Teachers Share The Worst Assignments Students Have Turned In Unironically

How Did They Put The Berets On?

My favorite was a research paper about black panthers - literal, four-legged black panthers - for a paper about The Color of Water, a book that touches on family, education, and race, including the Black Panther political group. Apparently the student did not read the book or pay much attention to the classroom discussions.

I also especially like it when they copy and paste from different websites without changing the fonts.

U4RiiA

This Looks Strangely Famili-HEY WAIT A MINUTE

Student literally plagiarized about two pages of a book I had written, as if I wouldn't notice...

When You Catch Them In The Act

An essay completed by his mom (who had done his written work for years, according to other teachers)...

It the parent-teacher interview I told her I believe the essay was likely plagiarized as it did not match the level of work that her son completed in class, however, the essay itself was so poorly written that there was no point in pursuing a lower grade than he had already received...

Her husband gave her an all-knowing side-eye grimace and she turned bright red...

Kid went on to fail my exam with a 4%.... It takes a lot of f-cking work to get a 4% on an exam...

Snuffy1717

That's What They Call Karma

During student presentations once, I had to stop class to pull aside one of the students for mocking a dyslexic classmate for his spelling errors. Then, my random-name-picker selected Rude Student next. He plugs his computer into the projector and starts presenting, and the rest of the class immediately starts snickering. Rude Student hadn't done the assignment at all-- he had copied another student's file off of the lab computers and hoped I wouldn't notice.

He had copied his dyslexic classmate's file, spelling errors and all.

He got a 0 and a discipline referral.

melbytoes

Forgot To Edit It Out

I had a kid turn in a Wikipedia article as a research paper. He wrote the intro and conclusion, but the rest of it still had footnote numbers and, somehow, a slightly shaded background.

Orcapa

English =/= Technology

I taught technical drawing. One of the kids was getting suspended for a week. He asked me for work he could take home. Since he couldn't do work using the software at home, because he didn't have a computer, I gave him a stack of worksheets pertaining to the AutoCAD software and told him to take a book off the shelf. The guy came back later after his suspension was over and turned in some of the craziest worksheets I'd ever seen. I told him , not one of these answers is right. The kid got all upset. He said, they all came straight out of the book.

Then he showed me the book. It was Norton's anthology of English literature.

sketner2018

...There's Just So Much Wrong Here

I was grading anatomy papers once and a male college student mislabeled the vagina as a penis. I had someone else call the pectoralis major muscle that goes over the chest area the "titimus major". That same kid also called the quadriceps the quadricicle.

I had one male student mislabel appendix as the "clitoris". So many good jokes came from this one.

Also I should point out that all of these were on accurate anatomical models, so these were especially bad mistakes.

Alittlestitious1

At Least They Do Science? Right?

This is on me and I know it.

I teach 6th grade and had taught about citing sources but not about reliability. Had a student turn in a science paper whose entire source list was Phineas and Ferb episodes.

estrogyn

Well, were the episodes properly sourced?

antlear

Take This Advice: Anything Is Better Than A Zero

I'll always remember the time students had the assignment to write something creative - we'd covered poems, short stories, stuff like that. Even a diary or journal entry would have worked, it was a real softball of a homework assignment.

A couple kids clearly phoned it in and that's annoying, but one kid decided to plagiarize Bob Marley lyrics as an original poem.

Dude, you could have written two paragraphs about how you liked that song, and we're all good. Now I have to drag you out in the hall because plagiarizing is a Big Deal and can get him in trouble with administration that's over my head.

Just felt bad all around, and I was a new teacher at the time and had never had to deal with it before.

Seriously people, just half ass your homework or take the zero, if you don't want to do it. Don't cheat. Once you cheat, stuff is out of my hands, and there's no way it's worth it on a dumb one off assignment.

IJourden

Wait, So You're Telling Me Finland Isn't France?

A student handed in an assignment for French class that he had used google translate for. Except he made a mistake when selecting the language to translate from English. The assignment he handed in was in Finnish.

snardles