My cheating students thought that they had me fooled, but in the end, they fell right into my trap.

Here's what happened. Subscribe to Am I the Jerk on YouTube and hit the bell to turn on notifications.

I am a cancer researcher and a guest professor at a university school of medicine teaching my

specialty, imaging. Besides the usual acquisitions of medical images using MRI, CT, etc.,

imaging has a lot to do with image processing. Some days I am just a glorified programmer slash

IT guy and as anyone who has ever programmed anything will tell you, coding is a very personal

activity. With enough experience, you can tell who wrote what just by looking at the lines.

I'm also in my late 20s and I am not native to this country and it is my first year as a

guest professor. So some students look at me as this inexperienced, gullible foreign guy.

As part of my modules grading, the students have to submit two reports that weigh 10% each of

their final grade. These reports are about image processing and they have to code a fair bit.

As usual, there are students that make an effort, some who do minimal work, and some that cheat and

copy. As I was grading the reports, I noticed a small group of students who found reports from

previous years online and literally copied and pasted those reports, changing only their name.

It was a face palm moment because those reports were not even good and they had a lot of errors.

You see, in order to establish a baseline for my grading, I browsed previous years reports so I

knew what to expect from the students of this module. Naturally, I graded them all with a zero and

kept working my way through grading reports until I had left. Meanwhile, the students casually asked

me in the halls how are the reports. Of course, I can't comment on that until I release the grades.

One time, this dude, who copied from another report 98% match on a plagiarism checker,

asks me when I will release the grades and comes up with this story that he worked really hard on

his reports. That his exam hasn't gone so well so he's hoping that the grades on his reports

...