In a recent Reddit thread, one user asked teachers and professors if students had ever tried to trade sex for grades in their class. Here are 14 of the best stories from the thread!
1. “I had a girl say she’d “do anything” for extra credit. Her intention was clear. I made a joke of it by responding “Anything? Would you kill a guy?” I think she was embarrassed I didn’t go for it. She dropped my class not long after.” (deleted)
2. “My go-to, if I get a proposition, is to tell them to call my wife and ask her permission. So far only one has, which prompted an interesting conversation with my wife, and then she discovered just how much I’ve been hit on by women.” (SmarmyHuman)
3. “I had one student so aggressive that she wouldn’t be put off by anything. If there was no desk between us, her hand would immediately be climbing up my thigh. If I put a desk between us, the moment I glanced away she’d be coming around at me. So, one day, I was literally climbing up my chair to get away from her, and I loudly protested, “I’m married!” She retorted, “What’s your wife got that I don’t?” My reply: “A college education.” I’m particularly proud of that comeback.” (ProfAwe5ome)
4. “I’m not a teacher, but I am a second-year college student. And I just realized that when I told my teacher in high school “I’d do anything to pass your class”, in a completely innocent manner (yes, he was attractive, but I’m a wholesome student and I think every teacher in my school knew that), he took it the wrong way. He told me there was nothing I could do and then I had a “random” meeting with my principal about my behaviour. I actually didn’t put 2 and 2 together until just now … oh boy. I’m sorry, 10th-grade history teacher…” (Gwynn)
5. “My grad student does this thing during the last regular lecture where he passes a bucket and students can write any question they want and he’ll answer it. It can be on the subject matter, general course feedback, whatever. Open forum for all. Well, he’s reading out questions and gets to one which makes him stop – his eyes get big, a shocked look comes over his face – and he reads, “I’m 19, 36-26-38, and I f*ck like a bunny on cocaine. I really need a B- to keep my average. There is a phone number here but I won’t read it.” (SpoopsThePalindrome)
6. “Happened to me once in the 80s when I was myself in my 20s. A student who I just failed pressed her breasts against me and asked if there was anything she could do to pass the class. I said, “Yes, take it over again.” It really makes me wonder if that ever actually works.” (poncewattle)
7. “I have students flirt, or make subtle comments fairly regularly, but one student really went above and beyond.
She was doing poorly in my class with about a 65% average early in the semester, and she was coming into my office hours regularly for help. She was really trying but was still struggling with the material.
Well, toward the end of the semester she shows up for office hours and asks if she can charge her phone. She didn’t have a charger, she said, but she had a cable, and could she just plug her phone into my laptop. I didn’t think anything of it and said “Sure.”
She got fairly flirty that session and was starting to cross into the inappropriate territory, but I played dumb and kept things focused. When we wrapped up, she unplugged her phone and said something like “I think my phone copied some pictures to your computer. Tell me what you think.”
Oh boy, did her phone ever copy some pictures? There were literally hundreds of pictures of her which looked to be taken over the course of the semester, almost all of them nude.
I had to report it to my department chair. I told and that I’d like for us to assume it was an accident, but I wanted to cover it too. We had a meeting with her and she was embarrassed, but we stuck to the “it was probably an accident” line and left her most of her dignity.
Surprisingly, she didn’t drop. Instead, she apologized after the next class, very embarrassed and promised it wouldn’t happen again. She ended up pulling a C-, which I bumped up to a C because of the extra work she put in.” (Withrow)
8. “I’ve been a college instructor, teaching assistant, or professor for ten years. I’m extremely oblivious, so I don’t typically realize I’m being hit on until a month or two later. The semester ends, I’m in my office thinking of the past semester, saying “Man X was friendly — she sure seemed nice but she always wore low cut tops and OH MY GOD!” And then the realization sets in.” (grammar_oligarch)
9. “I once had a student offer to have her sister perform oral sex on me if I gave her a passing grade in the class. I of course refused and informed her that such an offer could be grounds for dismissal from the university, but I have to admit I always wondered why she offered her sister’s services over her own.” (faleboat)
10. “One student I had was taking the class for the third time and still struggling (non-native English speaker, which represents roughly a third of the campus community). It was a very halfhearted proposition. I pretended I didn’t understand what she was implying and instead offered to work with her extensively on revision efforts. She ended up being my hardest-working student and finished the class with a respectable A-.”(social)
11. “I’m an art teacher and, when I was teaching middle school, I had a 7th grader ask me, in the middle of class, to suck his d*ck. Not in a mean way, but in a “will you please?” kind of way. They go to lunch, the kid leaves the lunchroom, comes to my room and asks again. He’s 12 years old, mind you. I kept trying to get him to leave the room and he was saying, “There aren’t any cameras in here, no one will know if you don’t tell,” and then he tried to pull his pants down just so I could see his penis. I reported it, wrote a referral and the school made me press sexual harassment charges. The kicker is that, after he came back from being suspended, the school didn’t remove him from my room and I had to teach him for the next 3 months. Ugh.” (deleted)
12. “I teach a course on computer basics to keep the older employees up to speed and help them have greater efficacy over their work. I issue some small quizzes in order to cement their knowledge, you can’t actively fail them unless you go out of your way to try to flunk. I had this one older lady who kept shilling out her daughter (18 years old) to me. First, she’d complain during the lunch break about the loser she was dating, the fact she isn’t going to school and doesn’t have a job, and the fact she doesn’t aspire to anything. Then she started saying how alike we both were and had the same interests (We’re both “good with computers”). Finally, I got one of the quizzes back from this lady with no questions actually answered; just a letter reading that she’d like me to make the first move to talk to her daughter. The back page was her daughter’s phone number, e-mail and “Instagram” (Actually, Snapchat but good hustle!).” (TheQuickAndTheRed)
13. “When I was in graduate school, I had a student who, once he found out I was gay, started to flirt with me a lot. He was ridiculously good-looking. He did stuff like come up to me after class to show me his pierced nipples (which involved, of course, lifting his shirt and showing me his perfect abs, too). He never actually made an offer of sex for grades; he might have just been offering me sex. Or he might have just enjoyed flirting with his teacher because he got off on being hot. Poor boy got the lowest grade in the class; he was pretty, but not too bright.” (nycdedmonds)
14. “I used to teach an astronomy class which required the students to go outside for 2 hours to the campus observatory and point out constellations. One girl in my class was pretty clever overall. She didn’t like working particularly hard so she always sat with the nerdy awkward guys who easily did all the work. One day, she asked me if the observatory would be open to which I responded, “I don’t know” because it was the middle of the day. She then sighed and said, “Maybe we could meet up at my place tonight, get a movie, and determine my grade some other way.” Well, being the suave physics grad student that I am, I just stared at her expressionless, turned, and quickly walked away.” (hbaromega)
