The Girl Programmer vs. the Dumb People - Round II

Just a few more war stories for your amusement.

One time I was giving a midterm and all of the students had finished and left except for one guy in the back row.  He looked worried.  Then, as I was staring right at him, he reached into his shirt pocket, referred to his notes, then continued with the test.  No, the notes were not allowed.  Now, if you are the only student in the room, who will the teacher be looking at?  

On another midterm, an young lady turned in her test, then went back to her seat and immediately began to look up something in the text, which is not unusual.  What was unusual was that after she found the item in the text, she closed the book, came back to my desk and took her test back.  I was so surprised that it took me a few moments to recover and ask her to bring the test back to me.  Even more surprising was that she began arguing with me.  She said "But I made a mistake."  Fortunately, I was able to retrieve the test before she altered it, and so saved her grade.

Finally, I must share something that another faculty member told me about something that happened where he used to work.  I may not have all the details exactly right, but in essence, this is what happened. 

As with most computer science programs, this one had a significant number of Chinese students. A certain faculty member would give frequent short quizzes.  On quiz day, as soon as every student was busy with the quiz, the teacher would post the answers just outside the door, so the students could check them after they left.  I don't know how hard each question was, but the number of questions was fairly short.  During one quiz, a Chinese student came in who was not in the course, bowed deeply to the professor, mumbled something in rapid-fire Chinese, then left.  It seemed to be an apology for accidentally entering the wrong room.  The teacher thought nothing of it until the next quiz, when the same student came in and did the same thing.  As most experienced teachers, he became suspicious. How likely is in that the same student would make the same mistake on his room location twice, especially on quiz day?  During the next quiz, he asked his graduate assistant, who knew Chinese, to sit in the class with him.  Sure enough, the same student came in and did the same thing.  But the graduate assistant was able to understand his mumbled Chinese, and found out he was zipping off the quiz answers that he had just memorized from the posted answers, for the benefit of the Chinese students in the class. 

So, the experiment with "code talking" didn't work out so well.