Cheating is a constant concern for teachers, particularly when exams are around the corner.
Instead of imposing draconian measures to keep her students from copying off of each other during their midterms, Mary Joy Mandane-Ortiz, a faculty member of the Bicol University College of Engineering, decided to let her students engineer their own solutions to the problem by having them make their own creative anti-cheating hats.
Her students clearly took the silly challenge seriously. An album of photos from the exam, which have already been shared over 4,000 times, shows students donning everything from Jollibee masks to Spartan helmets and even Naruto-inspired headgear.
Ortiz said on Facebook that she actually took inspiration from a Thai university that briefly required its students to wear bizarre horse blinder-like contraptions on their heads to prevent wandering eyes (they quickly ended the practice due to the embarrassment).
Ortiz said she did not expect her students to come up with more creative versions. (Maybe they didn’t want to look like carriage horses? Just a thought.)
“I still believe that the best way is to have integrity to not cheat with or without the hats,” Ortiz wrote, seemingly in response to some comments that said it was better to trust students.
“I really love and [I’m] proud of my students because their engineering midterm exams can be pressuring and stressful, yet they managed to add some color and fun. Thank you very much, students. You make me proud,” she wrote.
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