Also interesting: the teacher is assumed to be female.

"lol-ing".......

When I was a TA for an undergrad class, I had all the students submit their papers with an upper and lower word limit (not including references), and I had them submit their entries electronically.

It made it a lot easier (for me at least; other TAs had some problems) to grade and keep anonymous (and I didn't have to carry lots of papers to and from class, the TA office, and home). Using the revision functions of Word, I was able to help with editing and commenting, and doing a word count was a snap. Furthermore, by having a word limit instead of a page requirement, it didn't matter what formatting they used. (However, I did my best in trying to get them to not do any fancy formatting when not asked for.)

When we did have a class-wide paper to grade (with a page limit) I was surprised about how many students in the wider class actually did the above. (I was also surprised that a few of my students also did it.) Oh well... I guess some students have been conditioned to this kind of thinking (without realizing that they're not fooling anyone...?)

I used to edit my kids' papers when they were in junior high and high school. My daughter "discovered" this method of making her paper appear longer...I had to disappoint her by letting her know that wasn't going to fly, and showed her some areas that would be easy to expand to get to the length the teacher wanted. (but...she was so excited that she'd discovered that; she really made me laugh).

Me marking up their stuff and then making them change it (sometimes several times) really helped them learn how to write papers. By the time they went to college, they didn't need my editing skills anymore.

also reminds me of this xkcd on connoisseurship: http://xkcd.com/915/
you've become a connoisseur of paper margins and formatting!

As a student, I remember writing a paper, printing it out, and thinking that something was "off"...

It was the first time I had written a paper using Word on a Mac, where the default font is Cambria (slightly larger than Times), and the margins were automatically set at 1.25. The same paper in the standard format on the Windows machine I tried was about a page shorter. It was too late to fix it, and I turned that paper in dreading that the instructor would think that I had deliberately padded my paper. 

Since then I've had an irrational hatred of Word on a Mac, even though I haven't taken a class that had a minimum page requirement in a long time.

I did the opposite during my undergraduate career - upper word limits were my problem. I occasionally would need to decrease the line spacing to 1.5, and played with smaller font sizes. My professors never said anything; perhaps they didn't notice because they were preoccupied with the majority of students doing things in the opposite direction? 

Are there any teachers here who can explain the rationale behind being such sticklers for page/word counts as to unintentionally encourage students to play around with formatting?

It was one of the many things I loved so much about my Chemistry classes - lab reports were to be long enough to contain the required information, and page/word counts were merely approximate guidelines. Result: our papers were of appropriate length for the lab being described, and we could focus more on content than on forcing ourselves to be verbose or terse (depending on individual style).

I'm embarrassed to say I've fiddled with this black magic a few times before...but I tried to be a little more subtle about it. Whether or not my 2 spaces after the period, slightly elongated kerning, margin shifting by a decimal, etc., actually succeeded are another issue. After a while it does all start to look like the comic's example.

I do that but it's to reduce the size, not to induce it...
*blush*

A very good reason to always put formatting on your assignments. I went from writing ambitious essays and then get eyerolls form my friends because it wasn't divided in paragraphs or written in 1,5, to switching to Garamond because one teacher thought TNR was dated, to feeling like cheating when using 1,5 (after having that as modus operandi fo years, as required in both hich school and college) after one teacher talked about it as a cop out... long story short, even honest students can "fiddle" with the format when they don't know what the format is supposed to be

My trick was always to go through and increase the size of each period and comma to 14pt when my paper was too short.  It would add maybe a page or two to a 20-page-er. 

But usually I had the problem of my paper being too long... then I would go back and decrease the font size on my footnotes! 

Ah, formatting.  I used to tell the students I worked with that composition and all its accoutrements, be it the dreaded 3-5 paragraph essay, fonts, or even the whole of grammar, is simply that, fashion.

Of course I would quickly add that this should in no means trivialize these standards.  I would ask: if two people with the same resume showed up for a job interview, and one was wearing jeans and a t-shirt while the other wore a suit, who would my students give the job to?  Their response was unanimous.

Ideas are like that, I would explain.  Your argument might have the same merit as someone else, but if it's not dressed properly and has spelling errors or "isn't long enough," then it won't be considered as fairly as it should.  This was especially comforting to the ELL students (English Language Learners), who were often judged by their teachers more for their subject-verb agreements than how well they backed up their claims.

I've done that.  But then, hasn't everyone at least considered it?  I had a rule, though; no more than half a page of fiddling -- in either direction -- on anything under 10 pages, 1 page for 10-20 pages.  Trying to add what amounts to one more paragraph to a tightly-constructed essay is a pain in the butt, and I've never been a fan of superflurious wording.  If it was over or under by more than that, it probably did need proper revision.

Besides, at those levels you can increase the margins by just 0.1 and it's virtually undetectable without a ruler.

As a TA in the late 90's, I worked for a professor who refused to give an F to any paper. Fs were only given to those who did not turn in work. So, when grading the class' midterm paper I was made to give a D to a student whose paper was 3 sentences and 3 pages long. I'm not sure what the font size was, but I think it was around 50. Believe it or not, the student looked shocked (in a negative way) when he saw his grade.

While I've never done quite what's being described in the comic, I have very seldom written a paper of the correct length. If you ask me to write ten pages, odds are I will end up with twelve to fourteen. Sometimes I will fiddle with various parameters to make it fit, not really because I think professors won't notice, but to make myself feel better about making it fit, if only on a technicality. In my experience, unless one turns in a paper that's twice as long a professor requested, they never seem to care when it's too long. Which is interesting, considering that everyone wrote their papers a couple of pages too long, that would amount to a good deal more work for the professor on the grading end.

If these tactics are so hilarious that you all laugh about it in secret....why not just grade those students down?  I know many people who do this, and have done it myself once or twice (mostly in high school) and never had more than one teacher (also in high school) even mention it, let alone grade down for it.  If the paper is adequate, just too short, why not just write a note saying "don't do this?"  Students believe you don't notice because you don't do anything about it.

Most of the comments on this article make me think "What the f is university like in America!"