I don’t think there’s a exact percentage; it’s more of a state of mind. A grade like 59, for example, shows that the student conceivably tried to make it. It’s an F with honor. A grade like 14 shows that the student didn’t even bother to half-ass it. I once got a 2 on a final exam in high school. That was a low F.
I once took a science fiction class in college. Every week we read a novel and wrote a 1 page paper on it that we turned in at the start of Tuesday’s class.
We got the paper back at the end of Thursday’s class.
One Thursday, a girl comes in at the start of class and asks the professor for her paper. When he refuses to give it to her, she says, “I don’t see why I have to stay for the lecture, it’s not like I read the book.”
It was because of this incident that the prof decided to have an exam about the novels.
Blue Books:
Every student brings a blue book to the exam. The teacher already has a stack of blue books. The teacher collects the blue books the students bring, then passes out blue books from a different stack.
In a lot of my classes, we were allowed to rbing some amount of notes. One sheet of standard sized paper was the norm. They didn’t care what you put on it or how. I thought it would be interesting to show up with a magnifying glass and a bunch of 4 point text, but as it turned out I almost never used what I copied (I think this was a sneaky tactic to get us to look over all the material evaluating which were the important concepts, and so tricking us into inadvertantly learning something).
It makes sense, though. I many situations, you aren’t going to be denied the opportunity to look up an equation if you don’t remember it… what exactly is the point of testing memorization skills first and understanding second, when understanding will be the more valuable real-world asset?
I’m ambivalent on the plagarism thing. Wholesale plagarism where you take someone else’s paper/program/project and try to pass it off as your own is a pretty clear case of academic dishonesty. But failing to attribute/identify a quote is also plagarism. I’m sure I have on more than one occassion put down a verbatim quote from something I’ve read years ago- without the faintest recollection of who it came from originally (which makes it a bit difficult to cite) and possibly convinced I came up with it myself. What then?
I actually had a friend do this once. Well, no magnifying glass, of course, but insanely small print. The next semester, the professor changed the rules to allow only handwritten notes for exams.
It is a wonderful system. That’s what my profs did. There was that one time though. I was not a star student in physics, I had to really work to even comprehend some of it. Anyway I was passing somehow. There was this one smartass in the class. Big mouth, bad attitude, rude, the works. I noticed he was copying off me during the final exam, right from the start. The prof was watching, so I gave him one of those “Don’t worry, I got it under control” winks. I then gleefully proceeded to put down an entire test of wrong answers, commplete with calculations. Slide a decimal place over a few to the left here, use the wrong integral there, etc. Then I just kicked back and waited. When he turned his blue book in, I crossed out all my gibberish and redid it all and turned it in. It was a short exam, so time was not a problem. I passed - not an A, but decent (it was either a C or a B). Good enough. He failed, and the prof was laughing out loud.
My favorite stupid cheater story:
I was student teaching English 12 at a very large high school. We were studying Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I send everyone home with a take-home essay test. Before I send them home, I explain that I have membership in turnitin.com, what plagiarism is, and that if they plagiarize, they will get a great big zero for their test score, jeopardizing their semester grade and possibly delaying their graduation.
Tests get turned in. On time even. I’m grading one evening, and I come across an essay that’s unusually well written for a high school student. It’s college level, and the student is not that bright. So, I send it in to turnitin.com. The site takes 1-2 days to return a report, so I go back to reading essays. After an hour or so of reading essays, I come across one that seems…familiar. I check, and sure enough, it’s the exact same as the suspect essay I’d pulled just a bit ago. Well, gee. Even if someone didn’t buy it off the Internet, there was some copying happening somewhere.
Another half an hour later, and I find a third version of the very same essay. I roll my eyes and tuck all three away until I get the report from turnitin.com. A day later, the report comes in, and sure enough, the essay was purchased from some hack of an Internet site. I print up the report three times, dig up student home numbers and start calling parents.
And then I notice something.
All three students are buddies. Two of them are in the same English class. The third is in another of my English classes, and I’ve seen all three of them hanging out together during passing periods. Now, what are the chances that each of them a) decided to cheat, b) went to the same Internet site, and c) got the same essay without mentioning it to either of the remaining two? Seems pretty remote. However, the idea that these three downloaded one essay and copied it three times for the same teacher…?
The upshot was that while two of them got in serious trouble with parents (one for using Daddy’s credit card without permission), the third’s parents didn’t care. My master teacher wouldn’t allow me to flunk them but insisted I offer them the opportunity to redo the essay. I graded it harshly (and warned them I would), but whatever their grades were, they were better than the flat out zero they deserved.
Sorry, didn’t realize that’s how you’d read it. Actually, this is the first time he’s been caught cheating – last term he simply failed the course. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had plagiarized on one or more of the assignments he actually turned in (last term), but his test scores were so low it would have been pretty much a moot point.
The three test scores were 41, 24, and 24 (each out of 100) – the last one was the final exam.
I agree, and I always attempt to write my tests to focus on the understanding, not just memorization of definitions. And yet it’s laughable how often students just try to memorize code examples and then use them as their answers on tests. EVEN when I tell them: “Hey – I posted a practice problem online for you, but this is not the one you’re going to get on the test. It’s asked in the same format, so you’ll know what kind of question to expect, but this is not your actual test question”. Then several students proceed to write down their memorized answer to the practice problem on the test… (sigh)
SteveG1 – that’s hilarious! That would be worth extra credit points in my class. 
That’s beautiful. 
Well, sometimes I wish my university would do that here, especially with some specific cases I’ve had in the past.
The “official” process when academic dishonesty is discovered (according to the university policy) is for the teacher to meet with the student to discuss the issue. And it may be resolved between student and instructor “in a matter amicable to both” – with any penalty to be put in writing and signed by both parties.
If no resolution at this level, then again the “official” procedure is to send it to the “Academic Honor Code Hearing Panel”. Honor Court. Which basically gets made up of two faculty members (one from the department, one outside), two students (not necessarily from involved departments), and the Dean of Faculties or some designee, who only votes in case of a tie.
I haven’t taken anything there in years, so I don’t know if the typical climate on these things has changed. But in the past, I found that procedure to be pretty useless, as the panel never seemed to have the balls to back up the policy. Even when I took 4 cases there (cheating on assignments), in which one kept denying and the other 3 admitted it – they were all allowed to be given “makeup” assignments, so that they wouldn’t be prevented from graduating. A different faculty member gave the makeup assignments, and they were… you guessed it… not proctored, but take-home, like normal homework. :rolleyes:
Wow. Things have changed since I went to school! I didn’t think it was THAT long ago… but now I’m feeling old.
I had an English class taught by THE most anal woman ever. I enjoyed her insights and her class, untill she double checked a paper I turned in. I had, by mistake, mis-attributed a quote. It really was a mistake! But this instructer hit the roof, accused me of plagerism, yelled at me for what seemed like hours…
I kept saying, “I’m sorry!” I even groveled. But she let me stay in her class. I just had to endure fishy looks for the rest of the semester.
Hey, I was a student. I made an honest boo boo. I DID learn from it though. I now have an irrational fear of English instructors from South Africa and a healthy respect for double checking your quotes.
My sister teaches high school French. She assigned a report a few years ago. One student turned in a report on Victor Hugo. It was a little too good for high school, so sis did a Yahoo search. She typed in one line from the report and there it was–the entire paper on the Internet.
The next day she confronted the student who denied it. So sis went over to the computer, pulled up Yahoo and typed in the line. The entire paper appeared. The student looked at her and said (with a straight face believing every word that left her lips), “Oh, that’s not my paper. I used Google.”
smiling bandit, I just realized what made it sound like he had been caught cheating before. Must have been this line in the OP:
"Imagine my irritation at seeing yet another attempt to cheat on assignments. "
That actually meant another attempt in general (since I see attempts just about every term). I can see how you thought it might have meant him, specifically.
Another humorous one just came to mind, from a few years ago – the “stupid cheater” variety.
This other department used to accept D’s from their students in this class as “acceptable” for their graduation requirements (no more), and one student was on the border of D and F. In his final assignment submission, my Teaching Assistant alerted me to his program, because she really didn’t know what to do about it.
He had turned in code for most of the requirements (not all correct), but had replaced ALL the function names and variable names with personal insults aimed at ME. Things like “void FuckYouMonstre()” and “int MonstreSucks” etc. etc.
And something about the name substitutions caused his code to not compile or work. I realized what it was (he applied the name change to the constructors, also – for anybody reading who knows Object-oriented programming), and fixed it. When I compiled and ran it, the errors looked familiar, and it turned out they matched the mistakes in another program. Upon further investigation, it was clear that he copied another student’s code submission, then did the name substitutions.
If he had not engaged in his personal vendetta, this wouldn’t have been handed over to me by the TA, and it likely wouldn’t have been detected, resulting in a D final grade for him. But since I found the cheating, the 0 on the assignment resulted in a final average in the F range. Gosh, don’t ya love it when a good plan bites you in the ass?
In the at-least-he-has-imagination department:
A guy I knew in college had a biology test coming up that required him to commit a fairly large chart to memory. Instead, he drew up a nice design and had it printed on a T-shirt, which he wore to the test. It worked.
Afterwards, I remember him saying, “next time, I think I’ll print it upside down…”
Speaking of stupid cheaters, one of my friends in college once had to grade a stack of papers on elements. The assignment(as best I remember it) was to write 250 words on the uses of element X. Elements were assigned by picking up a sheet of paper with the atomic symbol of an element on it. (In other words, no more than two people had the same element. this was a large general chemistry class). You were allowed to look the element up in an encyclopedia or whatever but were expected to write about it in your own words.
Enter Idiot. He used a digital encyclopedia. He then used the replace function to substitute the name of the element for its symbol. If he hadn’t been an idiot, he probably would have gotten away with it, as it sounded like an encyclopedia entry but would not have been worth the effort to pursue further. However, he failed to proofread. The proof of what he had done was the use of words like “irontus” (His element was iron, the symbol was Fe. replace “fe” with “iron” and you get “irontus” in place of “fetus”.)
Ah, sorry for the confusion there.
Sadly, not all cheaters are stupid. As it happens, I still feel a little guilty (and somewhat racked off) for letting other people cheat in my high school physics.
We had a teacher. He was going back to college at age 45 or so, and was geting his new degree in physics or education or whatever, and he was given an opportunity to practice teaching at out school. He was very unpopular, probably because he wasn’t particularly fun. He didn’t joke or explain things ten times. He didn’t screw around.
And I admired him. He was a good teacher if you paid attention.
Sadly, it seems no one else did. They all (and yes, as near as I could tell everyone else in the class was) cheated, by putting the formula as comments in their graphing calculators. We were supposed to remember the formulas. I did remember them and didn’t call attention to the cheating. Truth be told, I didn’t want to know what might happen if the other 30+ people around got realized what I’d done.
Ironically, I also feel cheated. Here’s all these other peeps with every formula right in front of them and I’m doing it the hard way. I guess I managed to be both dumb and dishonest without even getting the benefits of cheating. sigh
I did cheat once, and the teacher looked the other way. Actually I cheated repeatedly in that class and I got away with it. It was Algebra II in high school. For you math whizzes that probably sounds thoroughly pathetic, but I just don’t get algebra. At least I didn’t when I was 15.
It was interesting because that teacher, Mrs. H, had been around for quite a while. She was a delightful old bird, with stick legs and bright pink lipstick that found its way all over her mouth. She once took an infinite line across the chalkboard to the wall and out the door. We all knew she was out smoking when she’d be 5 minutes late to class. And I imagine she’d seen students like me more than once - reasonably high IQ, great in art and accelerated English, but very right-brained and really high-strung. I’d had her for Algebra I the year before, and done okay, but Algebra II was beyond me. So I sat sideways in my chair & copied from my best friend behind me just about all year. Got B’s. For the final exam I decided to just face the music & didn’t sneak a single peek. Failed it. And she let it go, never called me on it, and let me pass the class with my B average.
What was lovely is I took her Combined Geometry class the following year & did spectacularly. I’ll never forget one day when we were working on proofs and I figured it out well before anybody else had come close. When I gave her the answer she responded “Aha! The artist gets it!”. That was one of the few days I felt good about myself as a high school student.
What a delightful teacher.
An art major stole a bowl I made from the to be destroyed pile and turned it in for a grade. Another student’s project had exploded in the kiln and it had pointy shards in the bottom. I would never have known had she not put it in her senior show. I was pissed. She had it for sale for $75! It was on display in the library. I complained quietly to the librarian, and left a message for the teacher and waited a day or so. It was still there. I then demanded that they let me examinie it. The stupid bitch had not noticed that I had wrote my mark in iron oxide on the bottom. She had written her initials on the bottom in sharpie. The librarian refused to hand over my bowl and I tracked down the teacher who came back to the library and gave me the bowl.
By school policy, she should have been expelled, but she graduated anyway. I stood up at her graduation and shouted cheater and theif as loud as I could while she got her diploma.
I scrubbed off her initials and filled the bowl with a three wicked candle and gave it to a friend.
I had the same problem, except it wasn’t in Algebra I that I previously encountered the teacher but Spanish I. She was also the Key Club faculty advisor and I was a member.
I never really studied for any of my classes except for English; instead, I got by on just what I memorized in class. Never really cheated either though sometimes I used my digital watch as a mirror to see what the person next to me was doing.
Another one from the list of Top Ten Ways NOT To Try To Cheat.
One fall semester, I went ahead and posted my versions of the solutions for programming assignments for students to see (and learn from) after the assignments were graded and handed back. I took everything down at the end of the term, in preparation for the next semester.
In the spring term, I gave a programming assignment that was similar to, but not the same as, one from the fall. Basically, I provided the same starter code on both of them, but most of the specific tasks for the spring assignment were different. There were a few areas of overlap.
It was obvious which people had obtained a copy of the previous term’s solution, especially when they turned in functionality that was NOT part of the current assignment.
The saddest part? Six people turned in work in which one of their functions was THE EXACT ONE from my posted solution from the fall term. One person even left my documentation comments in the code, as-is. And it wasn’t a function that I had written in the most usual or common way. It was fairly distinct.
So, on the Top Ten Ways Not To Cheat list:
*** Don’t plagiarize your teacher. He’ll know.**
It wasn’t plagiarization…it was an homage! 
You know what’s even scarier? I had this student’s twin sister in one of my freshman comp classes. She was writing a research paper about iron deficiency anemia and plagiarized large sections of it from the on-line Merck Manual, using her word processor’s search-and-replace function for exactly the same substitution, with exactly the same result.
I also had a kid in my drama class who cut and pasted material from several different web pages into his final paper, without paying the slightest attention to differences in style. Some chunks of the paper had patently been written by a person with a degree in classics, others were borderline illiterate and in fact much worse than this student’s own, unaided work. (The sad part was that he was really quite bright, just lazy.)