Unfiltered Story #362404

When I was in college, I signed up for work-study and worked in the Spanish teacher’s office. Because I’d already gotten As in the first two semesters of Spanish, I was allowed to do some basic grading for the beginning students – just checking for spelling and grammar errors.

As I went through a stack of essays one day, two caught my eye. They weren’t just word-for-word identical. They weren’t just riddled with identical mistakes. They hadn’t just been turned in one after the other, guaranteeing that I’d see them at the same time. They were both written in the same handwriting, with the same pink glitter pen – the only two in the stack that weren’t in black ink!

There wasn’t a big dramatic conclusion, I’m afraid. The teacher just told me to grade the essay, then give each student half of that grade. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure they should have both been reported and gotten zeroes, so they got off easy (although half the grade on THAT essay was probably only 20%). But fifteen years later, I still remember that and wonder how they could possibly have expected to get away with it. If they’d actually been trying to, I don’t think they could have made their cheating any more obvious.