An engineering student turned in a teammate survey instead of his midterm, then wrote that he doesn’t ‘really understand computers’

An engineering professor, Husky (huskystarttv), recently took to TikTok to talk about some confusing behavior from her current batch of students. In a post that got over 4 million views, the professor called them “the iPad kids” and shared how her class reacted to their midterm exam.

As she drove, Husky told her viewers in her video that the midterm was “design focused” with no math or physics, and fairly easy if the students had participated in class. According to her video, her first problem was that “quite a few students arrived to class late” and didn’t know about the midterm. Husky got irritated, saying that it was in the syllabus and the schedule, and had been announced over email and in class.

While she watched the class, she said that one student was on his phone rather than his laptop, and it seemed like he was scrolling because he kept smiling and giggling. She assumed that he was taking the test on the Canvas app and “switching back and forth between TikTok or Instagram.” She didn’t want to distract the rest of the class, so she decided, “I’ll just take 10 points off of his exam and note that he was on his phone.” Then, after an hour, the student simply packed up and left.

Since he didn’t say a word, she decided to check his submission

Husky claimed, “He didn’t submit anything.” She graded him a zero and asked why he didn’t do the exam. Allegedly, he had only filled out the peer-review survey for teammates that the Canvas app had automatically sent, believing it was the test, and thought that his classmates were “doing s— for other classes.”

Out of curiosity, she checked his survey, where he supposedly wrote, “I didn’t really know what was happening in this project because I don’t really understand computers.” Husky said he approached her in class, but instead of apologizing or asking for a chance to retake the test, he just stared at her. She claimed he then got angry when she referred him to success coaching.

She asked if she was “wrong” for her reaction, and her viewers were on her side, with one user writing, “LET THEM FAIL.” Others saw it as a sign of a broader problem in education, pointing to concerns like those raised by a Texas teacher who said only two of her 110 students read at grade level. One user noted, “This is a DIRECT result of high school teachers not being able to hold students accountable.”

One person pointed out that having a phone out during an exam used to be an automatic fail. Another claimed that if they had missed a midterm, they “would have thrown up and then come to you sobbing about my mistake.” Husky responded, sharing that she once emailed her own professors while in an ambulance on the way to the hospital.

Attack of the Fanboy was unable to independently verify the student’s side of the story, as this account originates solely from Husky’s TikTok video.