50 Hilarious Times Students Took Stupidity To The Another Level

A girl in my earth science class asked "do the oceans go to the center of the earth?" 17 years old.

Not a professor, and it didn't happen in college as well. But in my fourth year of highschool (VWO for all the Dutch people here) a girl asked the teacher what nazi's were. Note that we had already discussed the second World War in second year of highschool and this is the Netherlands where the second World War is often discussed in all kind of schools during our remembrance day.

I am a non-traditional (read: really a lot older than my cohort) student and the bulk of my classes are online. Nearly every one has discussion board posts or peer review assignments that count towards a hefty percentage of grades. I am appalled at the writing skills of some of these people who are taking upper division classes. Not just typos and misspells...things like, "I ringed the doorbell." Repeatedly. From native English speakers.

I'm not a professor, but the "dumbest"/weirdest thing I ever witnessed in college was a student who had to do a presentation on "Objectivity in Science Reporting", a project she had voluntarily chosen, might I add. She had been provided with reading material by the professor a few weeks in advance. On the day of the presentation, she walked in front of the class, unpacked her things, seemed to be preparing, then sat down in front of us and proceeded to do absolutely nothing. After a few moments of silence, the professor asked what the problem was, and she said, "The texts were in English. I only speak German.", followed by her continuing to just sit there and do nothing.

I'm not sure why she bothered to position herself in front of us, knowing that she didn't have anything to present anyway, nor do I know why she didn't inform the professor of the language barrier, let alone why she had signed up for a course that worked exclusively with English material in the first place. I do know, however, that it took a few more minutes of her just sitting there quietly before the professor told her to go back to her seat.

I'm not a professor, but my roommate freshman year of college was pretty dumb. We were at a private liberal arts university, and part of our frosh seminar class was attending one of the "deans' lectures" and writing a paper about it. It was a gimme A. She decided not to attend any of the deans' lectures. They posted the videos of the lectures online, and people who didn't physically attend could watch one and write the paper for 90% credit or so. She elected not to watch anything, just pick a title of one and write about it. The title of the lecture she picked was "The Value of a Liberal Arts Education." She wrote about the value of a liberal education, as in liberal vs conservative and was so pissed when she got an F on the paper and completely couldn't understand why. I don't think she ever did.

A few semesters ago, I had two students in a statistics course not know how to do division using a calculator -- they didn't know what order to press the buttons in.

Talking about Somali Pirates. Student couldn't believe they wielded ak47s and used pontoon boats, thought they were the flagship-and-cannonball types straight from Pirates of the Caribbean

Not a professor. But back when i took drivers ed, the teacher asked if anyone knew what the raised bumps between lanes were in the roads. A guy raised his hand, was called on, and said in all seriousness, “for blind people so they stay in their lane.”

Everyone turned and stared at him in silence. The teacher had this look on his face like, dafuck? Then everyone started laughing and his buddy next to him whacked him in the arm like, you’re joking...but he just turned to his friend with his hands like 🤷🏻‍♀️ so the teacher set him straight. He never raised his hand in class again.

Not a prof but in my first year in a class with 300+ students we had an assignment called PeerScholar. We had to write about a short maybe 1000 word argument for/against legalizing weed, then you would look at 5 other peoples work and give them feedback, and 5 people would look at your work and give them feedback (you were also graded based on how good your feedback was).

One person's argument was hilarious, I have a screenshot somewhere in the depths of my Gyazo account but one paragraph his argument was talking about how the economy would collapse from weed becoming legal cause everyone would be so high all the time they couldn't work. I'm pretty sure he just wrote some last minute shit essay to get some marks since the final draft has the most marks but it was so hilariously bad.

Not a professor but a TA. I don't think I ever had genuinely dumb students, it's just that some people adjust more easily when moving from high school to university than others.

In particular, if you were "naturally" smart, you could just coast through high school. Material was presented slowly and frequently enough that missing a class here or there didn't really matter. Not so in university.

For a Physics 101 lab course for pre-med students, this one student regularly came 45 minutes late to a 2-hour lab. So he'd miss the discussion at the beginning of the lab session where I'd discuss the task at hand and common pitfalls to avoid. Then he'd wonder why he wasn't able to finish on time and why he struggled figuring out why his lab experiment didn't turn out the way he expected.

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.

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 the second worst in his class of several hundred graduates.

I'm not a teacher but my dad is a college professor and he often has pretty funny tales. However this last semester of Psychology in sports students have been a whole new level of dumb. He showed them how to use APA, then he did it for them for the different chapters of the book, all they had to do was literally copy and paste the reference he made for the chapter they used. Dummy proof you would think right?

Wrong.

One student copied the wrong chapters

One student copied all of the references.

One student made changes to the references!!!

That one I saw big red question marks beside and he noted 'I did it for you? why would you change it to be wrong???'

As a student in a class, this girl, who somehow managed to be tertiary, would ask an average of 20 questions per 40 minutes session. Since we knew the statistics final would be a project, my friend and I recorded the number of questions she asked compared to the rest of the class. It came out that on average she asked at least 3x as many questions as the class on average.

The girl was supremely stupid, and didn’t understand why the probability of rolling a 6 on a die was 1/6.

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 our 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 animated version of the Jungle Book (the topic was Developmental Psychology).

I heard this story from my professor dad: once, during the week of a final paper, he found an office voicemail from a student claiming it was midnight and he has to drive two hours to a major city in the because his friend needed emergency appendectomy surgery. The student forgot that, in those days, voice mails spoke the recording time, which was 7:30 AM.

Not a professor but we once jokingly asked my classmate when the third world war happened, she told us she didn't knew the exact date.

Took my Intro English requirement as the online class, part of which included a discussion forum. Each student was required to write a post giving their response/understanding of the topic at hand (eg. the Blind Men and the Elephant) three times over the semester. When you went to the site, the most recent entry was highlighted, so imagine my surprise to see my words highlighted for a post I'd put in weeks before - with someone else's name and an added sentence at the end. I checked into it, and for each assignment she'd gone onto the forum and straight up copied another student's answer, added a sentence somewhere, and submitted it as her own.

I reported her to the professor and girl had the nerve to email me (as one of the students she'd plagiarized, she didn't know I'd turned her in) to ask for help defended her because it was *completely* an accident that she'd submitted these answers, she was "just reading other students posts when it happened", and she really needed this credit. Told her if there was such a thing as accidental copy-paste-post, it wouldn't have been edited (3 times), and if it was so accidental that she'd never noticed, then why didn't she ever post her actual assignment answers? Never heard back.

I taught calculus in college. There's always several students who are terrible/lazy at the subject, but this term there was one who was really energetic about appearing to put in the effort, in multiple different ways but I'll focus on one.

I told the class I'd give them extra credit for doing any of the "advanced" problems at the end of the chapters. This guy turns in elegant, concise, handwritten solutions for all of them. That'd be hard even for me. He even knew how to do epsilon-delta proofs! That's not something I taught.

One of the problems involved a variable D and an epsilon-delta argument. His proof contained the phrase "Let ε > D", which is utter nonsense not only in context but in terms of an epsilon-delta proof in general. It's supposed to be "Let ε > 0", without exception. He was copying from an instructor's solution manual without knowing the meaning of the symbols.

I suppose this isn't dumb so much as shameless.

I'm a film student and we were asked to make up our own ten rules to follow when making a film, much like the Dogma 95 Manifesto, an specifically had us refer to us as a Manifesto. This one student submitted the Communist Manifesto instead.

According to my lecturer, that student didn't do very well and is now a forklift operator.