The final exam for my modern physics class is this morning, which means I’ll have a bunch of time to kill while I proctor the test. This will likely involve a lot of brainless time-wasting, but I need to be on hand both as a formal guard against cheating, but more importantly to answer questions about the test should any come up.
Our sections are small enough that I don’t worry too much about cheating, but it’s a much bigger worry at lots of other places, and there are all sorts of ways of dealing with it. So here’s a possibly entertaining question to pass the time:
What’s the most amusing anti-cheating strategy you know of?
I’m thinking here of ways to mess with the heads of students who are inclined to cheat. I’m thinking of things like the story I heard about a fairly famous physicist who told the students in a huge lecture class that there were four different versions of the test, to prevent copying. When exam day arrived, the tests were handed out, and were printed on paper of four different colors. So the students who wanted to copy just looked for the person closest to them with paper of the same color, and copied all their answers.
The thing was, the paper color had no relation to the version of the test. So all of the copiers failed in spectacular, and hilarious, fashion.
Do you know of anything comparable? Leave it in the comments.