14 Teachers Share The Dumbest Essays Turned In by Students

Author image for Eric Lund
Eric Lund
Sep 13, 2018 8:00 PM EDT

How does a teacher grade fairly when a student has just put real work into something so damn stupid?

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  • 01
    Text - 3 hours ago Parokki 638 points The first history essay I ever graded was back in teacher training about Sino-US relations in the 1900s. It started something like "Relations between the US and China were really tense during the 20th century. The worst bit was definitely when China attacked Pearl Harbor and the US retaliated with two nuclear bombs." IIRC this was followed by a lot of good solid information and I had a hard time figuring out what a fair grade would be.
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  • 02
    Text - Booksnotpeople 610 points 4 hours ago Typical middle school English assignment of answering questions about a story. A student made up everything The names and events were all different. He essentially wrote a new story in the form of answers to the questions. We had even read the story as a class. He tried to argue with me that he didn't make it up.
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  • 03
    Text - CantFindMyWallet 167 points 2 hours ago I once had a 9th-grade student suggest that death row inmates be sent overseas to fight wars instead of having soldiers do it. That was pretty amazing.
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  • 04
    Text - Parnv 154 points 3 hours ago There were short blog posts due weekly, each worth 1% adding up to 10 by the end of the semester. On the last week a student posted the entire bee movie script..
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  • 05
    Text - Prosaic_Reformation 4.0k points 6 hours ago Maybe not what you're getting at, but some entertaining approaches to essays included a kid who turned in three pages with a sentence on each page (he said "it meets the requirements for a three page essay, since nothing in the instructions said how many words had to be on each page"), and the kid who put four pages of Wikipedia quotes (in quotes, and cited) and said that there was no limit to how much of the essay could be quotes Apparently I g
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  • 06
    Text - 4 hours ago MadWhiskeyGrin 4.5k points College course, freshman orientation kind of thing. "This Is What College Will Demand" for students who weren't quite ready for 101. Assigned them an introductory short essay about anything they wanted. Just something they're interested in, let me see what I'm working with. One of the essays read, verbatim, "I am interest in blueberry muffin. Like how they round on top and riped on the side. That what I like" Kept that one on my fridge.
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  • 07
    Text - PrettyTender 121 points 2 hours ago I had a student turn in a paper that I wrote and published on my own faculty page as an example for the assignment. He found it by googling my name and the title of the assignment. He didn't notice that it came from my own site. I guess he also didn't ever click on the link in the syllabus that took him straight to said site/paper. Good times.
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  • 08
    Text - wattatam 2.3k points 6 hours ago I was tutoring a college student who REALLY wanted to write about an infinite energy machine he saw on YouTube as a serious topic for a research essay on renewable power. I eventually told him that if he could find peer reviewed sources we could. We looked for pretty much the whole hour. He then explained to me that there aren't any because of !conspiracy!
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  • 09
    Text - asocktipus 1.5k points 4 hours ago I once had a student turn in a plagiarized essay. It was super obvious just from the weird shifts in language (they had matched the fonts and everything at least, but I did get a few that didn't) but they also left a hyperlink (that they tried to disguise by removing the underlining and changing the color to black).
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  • 10
    Text - I_Bathe_In_Bleach 1.3k points4 hours ago edited 3 hours ago I teach history at a local community college and you wouldn't believe some of the takes people have on historical figures. Being in the Deep South, I'm used to the ole "Lincoln was a dictator" and "Sherman was a war criminal" stuff, but "Ancient Rome was a black civilization" probably takes the cake in terms of vagueness of sources and why on earth that needs to be debated in the first place.
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  • 11
    Text - 3 hours ago bloomingfireweed 1.1k points I worked a short stint (almost a full semester) as a substitute teacher to pay the bills, and some of the sub jobs I took were multi-day ones that required me to grade papers. During one job, I got a group of 11th graders that were doing a history unit on the Holocaust. One of the assignments was a short essay/research paper in reaction to a video about Auschwitz. One kid in the class wrote for her paper "I don't understand why these people are goi
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  • 12
    Text - TIFF 122 points 3 hours ago Not my story but I have a friend that is an English teacher at one of those alternative high schools for the At-Risk students. One of the assignments required students to write about anything in their "school journals" every morning. This one stubborn student spent a whole trimster writing a whole page of "blah, blah, blah" every entry
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  • 13
    Text - edited 3 hours ago NFLDUndertown 921 points 3 hours ago A grade 12 student who never showed up to class and never turned in any homework or assignments tried to Breakfast Club me with a heartfelt, personal essay on his final exam. He even tried to end it with 'Mr.NFLDUndertown, I know this isn't what you were looking for, but it's what I know and FEEL'. Yes, he capitalized 'feel'. I still failed the shit out of him. EDIT: Just to clarify, the final exam essay question wasn't about persona
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