50 Hilarious Times Students Took Stupidity To The Another Level

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.

I wouldn't say dumb, but definitely baffling and annoying. She had somehow gotten all the way to college still believing that weirdly and creepily exaggerated coy-little-girl flirting would get her what she wanted, including with female faculty. It was cringey to see in action - literally tilting her head to the side, playing with her hair, pivoting her leg back and forth mannerisms, combined with semi-childish speech patterns while glancing up through her eyelashes. Definitely "I'm only talking to this one in front of witnesses" territory.

She told me that she was reading and studying every night and still not making progress on tests and needed help. I explained how to make written study materials to help her absorb information better. She said she'd done that and reviewed the materials regularly, but still wasn't seeing results. Genuinely concerned and puzzled, I asked her to bring me her materials next class period and we'd go over them to make sure they were accurate and useful. She agreed.

Next class period rolls around. She announces, with even more exaggerated mannerisms, that wouldn't you know it - she was so frustrated with her score on her last test (returned before our earlier conversation) that she'd thrown her study materials into the trash in a fit of anger and they were all gone. Almost as if they had never existed.

I looked her in the eye and said, "I think you should consider, then, that self-discipline may be playing a role in your grades in my class." She huffed and pouted in outrage, and I never saw her again.

What makes me sad is that clearly someone, almost certainly her family, had taught her that these behaviors worked. No one sticks to a behavior that strongly unless she has had success with it.

Not a prof but we had a creative writing assignment where we were given a piece of paper with a list of 5 unusual words to use in a poem.

I read my poem, which used all the words, and a girl went on an angry rant over the fact that I had used a bunch of obscure words that she didn't understand.

Not a professor, but someone in my class asked, "After a C-section, do they put the baby back in?"

A friend was substitute teaching a high school math class and was to proctor a test for the students. At one point during the test a student got up to ask if he knew what 8 x 7 was, but before he could respond another student said " sit down....he doesn't know the answer to that....he's a substitute teacher not a math teacher."

Not a professor, but I was helping out a younger friend’s classmate revise for his O-level (15-16 year olds) maths exam.

He had some past papers with him, so I looked through them and got him started with a simple problem to try and gauge how much he knew. The question provided some measurements in millimetres, asked you to do some basic number crunching, and finally provide the answer in metres.

He attempted it for a few minutes, but didn’t cover any ground, so he asked for help. I then went through the number crunching with him step by step and prompted him to do the final conversion to metres thinking it would be trivial.

He stared at me blankly.

Me: “How many millimetres are there in a metre?”

Student: “I don’t know.”

Me: “What does ‘milli’ mean?”

Student: “...”

I take out his foot ruler and place it in front of him.

Me: “Show me a millimetre on this ruler.”

No response.

Me: “What do the lines represent?”

He gives me some bullshit answer that makes no sense.

Me: “Have you never used a ruler before!?”

I then proceed to explain to him what the millimetre and centimetre marks on the ruler are. I also explain to him that they are 1/1000 and 1/100 of a metre respectively and that the words “milli” and “centi” imply as much.

Me: “Okay, now that you know what these are and what proportion of a metre they are, can you show me how large a metre is approximately?”

I expected him to stretch his arms out and just say “about this much”.

Student: “Umm... from here to [nearby shopping mall]?”

I just stared at him in disbelief. I was honestly shocked. The shopping mall he referred to was at least 1-2 kilometres away. His exam was in 3 days. How did he even make it this far in school?

When my mom was a history teacher at a local high school, they went on a trip to Spain.

One girl, let's call her Megan, was not quite a clever student. They went to a restaurant to eat and Megan was looking at the menu. She was frowning the whole time and made some "hmm, hmm" noises and looked like she was struggling with the language. My mom told her there was an English menu on the other page, because she didn't understand Spanish.

3 minutes later she still looked confused. My mom asked her what was wrong.

Megan then ask my mom why the English language was so different than they learned at school. Megan didn't understand a word.

My mom looked at her menu, went quiet for a second and told megan she was reading the German menu.

Actually one of the smarter kids in my class. Ethics, awareness of social norms...not so much. He sent me an email after the semester ended, asking if I'd mind telling my next semester class that his digital textbook was available for sale. Oh, and that it's a PDF so if multiple people want it, he can sell them all copies. I responded that I admire his entrepreneurial spirit, but it probably wasn't a good idea to solicit his professor's help in starting a piracy-based book selling business.

As a GA teaching freshman English, I had a 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 that wasn't from a website.

Another time, the students had to analyze a movie showing how it used the Hero's Journey as plot structure. This was an easy assignment seeing as how nearly every modern movie uses this structure. The student copied the Wikipedia summary of Aladdin word for word, and he denied doing it. He argued it was a coincidence that his entire essay was the exact same as Wikipedia's.

History. Prof. is talking about some expedition or something and mentions Antarctica, is standing in front of a world map. Girl raises her hand. Asks, "excuse me, but where IS Antarctica?"

Prof. stands there unable to answer for a few seconds, then raises his arm to the map and goes, "right heeeeeereeeeeeee!" While running his hand under Antarctica and making exaggerated Vanna White motions.

Girl goes, "oh, ok!"

I was a little scared. More for the professor. He had that, "I am severely underpaid" expression.

Not a professor. In the midst of an English Renaissance Literature course, one of my fellow students raised her hand:

“Dr. [Professor]? I am just so...like, how did these people survive without Wally World?”

She meant WalMart. She wanted to know how Renaissance-era people survived without WalMart.

Our professor stared at her for a couple seconds, and then moved on with his lecture as if he hadn’t heard.

Not a professor. Heard some arguing from the chemistry class with some one shouting "but Mercury is a planet! How can can there be two Mercurys?"

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 answered whatever question she was looking up. Just to make sure, I let her do it one more time. I was watching her THE WHOLE TIME, and she was completely oblivious to it. She got an F.

Not a professor but in my psychology class there was this one girl that would ask questions every three minutes, not the good questions either you know? like the ones where the teacher didn't full on explain things or anything that would make the discussion better just the type of dumb questions where the teacher had literally said what she was asking about two minutes ago.

Anyways, we were viewing a map of cultural stereotypes and in Mexico it said "Maids and Gardeners" (which, okay, fair enough, its just a stereotype) but this girl legit looks at it, looks at the teacher and says: "That doesn't make any sense because Mexicans don't have gardens. How can they have gardeners?"

As a student, I rolled my eyes. As a Mexican, I burst out laughing. jfc, I can't even be mad, I know she's not racist, she's just ignorant as hell.

I teach computer engineering at a community college. One of my courses last term had a project component, where every student had a unique project. I posted my own project as an example. (I enrolled in a similar course a few years ago as a professional development activity.)

One student handed in my project, after taking my name off, of course. My feedback included “At what point did you convince yourself that I wouldn’t recognize my own code?”

His final grade ... well below 50.

In freshman year a girl asked my history teacher if George Washington or Thomas Jefferson invented the lightbulb.

In sophomore year a girl asked if Spain was in the US and the guy behind her said "We don't need to know this! We're American!"

I live in the midwest

I’m not a professor, but I studied modern languages at university and met a girl who had managed to spend an entire year abroad (a compulsory part of the course) living in the country where her language was spoken, working at a job with local people, and sharing a flat with three local people, and after the year was up her language skills had not improved one jot, and her flatmates had to talk to her in English because she couldn’t understand them otherwise.

I mean, I fully appreciate that some people find it much harder than others to learn a foreign language, that’s not actually the part I find dumb. The dumb part is getting into £30K of debt and spending 4 years of her life on a degree, then putting absolutely zero effort into actually learning the thing you’re paying to learn. Actually, to be that bad at the language after a full year you’d have to make an active effort to avoid it, never turn on a television or pick up a magazine, spend all your time in English and Irish themed pubs and ignore anyone who tried to talk to you.

I was invigilating a 2hr exam once where students had been given very strong hints about the two essay questions beforehand. A student bustled-in making an incredible racket an hour late. Handed his completed essays in 10 minutes later, written on completely different paper to the stuff given out during the exam, and smirked and waved to everyone as he left. His lecturer marked it anyway and gave him 0% for both - essentially failing him - as the student had answered completely the wrong questions despite the hints, and he figured reporting the student for cheating was 'too much paperwork'. The student appealed the score, threatened the department head when the 0% was upheld, and was expelled.

I had a student who tried to argue that plagiarism wasn't real after ganking the text of a one page paper on velociraptors straight from a top Google search result for them. "But if you read something, then you're just taking the knowledge and thumping it back into a word processor, what's the difference?" She was a criminal justice major.

Not a professor, but a high school math teacher. I had a student who answered a FaceTime call during the final exam. I just took her phone, told the person on the other end “Not a smart idea” and hung up on him. I let her continue the test.

Then I caught her cheating off the guy next to her twice, so I failed her.

And if that wasn’t enough, during the next period’s final exam, she burst into the room on her phone yelling, “‘Sup Mr. AlwaysShamo!” I just yelled “Go away!” and she left. Kid was so self-absorbed and clueless.