50 Hilarious Times Students Took Stupidity To The Another Level

When I was working as a graduate assistant, the Dean of the graduate school where I worked was reviewing the capstone projects of two police officers who were about to graduate with Master's Degrees in Criminal Justice. She quickly discovered that they had plagiarized. She figured this out because when she opened the electronic documents, there was a significant amount of text that was hyperlinked. The links brought her to Wikipedia.

My wife teaches public speaking. The first speech in that class is just a simple narrative speech. Tell a story from your life. She had a freshman tell the class about a time he helped his boss in high school kidnap the boss's child after he had lost a custody battle. The student clearly thought the story would make him look cool and badass. Everyone in the class was horrified.

In an international relations class:

Teacher: Can anyone name a country in the Middle East where people don't consider themselves Arab? Student: Saudi Arabia.

The worst part? He was Persian.

I'm not a professor, but I did grade exams, homework (mainly worksheets), and some papers for a few professors back in college.

Hands down, the dumbest student I ever saw was one who turned in a photocopy of his friend's homework. Yes, a straight-up, minimally edited Xerox. He had made the tiiiiiiiniest effort to trace over the first few answers in pen, but had stopped well before the end of the first page. Of a 5-plus page worksheet.

The best part was that his friend's name was still clearly visible on the first page of the worksheet. This guy hadn't even bothered to obscure it -- he just put a SINGLE LINE through it and wrote his own name next to it.

I’m not a professor, but a brother in my fraternity won the “most likely to be serving fries at McDonald’s” superlative at the end of the year.

He genuinely thought he earned the award because he liked french fries so much.

During an oral exam (basic engineering electronics) a girl could not answer a single question. So I ask her simpler questions. I bring close the oscilloscope and point at the power switch - it was pretty clear it was a switch as it was written in bold letters ON/OFF - and ask her what was it? Answer - fuse

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...

While I'm not a professor, I did encounter a student in a biology class once that was a gem. She once asked if rocks were living things. Then a few weeks later, discovered that tuna was a fish...and not just a food...

Not a professor, but a student....My first semester of college I took a communications course and on the first day we introduced ourselves and what we potentially wanted to do as a career and how proper communication is important in that field. My classmate shared that he wanted to be like the guys on the show Entourage. Confused and unfamiliar with the show my professor asked him to elaborate. He went onto explain how he and his group of friends essentially wanted to be a paid groupies - partying, traveling and sleeping with woman on someone else’s dime. When asked which one of his friends was going become a famous actor for them to leach off of, he said that they “hadn’t figured that part out yet”. It’s been a decade, I wonder how that career aspiration has turned out for him......

I remember going on a bus trip with some student to a lecture and book signing event in Iowa City. As we were driving down the Interstate, surrounded by cornfields, one of the students yelled, "Who in the HELL eats all this CORN!"

Not a professor, but I used to TA for a post-graduate ethics in accounting course. I once received a paper that was literally a cut and paste of a wikipedia article. I figured this out by the fact that they didn't remove the footnote markers so there were a bunch of blue numbers and [citation needed] marks throughout the paper.

He protested the zero he received, loudly, in front of the entire class so I pulled up the wikipedia page on the projector and just started reading his paper.

I once had a classmate who thought we didn’t know the world was round until we invented planes.

I'm currently in a certification program for baking and pastry. Last fall I was taking a cake decorating class and one of our assignments was to visit and bakery, try one or more of their baked goods and write your experience about the visit. It was literally you writing your own Yelp review. That's it. No word count or anything. Just a review. One of the guys in my class plagiarized a review he found online.

This was just a one time thing, because this kid is a pretty sharp student otherwise.

Im a flight instructor and was trying to teach my student how to find your groundspeed while flying. To do this, you take two points (towns usually) that you know the distance between and time how long it takes to fly between them.

"Ok, bob, that took 7 minutes to fly between Bobsonville and Bobsville. The distance is 10 nautical miles, what is our groundspeed?"

"5"

"5 what?"

"5 minutes"

"No, your speed"

"Yeah, 5 minutes"

"So, since it took 7 minutes to fly 10 miles then our speed is such that it took 5 minutes?"

"Yeah"

Not a professor, but I tutored athletes for $10/hour at a D1 school. Two stories, same guy:

"What does 'colonialism' mean?" I tried to explain a concept spanning thousands of years of human history in a sentence. Double checked with his athletic counselor and yes, English is his first language.

"What does 'delinquency' mean?" It's for his class called "Juvenile Delinquency" We're 2/3 of the way through the semester. He's been taking this class for months now. Attendance is mandatory for athletes so I KNOW he's been to this class.

The sad part is that he was a product of terrible public schools his whole life and was told since puberty when he shot up to ~7ft that as an athlete, school was optional. And damned if he didn't graduate with the same degree as me. We walked next to each other at graduation.

Not a professor but in my statistics class a girl asked if changing the minus to a plus would change the answer.

Not a negative to a positive, like she wasn't questioning how negatives worked. She sincerely wanted to know if changing from subtraction to addition would change the answer. To the professors credit she answered with a kind yes and only a slight pause.

Not a professor but a fellow classmates of mine was in my chemistry course. They would go on rants about "Energies" I was very confused as I tried to deduce what energies they meant (Kinetic, Thermal, etc). Turns out they are believe in some magic spirits despite majoring in sciences.

Not a professor, but during orientation someone mentioned the writing assignment that was due for students in a specific first year program. One guy asked, genuinely, "Hey, do we really have to write that paper or can we have someone write that for us?"

The leader responded, "No...you have to write the paper."

"Ugh, why would I do that? I have the money to just pay some guy. That's what I did in high school, pssh."

He was 100% serious.

I was a TA for an ecology course. I was trying to explain complete metamorphosis by talking about butterflies. The student didn't know caterpillars turned into butterflies. I suppose you could go through life without knowing, but this was an upper division course at a prestigious university...

She did not come to a single class the entire semester. She never once contacted me, never once responded to my emails, never turned in a paper or any assignment.

I was having office hours between the final class and when their exams were due, and she comes to me and asks what she needs to do to get at least a B-.