Mad Max and the Slackerdome.
Well, when you consider that it was Gore dropping out all the time, and Bush gettting half-way decent grades, I’m not sure how ‘slackerdom’ applies to the current political situation.
That said, I’m pretty sure that unless you graduate Cum Laude, GPA doesn’t count for much in most HR-type’s minds.
Follow-up report: talked to the other TAs (there were other cases) and prof, and as a group have decided to just give the perps zeros on this assignment and the prof will write up a list of all the plagarism cases for the term and send it to the academic standards guy so that they are all in the works, paper-trail-wise, but no one gets suspended or anything (UNLESS they’ve done it before and are making a hobby of it, which this guy will notice). So I feel ok about this.
Oh, and apparently one can retake a class to replace a grade C- or lower here (a limited number of times). Pretty generous, I think, so my conscience is clear.
They all showed up to take the final exam, and maybe I should have told them to just take the afternoon and go to the beach instead as their chances of passing aren’t great, but, hell, it’s their problem if they don’t expect me to have noticed and didn’t want to ask me about their paper grades before arriving at the exam. I mean, how do you approach that: “In light of the plagarized paper that I haven’t yet told you you’ve been busted for, maybe you should go home and take a nap instead as you’ll be doing 6C again this summer.”
That seems a reasonably ballanced outcome.
That’s basically my point. If you string together a bunch of stuff that you’ve cut-and-pasted from various sources, assuming that you don’t get caught, you’re still going to get a low grade, because the paper still isn’t very good. Some of the sentences and paragraphs will be well-written, but the paper as a whole won’t get a good grade because of poor organization, poor transitions, hinky-looking bibliography, etc. This is the point that seems lost on most plagiarists. In all likelyhood, they’re such poor writers that they don’t realize how blatantly obvious their cut-and-paste job is to anyone who knows how to look.
If you paraphrase and use direct quotes, yeah, you’ll still have a low grade because you’re not a very good writer, but at least you’re not risking a failing grade and possible academic discipline! In the courses I graded for, if you met the minimum page requirement, made some sort of passing comments on the subject of the assignment (no matter how ungrammatical, disorganized, or fallacious) and make some attempt to cite your sources, you got at least a C- (and, trust me, you got lots of suggestions on how to make your next paper better, and more encouraging comments than you really deserved). Grades below that were reserved for people who obviously put forth no effort and did no research . . . and plagiarists, of course.
They also lack respect for their classmates, their instructors, and their school. No pity here.
I have a suspicion that that’s true for the vast majority of petty criminals.
[nitpick]In higher math, you are graded pretty much entirely on how well you can convey what you know in writing. So it really is across the board.[/nitpick]
YES! Not everyplace, mind you, but certain places do. (Although I didn’t need one to get my USAF security clearance, and it was a high one) A lot of the prestige jobs on Wall Street won’t look at you unless you’ve got top grades, often from the top schools. I worked with a man who would also disqualify based simply on school (he wasn’t supposed to, but nobody could really prove that he was doing it). And I’m not talking right out of school either. Not even significant experience counts. It is a way of trimming the field of applicants, I would expect. That is, in addition to elitism aspect of having top Ivy league grads only.
Still, there are plenty of good jobs for those of us who didn’t go to Ivy League schools and who had our 2.7 GPAs also.
Guinastasia, my husband screwed around for years then buckled down. Yeah, it was a collossal waste of money, but it was what he needed to do, I guess.
viva, while I was messing around with some art classes at Irvine Valley College (JC in SoCal), the cheaters were getting royally screwed. If you were caught cheating, you were automatically dropped from the class, received an “F”, and had included on your official transcript that it happened as a result of academic dishonesty.
As one teacher put it, “Try getting into a four-year college with THAT on your resume!”
Amen.
Plagarism pisses me off. Granted, I’ve always had a pretty easy time writing papers, and I don’t think I ever got anything less than a B for any writing assignment… but still. I remember in college there was a writing class that I sort of became the “official proofreader” for. Every assignment I’d have 3 or 4 people give me their papers to read and mark up. While I may occassionally make gramatical mistakes in my writing, I rarely miss them when reading. Give me a red pen and I’ll find every misplaced comma, sentence fragment, verb wonkiness (that’s a technical term, btw) or other mistakes you’ve made. I used to piss off one of my professors by doing this to short stories he had us read. Heh. Sorry, but Faulkner blows and should never be used as an example of proper writing to a freshman writing class! A lit class? Go for it. But not a writing class.
Anyway, I probably helped a lot of people get better grades by catching their mistakes before they handed their papers in, and I was just a peer! The school has official programs and resources if you need them! Resorting to theft (and it is theft) is just … well, low.
That said, I will admit that I took a cheesy 100-level MIS class to fill a math requirement (yay for liberal arts majors!) and it had a section on programming in BASIC. A really small section that didn’t give you any actual knowledge or ability, but required you to memorize lame syntax that I would never, ever be using again for the rest of my life. So my husband, the programmer, did my homework for me for the 3 weeks or so that we did that. <hangs head in shame>
This is so lame…but I bought a textbook for my computer intro class, (Com101 or something), and the book came with a disk for our assignments. I started writing my assignment-they came with templates or something-and for some reason, my disk (which, was brand new-the whole thing was!) had all the assignments done.
Stupid me told the professor.
I’m too honest!
No, not too honest; just not willing to lose your integrity over something so small and petty.
Well done!
The Citadel Fretful? My older brother is a VMI Grad, and sat on the honor court a few times (Not sure of terminology here, he wasn’t before the court, he was one of the magistrates/jurors or what ever they call them.)
Different universities, not just military academies, have honor courts whose jurors and judge are the college students.
My university has an honor code/policy, the most common part being the one about not cheating on exams or papers. If you fail to follow it, then you can be tried by the honor court.
No, UNC-Chapel Hill. (I guess the student in question should, at least, be thankful it isn’t The Citadel. Or UVA, for that matter – I understand the only penalty the honor court can give is permanent expulsion.)
This thread had definitely confirmed what I suspected: instructors and administrators impose lighter penalties than peers. Receiving an F for the class is probably the best a student convicted by the honor court here can hope for; it’s much more likely that he or she will be suspended or expelled.
Fretful and I both went to The College of William & Mary, where students have an Honor Code and being tried before Honor Council is a semi-big deal. It includes, but is not limited to, academic honor. Presenting false ID at a bar is an Honor Code violation, for example.
(best case ever: Student tried for lying after giving a false name to police who caught him in the act of streaking.)
… You’re not at BU by any chance?
(This professor sounds exactly like one I had for Ancient Greek. The guy would do anything to avoid actually teaching.)
Yep, you’re correct about UVA. A lot of people are dissatisfied with that, but there never was a majority, so it sticks.
This is a huge problem, because there’s very strong evidence of racial bias in the honor system, and very different rates among schools–for instance, most of the honor cases brought against students in the liberal arts in the past year didn’t result in expulsion, but during that time period all of the cases brought against engineering students did result in expulsion. This indicates something very wrong, and reform is desparately needed, IMO.
Moderate hijack:
The Plague of Plagiarism spreads. I just read a lame rant in a local paper the other day--you know, one of those righteous wrath diatribes about ungrateful immigrants and how they should go live somewhere else; it was a letter to the editor. The next day, glurge shows up in one of my Hotmail accounts, forwarded by a well-meaning friend (aren't they always?) containing the very same rant but in a longer version!
I checked it out at Snopes. Turns out the original was written by an Air Force fellow. So I fired off a letter to the paper with a rant of my own about how people should write their own [damn] letters to the paper and how I don’t need to see more glurge in the [frookin’] paper.
Now I’m wondering how many other letters to the editor have been swiped from elsewhere.
(End hijack)
Bringing this back to the top.
Yes, arisu I am at BU. Actual Ancient Greek the language (if so, go you!) or just greek myth? This prof’s most notorious class is myth survey, but he does teach the language on occasion. Does he have an odd mushroom fetish, too? If so, it’s the same guy.