School can be rough, and tests can be stressful. Even if you study, there are bound to be answers that trip you up, or that you’re not completely sure how to answer. Sure, you can fudge if it’s a short answer or essay question, hoping you might get partial credit…or you can go for comedy.
These 17 students totally cracked up their teachers with their off-the-subject responses to questions they obviously had no idea how to answer.
17. Not totally right.
As a teachers assistant in my High School grading chemistry tests, for one question which read: convert 1 m into mm.
One student had converted meters to yards to feet to inches to centimeters to millimeters rather than just multiply by 1000.
16. For your hungry tummy.
I graded AP exams this summer.
For one essay question, I got an awesome barbecue sauce recipe from a kid in Tennessee. I’ve made it a couple times, and it’s excellent.
- 1 medium onion
- 1 tsp paprika (use more if you like)
- 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
- 2 tbsp mustard
- 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar
- 6 tbsp ketchup
- Salt/pepper
- Sweat onion on med-high heat
- Stir in vinegar, paprika, mustard, and Worcestershire sauce
- Add ketchup, and cook down to desired consistency
It is… amazing.
15. I love this for her.
My high school teacher would always encourage us to write funny answers down if we didn’t know anything.
She found marking tests extremely boring so if we could make her laugh, we’d at least get .5 of a mark on it.
14. I mean it’s not a wrong answer.
Just another student.. we had a test which involved a sex education part. The question was ‘what are two causes of infertility in males?’
His response: ‘lack of penis.’
He tried to argue that he wasn’t wrong and somehow got a mark.
13. Points for trying?
The student knew the answer, just didn’t know how to spell it.
I taught history and showed a video clip of Ronald Reagan’s famous “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
In a later quiz I asked students to write down this quote with my favorite response starting “Mr. Gooberchuck…”
12. Maybe it won’t be so bad.
I was marking a final year engineering test and instead of answering the last question some guy drew an incredibly detailed portrait of himself serving fries at a McDonald’s with the caption, “Me, if I fail this”.
I still had to fail him but I did feel bad about it.
11. At least it made her laugh.
I had one ESL student who couldn’t quite get the hang of changing singular nouns into plurals.
“I have a pen” got him full marks on the unit test. “I have two penis” did not.
10. Don’t hate the player.
It wasn’t for a test, but a large portion of the class didn’t do an assignment so the teacher decided to assign a makeup assignment.
He wasn’t planning on assigning anything, so he asked the class for ideas. Someone said “an essay about procrastination” and he said “I like that idea” and the conversation ended with that.
Next class rolls around and someone turns in an essay titled “The Importance of Effective Communication” because he never actually assigned the essay.
9. Everyone’s a critic.
Saw a post on reddit where someone drew a picture and got credit for it for a test answer, so I did the same thing on my next science test.
Teach told me that my drawing of a giraffe was garbage and gave me nothing.
8. Math proofs are terrible.
I was helping a teacher grade back in high school, and I was grading a kid’s Geometry quiz.
The question was a two column proof and it asked him to prove that one side was congruent to another based off of two triangles being congruent (had to prove the two triangles were congruent first).
This was his whole answer: Triangle ABC is congruent to Triangle BCD because they kinda look the same. Side AB = Side DB because they’re both three eraser-lengths long
7. Three times?
I was student teaching 1st grade and was quizzing a student on sight words. The word was horse and he said “whores, whores, WHORES!!”
6. Not the Maxwell we were looking for.
College-level physics exam asked for a brief description of Maxwell’s theory.
The instructor shamed a student by reading aloud his answer: “Good to the last drop.”
5. I would hope so.
One time a kid in my Latin class started “sneezing” out various denominations of bills when turning in his test.
The total added up to $75.
I think he dropped the class.
4. That’s gotta count.
This question on a Psych101 final:
“What is Thorndike’s Law of Effect?”
Answer:
“Work hard, play hard.”
I don’t know why, but this cracked me up so much.
3. Maybe art school instead.
When my wife and I were TA’s in grad school, we proctored and then graded an essay exam. We had a student write, “I don’t know, so here’s a picture of a puppy”.
He then drew a beautiful picture of a puppy, it took him nearly an hour to complete it.
To this day when I ask my wife a question and she doesn’t know the answer, she just says, “puppy”.
2. That’s one way to handle it.
My friend needed to name Alger Hiss on his government exam.
He forgot the dude’s name, so he put I.M. Notaspy.
1. I’d expect more from an 8th grader, too.
Not me but a classmate of mine.
In my 8th grade social studies class, the teacher off-handedly mentioned “Necessity is the mother of invention”
On the test, one question was “_________ is the mother of _________.”
My classmate wrote “Mary is the mother of Jesus.” We were all really upset that he didn’t get credit.
I wish I had been this clever and chill of a student, honestly.
If you’re a teacher, please answer this question for us in the comments!