"Riddle Me This!"

Well, both, actually.

#1 was particularly close--the students do something that is not cheating but that is very close to it (I know that makes no sense, but it will in retrospect), and the failing grade is a punishment of sorts for the thing they did wrong. (BIG hint here--they lied, with the intention of confusing someone...)

#2 is close because the students are intending on fooling the teacher by doing something; to be clearer, they've already done something (but, of course, before the due date of the presentation).

Before the day in question, this group of students told their teacher a big lie in order to confuse her about--er--something... (I can't say any more without giving it away.) They assumed (erroneously) their young, conscientious teacher would be foolish enough to fall for it. They said they'd done something already. Does that help?

My solution had two major components to it:

1. The entire scenario may be traced back to the wife.

2. Her motivation was that she wanted to kill her husband and collect the insurance money.

(2), her motivation, is the flawed piece.

The big problem here is that the whole business seems some massive conspiracy, but in reality, if you think about it, it could just be the wife pulling the strings behind it all.

Think about it: the wife could tell the children (very young children, hypothetically) to "say happy birthday to Daddy"; and, for the most part, if they're very young, they'll just go along with it. After all, my friend said, they're gonna get cake anyway!

The co-workers? The Mrs. called them up and said it's her husband's birthday and that the co-workers should surprise him. Two ways this could work: (1) he was in a new job with people who don't know his actual birthday or (2) she explained that it was all part of a joke or come up with some other excuse. Now, it is stipulated that it's not a joke--which it certainly isn't in reality, as I'll explain in a moment--but that doesn't mean the co-workers don't think it is. For the purposes of this scenario in light of Mrs. X's motivation, however, we went with (1).

The big problem is the parents, but there's an answer here too: they never actually appear "on-stage." They could be hired actors, or some such thing--and, after all, the man is so confused that he would probably be thinking more about why everyone should be doing this than why his parents voice seem a little "off."

Now we come to her motive:

Why should she do all this? Believe me, we were stumped for a while, but then we thought of something very mystery-esque: she's after the money.

Let us say, hypothetically, that Mr. X inherits a great deal of money from--here we go again--a rich uncle (Barnaby Weste, you despicable old rapscallion!), but he must be at whatever arbitrary cut-off age Uncle prescribed. Mrs. X cannot wait a year for whatever reason (we weren't too sure on this--perhaps it's that Uncle changes his will on a dime, and she doesn't want to take the risk that he'd change it again?), so she develops a plan to murder Mr. X after having convinced everyone he'd already turned the cut-off age.

Yes, as you can tell, this woefully contrived scenario has multitudinous holes in it. The (real) parents, the birth certificate, the doctors who brought Mr. X into the world, the age-old question of why do anything this contrived when something simpler would do the trick... Yes, yes, I know. As I said, it doesn't work, but it is what my friend and I originally thought up.