24 Dumbstruck Professors Share Stories Of Their Stupidest Students

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mattstaff
Aug 11, 2018 11:00 PM EDT

How do you even drum up a response to these levels of ignorance. 

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  • 01
    Text - SUBMGK 7h May or may not be dumb, but my friend and I went to her uncle's house which had this piece of paper framed and put on the wall. It was a 0/20 on a true or false quiz. Her uncle was a professor and was just too impressed by such an achievement that he had to put it in his home.
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  • 02
    Text - PubScrubRedemption 7h Happened in the first week of a college anthropology course: Prof: "Let's list a few basic differences between modern humans and animals" Student: "We have a heart beat"
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  • 03
    Text - glimmerfox 6h I had a student who wrote an art history paper about Leonard Davin Chi. Didn't eve run that sucker througha spellcheck or anything. Referred to him as that throughout the entire раper.
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  • 04
    Text - BSB8728 5h One of my husband's colleagues said a kid up to him after an exam and said, "I didn't know the answers to the questions you asked on the test, so I made up my own questions and answered them." The professor said, "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard, and when I go to lunch, I'm going to tell all my friends."
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  • 05
    Text - IThink ThingsThrough 6h I saw some amazingly bad attempts at plagiarism in my day. These included: 1) Plagiarizing from an article in a journal the professor edited. This was a grad student. 2) Plagiarizing from the same source as another student in the same class. First hit on Google is not your friend 3) Turning in a sophomore lit survey paper referring to a poet's use of hendecasyllabics. I have a doctoral degree and I had to look that one up. Googled author's name "hendecasyllabics" a
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  • 06
    Text - soulsista12 6h One of my students told me he was going to be 21 when he graduated high school. I asked him why. He explained that he ages TWO YEARS every year. He is 15 turning 16 so that is 2 years. He is probably right that he will not graduate HS til age 21, but not for the reason he mentioned lol
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  • 07
    Text - masterpharos 7h I didn't have any particularly dumb student (also not a Professor, but a graduate teaching assistant), but I did mark one essay that began so eloquently with "Do we born with intelligent?" edit: As an addendum, because I still find this story hilarious, the second sentence was "How cognitive is developed?" One of my fellow PhD student marked an essay once which came in at 2 pages (it was a 6 page limit), and half of the essay, so one page, discussed Mowgli from the Disney
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  • 08
    Text - tapehead4 8h I didn't believe any student was dumb - he/she may only have needed the right motivation Until I met RJ. RJ was dumb. RJ didn't realize that the chicken we eat was the same as the animal. RJ was 21 at the time.
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  • 09
    Text - why-is-everything 6h I once had a girl in my class ask why meteors always fall in to craters, for context this was journalism degree and we where talking about libel laws. This girl did not pass.
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  • 10
    Text - Captain_buttchug (I was a student in this class) but after an entire chapter of going over the civil war in a history class, our teacher as a joke said "So who won the civil war". A girl raised her hand and said "the south" and he laughed until he realized she was serious, and she tried to defend it saying "what, we still have slaves right?"
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  • 11
    Text - Coloradical27 6h As a GA teaching freshman English, I had couple instances of cheating that left me speechless. First, my university uses an online plagiarism checker and the students know this With one student, over half of his essay was copied from a website. He looked genuinely shocked when I called him out on it, and then told me that his mother wrote the paper for him. I explained that his mother writing his paper was also cheating. Then he asked if he could get credit for the half t
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  • 12
    Text - disastar 5h We were discussing the three most common phases of matter-solids, liquids, and gases. Using water as the example, I asked a student to tell me what we call the solid phase of water. He replied, "Oil!" I was dumbstruck, but mine was only temporary..
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  • 13
    Text - ponderingprofessor 9h I don't know if this qualifies as dumb or is closer to stupid, but...I had a student who didn't show up for class regularly, and her grade was going to be a C, maybe a D depending on her final exam. What made her dumb, however, was how she tried to cheat on the final exam. She reached down into her bag and took out her phone, put it on the desk, typed something into it, looked at the test, looked at her phone, looked back at her test, rechecked her phone, then answer
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  • 14
    Text - bgoegan 3h A student in my economics class started his final essay with this: "We are all familiar with the country, Africa. Yet at the same time we know little about them. All we know is that it is hot there, African Americans live there and they are really poor. This begs the question, why is Africa that poor?" just so jam-packed with stupid I had to stop grading for 24 hours.
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  • 15
    Text - perceptionactionprof I teach a class on the history of Psychology. When covering the chapter on behaviorism, and discussing the ideas of its founder, John Watson, who was a determinist (did not believe in free will) \- a student asked me in the middle of class that if he was a determinist, why did he advocate free will in the Sherlock Holmes book? I was really taken aback by that one.
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  • 16
    Text - hypnerotomachia_ 6h I had a student when I was a TA who took the first quiz in my class, but I realized he wasn't on my roster. I told him this, but he insisted he was in my section. Soon, he stopped coming to section altogether, but did insist on handing his exams and papers back to me in lecture. I eventually discovered he was supposed to be in my colleague's class, but never attended that either. After the final exam (which he handed in to me!), he admitted to me that he had just reali
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  • 17
    Text - BlakeMP 6h High School Teacher. Many years ago, I was showing my students clips from Romeo and Juliet. Student stared at the screen in total bewilderment for a few minutes. Then she said, serious as a cancer diagnosis, "How can he be in this movie? He died in Titanic."
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  • 18
    Text - emtbr 8h A few years ago, I had a student turn in a term paper titled "Mental Disroders." They then went on to misspell 'disorder' two different ways in the first sentence. (Edited for spelling)
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  • 19
    Text - Notaroadbiker 5h Finally a good one to speak to. There was this girl the basketball team in college...just to set the stage. The assignment was for creative writing 101 basically. Bring in an apple, write about it, place apple on the table with everyone elses apples, Swap papers, find the apple that goes with the vivid discription on the paper. Dumb bitch brought in a pear from the tree near the mailroom. Tried hard to convince me it was a crab apple and that they werent edible. IIRC, she
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  • 20
    Text - Keskekun 5h All she had to do to graduate was to show up to a seminar. I pointed out the importance of this as it was the last time this mandatory and the last chance (having missed earlier opportunities) and I wouldn't run the class next year. Got an email saying she had a dentist appointment and missed it. She failed, couldn't get here degree and had to come back 18 months later for it
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  • 21
    Text - thepahadiguy 5h During an oral exam (basic engineering electronics) a girl could not answer a single question. So I start asking her simple questions. I bring close the oscilloscope and pointed at the power switch -it was pretty clear it was a switch as it was written in bold letters ON-OFF - and asked her what is that? Answer fuse
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  • 22
    Text - newyorkminute 88 5h One student asking the difference between psychopath and psychologist, in criminology class.
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  • 23
    Text - jaspxar 5h A student once threatened to sue me over the definition of the terms necessary and sufficient that he had mixed up in an exam. No biggie to mix them up (actually, for a math major it might be), but loudly threatening to sue me over an age old textbook definition in an exam review session was kind of stupid. It did entertain all other students who where present. Another student once requested letters of recommendation for 5 of the top 10 masters programs in Europe while being th
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  • 24
    Text - codyrussel 3h Dumb isn't the correct term-ignorant is more apt and one of my 17 year old, home schooled students was so ignorant it was scary. He read at 2nd grade level and couldn't count past 20, and basic arithmetic non-existent. Forget writing, as his 'hand'/spelling was also at 2nd grade level. John's mother home schooled him, and finally gave up on it at age 16-17, and enrolling him in our high school. My other students hated this sad kid and he wa always in fights/arguments with th
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