a kind of test

I'm teaching a college Intro to Jazz class.    What's nice about it is that, though the students almost all came into the semester completely ignorant of jazz — the genre, its iconic tunes, its sound, its main artists — it's an upper-level Music School course rather than a general-interest (general-disinterest) requirement for non-majors.    This means that they have real musical knowledge under their belts and so I can use technical terms and dig in to the nuts and bolts of a piece, and they'll know what I'm talking about.

During the first test of the semester, I noticed that one student had his phone out and was looking from the phone back and forth to the test, writing and copying.    I wasn't worried at all:  I make cheat-proof tests.    There's simply no way you could cheat;  you just have to do the work and prepare.    Nonetheless:  interesting.

Later, I was grading the tests, and came across the one from this student.    I noticed that here and there on its 3 pages there was tiny writing.    It was Chinese, obviously translations of the words I'd used in giving the test.    In describing Ella Fitzgerald's sound as "ebullient," or a player's playing as "melancholy," I was going way beyond the capabilities of foreign students, even ones fluent in English.

Test taken, grade received.    Lesson learned.