universities take plagiarism very seriously. Friend of mine teaches stage craft (how to make sets, props, costumes, lighting and sound design/planning/execution/engineering)
First semester, first test, easy pass: Someone pokes their head into the class and my friend goes to the door to answer them, stepping outside for like ~30 seconds
comes to mark the papers:
“In a proscenium theater, what is the very front of the stage called?”
Real answer: apron
55% of the student answers: the same made up word that sounded vaguely Portuguese with no hits on Google.
even though it’s super dumb and super easy and barely matters at all and is a one word answer to a basic question - the students ended up being investigated by the university and my friend had all his classes audited.
Just wanna say I took a stage craft class as an elective many, many years ago when college was affordable enough to do such things.
We didn’t do anything hands on, just learned how stuff works.
It was one of my most favorite classes. I was a beer chugging, skirt chasing, never went to class burnout back then, but I enthusiastically went to that class every time.
I may be dumb, but to clarify: they were assumed cheating because the word was fake, and the only reason for so many duplicated fake answers would be if they shared a faulty answer sheet. Right?
yeah, I mean a forgivable wrong answer would be “downstage center” “the front” “the lip” “limelights” “footlights” “wing” “leg” “curtain” “pit” - like close but wrong terminology or similar guesses.
The fact that loads of them said the same weird wrong answer was very sus.