composers who could in theory get away with it. No, these were people turning up expecting to study western classical performance.
8.
I taught English as a Second Language at a community college for a decade. My colleagues and I were pretty tough on the academics, but it paid off when our students started regular classes.
Often I ran into my former students around campus & asked them how things were going.
I lost count of the number of times they expressed disbelief at how badly their native-speaking American classmates were at writing sentences, doing math, and giving presentations in front of a group.
9.
In undergrad I was taking an American history course. Our professor was from Maryland and was probably in her early forties.
This kid asked her if she was one of the Pearl Harbor survivors. He couldn't grasp the fact that she was very much not alive at that time and that Pearl Harbor was not a harbor in Maryland.
10.
I used to TA for undergrad organic chem lab courses. Had a challenging student once who was not great at reading directions or thinking critically.
We were setting up an experiment that required gentle heating of a volatile solvent. I explicitly told the class, “Only turn your hot plates up to 2 when heating, these things get very hot.”
Maybe 30 minutes later I’m making my rounds through the lab and I pass said guy’s fume hood and notice his reaction is smoking. I look closer and see that all of the liquid in his flask is gone and its just a charred, black smoking mess (which is still heating).
I ask, “Student! What’s going on with your reaction??? What’s the temperature set at?!” The guy goes, “Oh, I wasn’t sure how hot to heat it, so I just turned the plate all the way up to 10. Is my reaction going to be ok?”
No, no man, it’s not going to be ok. He literally boiled the thing dry.
11.
I worked at my university writing center and saw a lot of really terrible writing. SO MANY poorly written essays. I really don’t know how you can graduate from high school without at least being able to perform simple tasks like “point to your thesis statement.”
The whole point of a writing center was to teach students to correct their own work, but there was a direct correlation between how awful a paper was and how likely the student was to throw it at you and say “I’m going to go have lunch. Will you have it fixed in an hour?” then try to leave.
The tutors all got really good at an authoritative, “Stop right there! Sit down. Now let’s talk about how YOU are going to improve YOUR paper.”
The most frustrating papers were the science majors. I could never tell if the paper was terrible or I just wasn’t following the details of their experiment on chlorinated aliphatic hydrocarbons or whatever.
The absolute worst was the ENGLISH MASTER'S DEGREE STUDENT who came in several times with absolute gibberish. To be fair, English was his second language but... are you absolutely sure you do not want to consider a career change my good sir?
12.
Student handed in a 1-page essay of complete gibberish. Like, utter stream-of-consciousness of a gerbil on LSD kind of garbage.
After receiving an F on this assignment, this muffin had the audacity to come to my office hour and demand that I explain this grade to them.
After I walked them through their river of word-garbage, they tried to tell me that I just didn't understand their writing because I am not an English native speaker.
First time I almost kicked somebody out of my office.
13.
My old History of Modern Art prof loves to tell the story about an exam essay featuring the topic of "the male gays" instead of "the male gaze".
14.
Once had identical twin sisters who turned in identical essays. Both were directly plagiarized from a Google search and received identical zeroes.
15.
I had a student include numerous emojis in a term paper.
A different student came to my office a week after the final, and asked me why she had failed the course. She hadn’t turned in a single assignment or written the final.
16.
Teaching an English subject on academic writing, including the structure and importance of paragraphs, and a student then handed in a first essay that looked more like poetry - one sentence per line.
When queried, she insisted "they don't have paragraphs where I come from".
Turns out she was British...
17.
One student wrote a paper about the causes of the Salem Witch Trials.
She sided with the accusers because she'd 'seen some stuff,' clearly not understanding the assignment.
18.
As a college freshman I took Advanced English with a student who didn’t know how to write a research paper or even possibly read (I don’t know).
When I realized she didn’t know how to research, I gave her my sources and showed her how to navigate them.
The next class when we were supposed to edit each other’s rough drafts. I handed her my paper to edit, she gave it back to me after 10 seconds without reading it and said it was good. She then handed me her “paper” and it was just a list of random dates.
20.
For a couple years I taught first-year college students in an ENGINEERING program, the majority of whom didn't know how to do unit conversions.
Not even, like, inches-to-centimeters. To repeat ... college ... ENGINEERING ...
21.
I was teaching a first-year religion class, and we were talking about the story of Adam and Eve. I told my class that a colleague of mine joked Adam had a C-section because he wasn’t conscious when God took his rib and made Eve.
The class had a giggle, but one student raised their hand and seriously asked why everyone was laughing, because men have the ability to regrow their ribs once in their life, thanks to this original moment.
22.
I used to TA physics. I had a student who had gone to a decent private high school tell me the value of pi was 2.28.
I can kind of understand the .28, because that's 2pi, but I don't know where the 2 came from.
23.
First story: masters student didn't know how to convert from seconds to minutes.
Second story: no one from a class of 4 phd students in an engineering field knew how to add two 2D vectors.
24.
One of my students (outside of class) explained that she and her whole family truly believes that microwaves mutate the DNA of your food (they don’t) and mutated DNA is dangerous to eat (it wouldn’t be).
I couldn’t help myself for calling her out. It was such a strange thing that it didn’t even occur to me to be sensitive. I just said she clearly needed to take my biology class again.
25.
My wife has had multiple students who are fundamentally technologically illiterate.
Numerous students have had no idea how to use Word or Excel, including one who used their email as a word processor (the University provides students with Office).
There have also been students who struggle with installing programs on computers. What's disconcerting is it's becoming an increasingly common issue. As an older millennial, the idea that kids are becoming less technologically proficient is so bizarre.
26.
My friend's student teacher (early 20s, about to graduate college) is working in a lower elementary classroom and spells words wrong all the time.
Everyone can have a brain fart now and then, but this is a few words, every day. Here she is, teaching the kid. and there are misspelled words on the board. Every day.
27.
In the final year of high school I had to intervene during a pratical exam when a student attempted to heat a plastic petri dish of water using the blue flame of a bunsen burner.
28.
I had a student who had failed the previous year, due to missing too many labs to pass and not handing in assignments. I had rewritten the curriculum.
I noticed that this student hadn't been handing certain things in and had been skipping lectures, so I decided to chat with them. They thought their marks for that semester were cumulative with their previous year's, so they just had to make up enough marks to get a passing grade.
This is a post-grad program. They had a Bachelor of Science degree in dietetics.
29.
I used to work at an English help lab at my university. I had no problem helping the English as a Second Language students because they had a tough challenge working outside their primary language.
What killed me is how some of these native English-speaking kids got out of high school still writing incomplete sentences, run-ons, tense disagreements, and having basic vocabulary and grammar errors.
I went to an engineering school, so some of these guys probably were good at math and bad at English, but you still need to be able to communicate.
30.
Professor at a middle of nowhere medium sized state school with a 80-ish% acceptance rate. Had a graduate student who couldn't code for the life of him but was a software engineer at an undisclosed incredibly large aviation company.
He couldn't accept that other students who didn't have jobs were better than him and that the people grading him "didn't have jobs". Sent death threats because we failed him on an assignment where his code didn't run.
He complained to the higher ups and got a C.
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