Stupid Cheater Tricks

The BBQ Pit
181

Of course, one solution to that problem is to do what my professor described above does: emphasize to students that they will get more out of turning in the assignments if they put effort in to them, but that they may make changes later.

We had to turn in a prospectus in the first month- and more of us than not knew by the time the prospecti were returned that at least some portions might need changing. She gave us this big song and dance about how we could find more sources if we couldn’t find enough obviously related sources, but some of us thought it would be easier in the long run to change our topic to be more like our sources. We were told that that was acceptable.

182

Well, presumably the first biblography wouldn’t be set in stone. [intones]Henceforth this will be thy bibilography. Thou shalt not subtractest from it, and neither shalt thou add unto it.[/intones] The point is to get them to get their toochis down to the library and actually look their sources up early in the process. It’s not like they’d lose points for having used a source that they discovered later in the semester, or for having decided to drop a source that didn’t turn out to be useful.

183

One of my colleagues has taken to making his students do an annotated bibliography for their research paper so as to reduce the possibility of plagiarism. The idea is that since they have to do this sort of work, they probably think: “Well, since I have to do all this labor anyway, I might as well write the paper myself.”

184

I’m guessing a book report on a Somerset Maugham work, the name of which eludes me at the moment.

185

The teacher didn’t say, but did mention that it cost him a lot for the subscription. So it’s not something that the school, or even the department, requires.

186

Of Human Bondage?

187

Well, it was the first thing I thought of when I saw Manda JO’s story of the guy turning in porn. However, I completely missed her explaination of what actually happened.

188

I posted an update on the OP on 4/4/05, after the second test was graded.

Well, the student that was the subject of the O.P. apparently decided to give up on the course after the second cheating incident. Shame, really – I tried to convince him (and his partner in crime) that they weren’t helping themselves by copying. That’s why they were doing poorly on tests.

Neither of them bothered turning in the last two assignments, and pretty much stopped attending altogether. Although they did both show up today to take the final exam – I presume only because they could lose their Title IV financial aid (which they are both listed as being on) if they quit attending before the end of the course (and I am required to turn in “last date of attendance” for anybody marked as Title IV who gets an F in the class).

They both bombed the final – but then I guess that’s to be expected when you stop going to class for the last 3 or 4 weeks and don’t bother to do several of the assignments, never mind the cheating.

At least I don’t have to expend any more effort on this case, this term.

Not much of a consolation considering the new incidents that just popped up – more idiots to deal with. :::sigh:::

189

Yeah , don’t forget that you have a rant to submit on the antics of your TA’s

Declan

190

Ack, don’t remind me!!!

The good news is… I finally got a TA this term (a new guy) who is competent, follows instructions, is timely, etc. He’s been great, and I’m getting him back for my C++ class in the summer.

The bad news is that in my Java class my TA has been totally, and I mean TOTALLY, worthless. I have a bunch of grading to do myself this week (finals week) because I can’t trust or rely or her to get it done in a timely fashion, much less to get it done right or at all. BTW, this has already been reported to the department, and the last I heard was that she was going to be told of her poor performance and fired (in the event that she’s planning to stick around. I thought this was her last term, but I don’t know. I never saw a notice about her defending a project or thesis, so maybe not…)

191

Here’s a good one…

A student in my Comp. class plagiarized from Internet sources on her final.  She wrote out the stolen stuff into her blue book.  What's really stupid about this is that she was already failing the class and even if I had been oblivious and she had passed the final, she still would have flunked.

Her English skills were atrocious, so when I saw carefully crafted sentences in her blue book, I knew she couldn’t possibly have come up with it on her own. Google is my friend.

192

Please don’t do this.

I had a professor who did this, and it was a nightmare.

What I ended up doing was having two projects: one which I worked on at my own pace, and one which I hastily threw together before each due date.

For example, I knew there was no way I could come up with a satisfying topic by the time the topic was due, so I came up with an obvious topic and turned that in. As the due date for the bibliography came around, I gathered resources on this topic, and did it the night before it was due. The day before the outline was due, I did that. The day before the rough draft was due, I wrote it.

Then, when the final project was due, I turned in my real final project. The one I had been working on at my own pace the entire time, and which had nothing at all to do with the topic, bibliography, sources, outlines, or drafts I had already turned in. Needless to say, the professor was quite surprised.

The class ate up all my time that semester since I had to work on two projects simultaneously just to meet the “pedantic” schedule. I did end up getting an A on the project, but it could have been better if I didn’t have to waste so much time on the fake project.

Your method penalizes those who actually care about doing a good job on their project. Not everyone works at the same pace, does everything in the same order, or spends the same amount of time on each part of the project.

193

Sorry, Black Hand, but in my business you must work like that and you get penalized, not rewarded, for straying from the project management outline. Perhaps you are going into a field that is more forgiving of deadlines and due dates, or perhaps this project is the wake up call for you to do so. Others need to learn how to work on a schedule, how to meet deliverables, and how to manage a project. There is never a one-sized fits all answer - better to get a cross-section, learn how you work best, and gravitate towards a field that accepts your work style.

194

I have to disagree with you there. One of my friends just finished a course where she had to do the paper the “pedantic” way. It was a living hell. It is not as though working at your own pace ignores the “grown up” concepts of due dates and deadlines, as the students have the deadline when the paper itself is due.

The due date-for-each-part-of-the-paper method is more akin to another “grown-up”, “real world” scenario: shitty Dilbert jobs where the boss asks you for a status report every week, preventing you from doing the actual work.

195

The students in my high school college comp class worked on a mini Coleridge unit. We read and analyzed and wrote 4 500 words essays on “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and then we did another 500 for “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”. For a portion of the final exam, I gave a take home essay assignment to be turned in on the day of the exam. They were to find any other Coleridge poem, and write a 500 word analysis of it. I reminded them of how easy it is for me to discern a shift in voice and tone and google for plagiarism. As part of this assignment, I offered my own essay on “This Lime-Tree Bower” as an example.

On the day of the exam, the last day of classes, a student comes up to me and offers a late analysis of “lime-Tree Bower” and the final essay. The “Lime-Tree” essay is probably only 200 words, and as I read it, I recognize that half of it is a word for word copy of my own essay. I give it back to her and explain that this is unacceptable. She takes the paper back to her desk. At the end of the exam period, she gives it back to with my wording crossed out paraphrased in the margins in pencil. I gave her zero points. When I got to her final essay, the voice and tone struck me as more impressive than her normal writing. I googled a sentence and immediately found the entire thing was copied in parts from spark notes online. She got a zero on this assignment too. She ended up passing the class with a low D. Sad really because her writing isn’t atrocious, I believe she was just lazy and didn’t care. Senioritis I believe they call it.

196

That’s how my mom teaches - of course, the class is for 7th graders, and the focus is “how to write a research paper.” Once you get to college, you should pretty much have that down. I’ve got no problem with asking for a topic early on in the term, but tying someone to a particular project schedule and research methodology is a bit excessive.

197

At my place a student, (one of those many that suddenly discover they are dyslexic and so must use a notebook pc in an exam) somehow managed to smuggle files in despite checking and pasted one in for one of his 2 hours, 4 questions exam answers.

It was 25,000 words long.

Another handed in a class paper that was word for word from some mid-western USA university online peer-reviewed sociological journal.

His vehement defence? He had been plagiarised. :rolleyes:

198

Since this thread is back, I have a doozy from the end of last semester. For my big Astro class I give multiple-guess exams on bubble sheets. So this guy came in saying that he thinks there were “a couple” of questions on his test that were marked wrong. He pointed out a question on his bubble sheet and said, “See, this is the right answer, but it got marked wrong!”

Problem: The machine that scores the exams doesn’t mark anything right or wrong on the sheet. It only prints the total number correct in the margin. The student has to go to the answer key that I post online, and compare their answers to the correct answers. “My score was 40/50, but I can only find eight questions that were wrong,” would be extremely suspcious, but “This particular question was ‘marked wrong’,” is an obvious attempt at cheating

The bubbles are filled in with #2 pencil, of course. And for this question it was easy to see that a different answer had been erased, and the correct one marked. Of course he could have changed his answer during the exam, and there’s no way to tell by looking at the paper whether it was changed before or after but . . .

The dip obviously expected me to say, “Yes, it is clear that you do have the right answer and it was unfairly marked wrong. And I know this particular question was marked wrong because . . . you say so. Yes, that is good enough for me. +1 points for you!”

He obviously did not expect this: I said, “That’s very odd. Let me see what answer the computer recorded for that question,” and pulled out the printed report I get with every batch of exams.

He immediately began to backpedal. “Oh. Uh, you have the answers we put? Um. Neat. I, uh, don’t even really, um, care about my grade. I, uh, only wanted to know whether the answer was right or wrong for, um, when I study for the final.”

I found his name in the report, and examined the answers recorded by the computer. “Hmmm,” I said. “This says you had marked B for that question. And it look like B has been erased on your bubble sheet.”

He was panicked. Never saw this coming. He stammered, unable to think of a good lie.

Now, at this point I could have said, “CHEATER!!! CHEATER!!! CHEATER CHEATER CHEATER! I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU TRIED TO PULL THIS CRAP! DO YOU THINK I’M A MORON? YOU FREAKING IDIOT! YOUR ASS IS MINE, YOU PUNK-ASS PUNK!”

Instead, I fixed him with a good hard look and said, “Is it possible that while you were looking at the answer key, you changed your answers on your bubble sheet so that you’d have the correct answers to study from?” This is, of course, total bullshit. Nobody studies from the bubble sheet, for crissakes, you study from the exam booklet that has the questions and answers printed out on it. But, hey, I threw the kid a bone.

What’s this? he thinks, A lifeline? “Um. Yeah! Yeah, that must have been what happened.”

“And what were other questions that you wanted me to look at?” I asked sweetly.

“Uh, no, um, actually, that was the only that one,” he mumbled. Then he grabbed his bubble sheet and skedaddled.

What a punk-ass punk.

It’s a real pity, too, because he was one of the ones who sometimes hung around after class and asked questions, and seemed really interested.

199

Maybe he was just brown-nosing.

200

While the work may be shitty, it allows you to assess problems along the way, assess scheduling and resourcing, and assess overall project viability before the end of a project. Good firms will realize when they’re throwing good money after bad, and can terminate a project. They’ll realize this through status reports. Having milestones allows the project scope to be amended before rollout (due date). It also gives the people who are paying for the project assurances that their money is being well spent. Lastly, projects in large firms rarely work in isolation. The inability of one department to complete facets of its project on a timely basis can adversely affect other areas within the firm, of which those in the trenches might not be aware.

There are “Dilbert” managers and “Dilbert” companies out there, but they’re the exception (well, maybe the latter half) because there is too much competition and too few dollars to go around.