My father taught some post grad courses at Stevens Institute of Technology in NJ. Monday nights, that’s when Mom would get us pizza or McDonald’s or whatever. Every other night it was a proper meal.

Anyway, his course was in metallurgy, and he expected you to attend every class, however the grading was 50/50. Half was on an original paper that you designed yourself (and had topic approved), and half on the final exam. The papers flowed in with about a month to go, and then for the final — he created a unique exam for each student with a couple questions based on the paper they had submitted.

This would have been in the 50’s, so long before AI, before the internet, heck before Xerox machines were widespread. But there was a thriving business at the fraternities in filing all the papers in all the courses that had ever been submitted, so it was trivial for someone to just go back a few years and find something relevant but to a different professor, copy it, and submit that.

And the first year, when he handed out the “final exams”, three of the guys just got up and walked out of the room. Curiously, word got around, and he didn’t have to worry about that sort of thing again.