I enjoy watching and hearing about dumb criminals, such as the guy who went to his own bank to hold it up, and wrote the note on the back of his own deposit slip. Here are some stories in this same vein.
Years ago, when I lived in the country, the door that we used most often was an old kitchen door with a large, plain glass window. We returned one day from a shopping trip and discovered that someone had tried to chisel their way into the dead bolt, but were stymied by the very old, rock hard wood. They ignored the large sheet of very breakable glass just above it. They also ignored a nearby pile of bricks they could have used. Thank God that people don't turn to a life of crime because they are smart.
Likewise, students don't turn to cheating because they are smart. In my 15 years of full time teaching, there have been several incidents that stand out, both from personal experience and from tales told to me by my fellow faculty members.
Early in my career, students were starting to copy papers from the Internet rather than writing their own. Another faculty member showed me one that was turned in to him. The student had not even read it, evidently, because the last paragraph of the paper was titled "About the Author"..which was not him.
Another incident happened when I was teaching both an undergraduate database course and a graduate database course. At this time, our lab facilities were not personal computers, but terminals to a VAX minicomputer. I was conducting a lab for the undergraduate course, when a student, who had been in my graduate course in the previous semester, asked if she could use one of the ununsed terminals. I told her she could, and she took a seat next to one of the lab students. I spent the lab walking behind the students, looking at their screens to see if they were doing OK, or having trouble, or whatever, as was my practice. In the process I walked behind my "visitor" and noticed she was working on the project that I was requiring for my CURRENT graduate course section, not the previous semester's project that she had done. As the VAX used UNIX, it was easy for me to see the current logins. The "visitor" student was not logged in under her name, but I noticed two logins for a student in my current semester's graduate class. Yes, you guessed it, she was doing the project for one of my current students.
It was easy to know what to do with my current grad student - he earned a zero for the project. But what to do with her? We had nothing in the academic honesty policy to cover that situation. The only thing we could nail her on was using someone else's login. Of course, we revised our policy as soon as possible to include things like this. But what still astonishes me is that she chose my class to sit in to do this. Not the brightest move.
I have more stories, but they must wait until my next post.
You're right, students just aren't any good at cheating these days. I've got a group that, in spite of my explicit warnings, does their homework together but then each of them changes the font face and size before they turn it in. It's hilarious to get five assignments with identical formatting, the same spelling errors, and so on - but one is in 12 point Times New Roman, another is in 10 point Arial, and so on. I just don't put much grading weight on take-home work and labs anymore; I DO ask questions about those assignments on in-class exams. But you can't be TOO hard-nosed because your bosses don't want to know about cheating, but they DO want you to have positive student evaluations.
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