• The best-known bit of professor lore: two students miss a test and concoct a story about having a flat tire as they traveled together to the exam. The professor agrees to give them a make-up test and ushers them to separate rooms. Each is astonished and chagrined to find the test consists of a single question: “For 100 points, which tire?”

• Barbara and David P. Mikkelson report: A student stops by the office of one of his instructors to ask a question and finds that the professor has stepped out for a moment, leaving an unguarded stack of the next day's final examinations on his desk. The student quickly steals one of the exams and disappears. Before issuing the exam, however, the professor counts them and notices that one is missing. He cuts one half-inch off the bottom of every exam prior to distributing them to the class, then fails the student who turns in a test paper longer than the rest.

• Reader's Digest (1961): Asked the oft-repeated query at the end of his lecture -- whether he planned to give a quiz the next day -- a professor at Mississippi State University answered nonchalantly, "A quiz? Why, I'd climb through that transom over the door before I'd give a quiz tomorrow." A sigh of relief passed through the classroom. But next day, after the class had assembled, there was a sudden clamor outside the door. The transom began to creak open and, to the utter amazement of the students, in climbed their professor -- grinning happily and clutching a three-page quiz in his hand.

• Some rather stupid underclassmen at my old high school were caught cheating by a black light. Ten of the 15 students in a bio lab wrote the answers to a test on their palms. They knew that the lab they would do after the test was a “hand washing” lab, so they figured they were set. After the test, the teacher gave them a powder soap to wash their hands with. All of the places that were not thoroughly washed would glow under black light. Well, when the time came, the culprits put their hands under the light, and their cheat sheets glowed for the teacher to read.

• After noticing that one student always found an error I had made in correcting his papers, I became suspicious. First, the error I supposedly made was for an answer that had been erased. Second, the same pen or pencil did not seem to be used on that answer. Also, the same student frequently brought me errors that I had made neglecting to give him credit. Being suspicious and hoping that I was not losing my mind, I began to XEROX papers before returning them. I confronted the miscreant and failed him for the quarter. He brought in mommy and daddy who were loaded for bear at a meeting in the principal's office. While listening to his litany of how I had picked on him all quarter falsely accusing him of cheating, I asked him to flip through the file for one example he could use as proof. He began to become nervous and stutter because stapled to each paper was the XEROX with the original answer circled. Those left blank and later filled in were marked in shorthand as MISSING. His correct answer was written over the shorthand. His mother clobbered him right there in the office.