College professors have an interesting job. They're teachers at their core, but they encounter many students at a point in their lives where they're not quite done being kids but are expected to be equipped with enough tools of adulting to get by.
As you could imagine, professors get a front seat to some of the most awkward moments in that timeline.
In a recent Reddit thread, professors were asked to share stories of their worst students. In other words, which students they were surprised to see made it out of high school. Reddit was in for a treat with stories of bizarre, underprepared, and just plain misguided youths.
"My first year teaching I had a student who had failed the previous year due to missing too many cooking labs to pass and not handing in half the assignments," one professor recalled.
"I had rewritten the curriculum and assignments. I noticed that this student hadn't been handing certain things in and had been skipping my lectures, so I decided to have a chat with them.
"They thought their marks for that semester were cumulative with their previous year's mark (with a different curriculum, different assignments, and a different professor) so they just had to make up enough marks to get a passing grade. This is a post-grad program. They had a BSc in dietetics."
"I teach at a community college that doesn't actually require a high school diploma to attend, so I've seen a lot," another professor wrote.
"[One] wrote in a discussion board about Lord of the Flies, 'I like how they saved all the flies. That was my favorite part.' If you've read the book, you can guess the look on my face."
There are staffers who weren't professors but still saw some raw material in their own areas of college life, like this writing center employee.
"Not a college professor, but I worked in my university's writing center for a while. I had a girl come in with a research paper bibliography that listed 'my mom' as a source several times," they recalled.
"When I pressed, she told me her mom looked up everything and sent it to her and she just … put it in the paper. She told me she had always done it that way."
"Not me, but a friend who taught in the politics department received a paper about 'gorilla' warfare in South America," another person chimed in.
"It was so poorly written she couldn’t tell if it was a typo, or if they genuinely thought Colombia had been overrun by a Planet of the Apes style revolution."
One professor had a terrifying encounter with a student who just couldn't accept their shortcomings.
"Professor at a middle of nowhere medium sized state school with a 80-ish% acceptance rate. Had a graduate student who couldn't code for the life of him but was a software engineer at an undisclosed incredibly large aviation company," they recalled.
"He couldn't accept that other students who didn't have jobs were better than him and that the people grading him 'didn't have jobs'. Sent death threats because we failed him on an assignment where his code didn't run."
"Student handed in a 1-page essay of complete gibberish. Like, utter stream-of-consciousness of a gerbil on LSD kind of garbage," another professor shared.
"After receiving an F on this assignment, this muffin had the audacity to come to my office hour and demand that I explain this grade to them. After I walked them through their river of word-garbage, they tried to tell me that I just didn't understand their writing because I am not an English native speaker."
"Masters student didn't know how to convert from seconds to minutes," one professor shared. Other engineering professors commiserated with how many students couldn't mentally make basic conversions, putting them at an unnecessary disadvantage.
"Not a professor, but in undergrad, I had a sociology course where we had to do a group presentation about different types of family structures. We divided the work by tasking each group member a with creating a slide on a sub-topic for our PowerPoint. When it came time to practice, I had everyone send me their slides so I could put it together into one file," another commenter wrote.
"I noticed right away that something was off when a group member's slide had gems like: 'women's suffrage has destroyed the American family structure,' and 'feminism has turned women away from their naturally obedient nature.'
"WTF?? I asked to meet with the group member about why the h-ll his slide was a misogynistic rant, especially for a joint presentation in a group of 4 women at a pretty liberal school … Well, I met with him and he sheepishly admitted that he had just Googled American family structure and copy and pasted from the first website he saw. He didn't realize it was offensive… he hadn't read anything on the slide that he had just sent to the group to present."
A teacher's assistant shared another student's mental gymnastics to prove something that … well, you be the judge.
"We were learning about this species of animal (lake mollusk, I think?) that could kind of 'choose' how and when it wanted to lay eggs so that its young had the best chance of survival," the TA explained.
"Anyways, overheard this girl talking to her lab mate in lab about how her boyfriend may have gotten someone pregnant. She and this boy had been together, according to her, for a little over a year, and (hopefully) we all know that it takes about 8-9 months to make a baby from the time of conception. So, the girl's lab mate asked if she was going to break up with him since he cheated on her.
"This girl looks her straight in the face, no joke, and said 'he didn't cheat on me.' Her lab mate was taken aback, but asked if maybe she had misheard. Nope. Long story short, this girl thought that humans could 'choose' when to begin the moment of conception, and her boyfriend had told her that the baby hadn't been 'processed' until after they'd gotten together and that he'd slept with this other girl over a year and a half ago. She genuinely believed this story, using what we had learned in class about the mollusks as proof."
"I was teaching a class about college campuses in the 1960s and 70s centering on protests and activism during that time. The final paper asked the students to take an example from that time period and compare it to a more recent instance of activism on campus," another professor recalled.
"One student chose to write about instances of Martin Luther King, Jr. visiting college campuses to speak on issues of equality. That's when the student said that he had won the Nobel Prize in Sports and I just had to stop. I reread that paragraph about 10 times before I confirmed with myself that this student did indeed write was I thought they did. The rest of the paper was equally well researched and, needless to say, they did not get a good grade."
These stories are based on posts found on Reddit. Reddit is a user-generated social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website where registered members submit content to the site and can up- or down-vote the content. The accuracy and authenticity of each story cannot be confirmed by our staff.
