My father is a college professor, and he has a policy of doing this. He figures that he’s teaching in the business department, and he’s supposed to be preparing students to be businesspeople. And he also figures that your boss would, in the end, greatly prefer someone who simple says “I don’t know the answer to that question,” to someone who makes an answer up and wastes his time. So Dad’s policy is that if you don’t know the answer to a question and you draw a little picture of a cow to show that you don’t know the answer, he’ll give you 40% of the possible credit for that question. (All the tests organized around questions worth 5%, 10%, or 20%, so the math is easy.)
He has a lot of talented amateur margin-scribblers and art minors, so he posts the best ones on his bulletin board in his office. I make a point of checking them out when I visit him.
Charles “Ray-Ray” Raylington! Is that you? Fifth row, next to the last desk in third period Honors? I thought I had recognized your style of writing. Still doodling action figures? Still leaving teeth marks on your pencils? Still wishing you had lived in the time of Mods and Rockers? Pity.
Glad to see you are doing so well.
But there is that little matter of the cheating you’ve now admitted to. I look forward to seeing you again.
Why are people deriding a 15 y/o high school student for watching a movie to complete her assignment?! Heck, many of my peers in undergrad did the exact same thing. Just right now I have recalled one very poignant moment from undergrad…
I was walking down the stairs out of the library with a friend. We ran into a mutual acquiantance from high school and stopped to chat. I was leaving with a massive handful of books to skim through as a prelude to beginning an essay due in a few weeks. Alternatively, he was going up to the fourth floor to get a DVD to complete an essay due tomorrow morning.
Most people just don’t put the effort in these days. The sad part is they don’t have to. I’m interested in the mark she’ll receive because, for all intents and purposes, having not read the poem she should receive an F. The disturbing part is, even though she hasn’t done any of the work, she’ll still pass the assignment. And if she keeps up with it, one day she’ll have a university degree. She might not graduate cum laude, but she’ll graduate.
(Not that I’m condoning this behaviour! However, I am pointing out the reality that success in today’s world in not as highly correlated with effort as it used to be.)
I could start a thread on students like this. Most of them are more upset by the fact that their transparent, well-used manipulation techniques don’t work on me than they are by the well-deserved F. My two favorites this semester were: 1. The guy who, having exhausted his bag of excuses, pulled junior high out of the bottom of the bag and said, “I’m sorry, but most of the other professors are just more cool than you.” 2. The woman who came into my office with the well-rehearsed line, “I take full responsibility for my work ethic this semester.” I said, “Good.” She was not expecting that!
You can get a decent summary Beowulf online in far less time than it takes to watch the movie. I couldn’t have gotten through the poem in high school, either (insufficient attention span), but how hard is it to skim and BS? I would hope that this sort of aggressive ignorance was rewarded with an F. Keep us posted.
*Bay-O!
Bay-O!
Grendel’s coming, and I wan’ go home!
Bay!
Is a Bay
Is a Bay
Is a Bay
Is a Bay
Is a Beowulf
Grendel’s coming and I wan’ go home.
A monster attacks while we drink our mead
(Grendel’s coming, and I wan’ go home.)
Look! The future King of the Geats!
(Grendel’s coming, and I wan’ go home.)*
Well, let’s see- if she isn’t going to READ THE POEM, then she cannot complete the assignment, as she is ignoring both the topic and assignment directions.
And people wonder why public education is so fucked up. Her mom should be fucking shot for fostering this kind of thinking & behavior in her kids. Pathetic.
I’m currently reading a book by Pierre Bayard, called “How to talk about books you haven’t read”. Fascinating stuff.
In one of the chapters he quotes extensive passages from Balzac’s “Lost Illusions” (second book) where both a literary critic and a bookseller openly admit (and/or are caught) not reading books they are reviewing/publishing. The book was written, or rather published, in the first half of the 19th century.
It’s just a bit easier to fake it via a movie nowadays.
It’s been a long time since some of you have been in the US public school system, hasn’t it? It really is disgusting.
Unless by some overwhelmingly unlikely stroke of luck the teacher is one of the few who prefers principle over parental pressure and actually grades properly, the paper will get a B.
Actually completing the assignment, and fulfilling the page number/word count requirement with even a tangential relationship to educational lesson is more than enough for a 3.0 GPA until, I’d say, around the sophomore college level.
I’m guessing B or C, depending on how well she writes. A decent writer (truly a rarity in high school, going by how bad the undergrad papers I mark are) could definitely BS their way to a B, I bet. But it sounds like this girl is just clueless; a dedicated lazy person would have to get creative to come up with an answer, but she might not bother.
One of my friends prided herself on never reading one assigned book in high school. She then went on to such heights as priding herself on starting assignments at 9 a.m. and handing them in at noon. She’s now applying to law school, and she did manage to get the average stats for the schools she’s hoping for. Wonder how she’ll do?
My Beowulf ignorance story: A friend was helping me move last year, and saw my copy of Beowulf on the top of one box. He said he was surprised that I would buy the book of that movie - it hadn’t seemed like my thing. He thought it was a novelization of the movie. I would have mocked him, but he was helping me move.
Here’s a true story from the college where I work as a professor. This happened to a colleague:
The angry father of student called to complain about the low grade on his son’s paper. Said the father, “This is a really good paper. It should have gotten at least a B.”
Dept. Head: “How do you know?”
Father: “Because I’m the one who wrote it!”
My HS required either a very dedicated work ethic or a near-constant stream of BS. A friend of mine a few minutes before a class in which a paper was due typed half a sentence in a word processor, then filled the rest of the page with ASCII characters and claimed a printer error.
I must admit I took a page from his book when I deliberately corrupted the file of a philosophy paper I had to email to a professor in college.
ETA: Oh, and as a sophomore or junior, this would have been a reasonable assignment at my school.
I might add that the assignment is impossible to accomplish just by watching the movie; watching the movie is a complete waste of time, in fact. She’d do just as well watching the Hobbit cartoon.
In the advanced track at my school you’d see something like this junior or senior year. Same with the HS in my current town.
Good writing, bad grading and, most importantly, good summaries/analytic articles to plagiarize can substitute for research and independent thought, but his niece is screwed by any standard. Given the horror that is that movie, I’d say only a truly out of it teacher would give her a decent grade.
I blame it entirely on the parents…simply haven’t instilled a love od education for the sheer fact of it in the kid. And high school is the best place, too - where they go easy on the grading and help you.
All that being said, I haven’t read Beowulf either. Just never had it assiged in school, and I guess I was never really interested in it. I did read ALL of the assigned reading in my school, but that wasn’t difficult. Math was more difficult and I didn’t slouch off in there either.
People why Asian kids have got this reputation of being so studious and smart. It’s because our parents constantly shove it down our throats and tell us how important it is from Day 1. They overdo it at times, but honestly, I think that’s better than the lackadaisical attitude displayed in the OP.