Be sure to check out 10 College Urban Legends (Part I)!

5. Teachers 1, Student 0
It’s every college student’s fantasy to find a copy of tomorrow’s test today and go out drinking to celebrate his good fortune instead of studying for the test.  One (un)lucky student did just that: he went to see the professor in his office the day before the test, found his office unlocked and unoccupied, and a stack of tests on the desk.  The conniving student swiped one and walked away, surely expecting a night of partying and an A on the test.  The teacher, however, had other plans.  When he returned to his office, he counted the number of tests, realized one was missing, and came up with a great way of catching the cheater: he cut off a portion of the bottom of the rest of the exams.  When one student turned in a full-sized one, he was promptly flunked on the exam.

4.  Positive Reinforcement
An English teacher would love the irony of this story: students playing a psychological prank on their Psychology professor.  Legend has it that a group of students really took to their teacher’s lesson on positive reinforcement and decided to try it out.  By listening quietly and attentively when the professor stood on the left side of the room, and being disruptive when he stood on the right side, the teacher was “taught” by positive reinforcement to always teach from the left side.  Using the same method, they taught him to move to the corner where the trashcan was, then to put one foot on top of it, and eventually to deliver all his lectures standing on top of the trashcan.

3.  The Good Samaritan
This legend is similar to the “fine print” tests you hear about, that have a page and a half of directions, with the instruction to not fill in any answers buried somewhere in the middle.  In this version, a religion teacher moved the site of his final exam at the last minute, leaving a note on the blackboard with the new location.  On the path from one building to the other he paid an actor to play a beggar who asked each student for help on their way by.  Most of the students refused, not wanting to be late for the test.  They were flunked.  The few who stopped to assist the beggar aced the final.

2. A Penny for the Poor
When applying for financial aid, this legend often comes up.  As it was told to me, a boy goes to college and doesn’t truly have the money to afford it. Not wanting to take out loans, and not willing to ask his family for help, he wrote a letter to the newspaper asking them to publish a story about him. All he wanted was for everyone who read the article to send him a penny, and with that money, he would finance his education. As it turns out, the story is true – the man’s name is Michael Hayes and he attended the University of Illinois, where he successfully raised the equivalent of 2.8 million pennies due to an article published in the Chicago Tribune!

1. Good Will Hunting
Everyone knows the Good Will Hunting story.  Incredibly smart guy with menial job solves and unsolvable math equation and jumps into the upper echelon of academia.  Well this story is actually based on a true one which happened about 80 years ago: a graduate student at UC Berkeley was late to class and mistakenly wrote down two problems that he assumed were homework, but were actually examples of “unsolvable” statistics problems. Having some difficulty with them, he handed in his completed assignment late, only to later find out from his professor the significance of what he had actually done!

Chances are that if you’re a college freshman or just going into college, you’ve heard lots of legends ranging from how students have cheated on SAT exams to a Biology class faux pas.  Here is a list of the most frequent myths you’ll probably here about – whether it is a group of kids discussing how funny and absurd they are, or that guy who is trying to convince people this is something his cousin did – so read up because you don’t want to be left out in the cold on these.

10. “Dude, you get 200 points just for signing your name!”
Whether or not this should be on the list is questionable, but it is a legend told so often that it really needed a spot.  The myth that you get 200 points for signing your name correctly on the SAT isn’t true; it just so happens that the way the test is scored doesn’t allow for anyone to score less than a 200, because if they do, the scores are not recorded. Sorry to burst your bubble, but you better start hitting the books!

9. Rejecting a Rejection
This one is usually told around the time that people are getting their acceptance / rejection letters.  Typically it’s told to somebody after an especially disappointing rejection. The way it goes is like this: a student applied to several schools, mostly reaches, some matches, and a safety or two. Not only was he rejected from his reaches, and almost all of his matches, but from one of the safety schools as well. In a moment of frustration, he wrote a letter to the reach schools, rejecting their rejection letters. One of these schools (supposedly Yale) was so impressed with his creativity and motivation that they decided to admit him after all.

8. Read Your Textbook, Win A Car
Ever wondered why you should bother reading every last detail of your 600-page textbook? Chances are you have thought about this, and haven’t come up with a good reason to do so. Well, this true story might just change your mind.  In 2001 a Yale student was reading the fine print of his textbook and found a publisher’s note congratulating him for being perseverant and offered him a chance to win a car if he sent his name and address to the publisher.  Sure enough, he did just that, and being only one of five students to submit his address, he was selected as the student to win a 1965 Thunderbird.

7. Pass the Salt
This is a fun story that gets told, mostly by guys, in high school and college biology classes, when the subject matter at hand is the male anatomy.  This is one of those stories where guys claim it happened in their cousin’s class, although you can be almost certain that isn’t true.  Legend has it that the professor was explaining that male semen is composed of nearly 80% sugar, to which a female student asked, “If semen is mostly sugar, then how come it tastes so salty?” Off-color? Yes. Hilarious? Yes.

6. Do You Have Any Idea Who I Am?
This urban legend found its way into Hollywood with the college movie Slackers, so if you’ve seen it you’ve heard of this little trick before.  In a lot of big lecture-oriented classes, often times the professor won’t know most of the students by name or face.  Legend has it that at the end of a final exam in one of these courses, one student refused to turn in his test when the teacher called “time” because he was finishing up his work on the last problem.  Taking too long, the professor refused to accept the student’s exam.  The student, not fazed, waltzed up to the front desk and asked, “Do you have any idea who I am?”  In a class of over 100 people, the teacher admitted he had no idea, and was rather taken aback by the audacity of the student.  The student simply shoved his test booklet into the middle of the stack on the teacher’s desk, flipped them onto the floor creating a chaotic mess, and walked away.

Update: Be sure to check out 10 College Urban Legends (Part II)!