A final-year music student was required as part of his course to compose a symphony. Although otherwise a diligent student, he had no inspiration whatsoever for the task in hand. Then he remembered a piece of advice that his professor had given him a few terms earlier: ‘Find a symphony by a modern but not ultra-modern composer, and copy it out backwards - nobody will recognize it’. The student decided to follow this advice, but… which symphony to choose? Finally it dawned upon him: the professor himself had once written a symphony. It was unpublished, though the score was in the university music library. And so the student borrowed his professor’s symphony, carefully wrote it out backwards, and prepared to sumbit his work.
It was then that the student realized that he had just produced a note-for-note copy of Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony.

Absolutely priceless and oh-so tantalizingly believable.

Actually, there is a version of this anecdote circulating in the Czech Republic, with the result yielding the New World Symphony.

Good one. I suspect this is true of some of the crabby professors I encountered in my university years.