That’s been the story with virtually every cheater I’ve ever caught: they plagiarize from stuff that I can readily find, and they would have been able to pass the class even without the cheating.
I always feel like they’re being double stupid :wally :wally
Aside from all the cheating stuff, this thread has boggled my mind about the blue books. In every test I’ve ever taken that involved writing in blue books, the blank books were handed out by the prof at the time of the test. It never even occurred to me that students might be required to supply their own. It’d be like having to give the prof a red pen to mark up your test with, or having to bring your own toilet paper with you when you used the facilities. In fact, I kind of assumed that the whole point of having to write test answers in bluebooks, instead of on our own (regular) paper, was to ensure that we couldn’t bring in anything already written ahead of time!
I thought bluebooks were a basic teaching supply. If a school can’t afford to provide them, can’t they just raise tuition by fifty cents?
Good point, and at least in some of the accounts, the bluebooks were mixed up and students had to choose one from a pile.
Interestingly (to me), it sounds like taking tests in “blue books” is the standard experience. I wonder if that’s more usual in certain subjects, though. I have never actually taken a test using a bluebook, and this is throughout high school, college, and two masters degrees – lots and lots of courses.
Never used them for my own teaching, either. I make up my tests so that there is enough room to write answers on the test copy itself (so the students cannot use outside paper). I employ a few other anti-cheating tricks, too – including arranging the seating in the classroom (when possible) so that that there is a free seat between any two students, and two copies of a test, so that two adjacently seated students (even with desk between) will have different copies (that look the same from that distance). Copy your neighbor on the mutliple-choice stuff, for instance, and you’re going to get them wrong.
Sadly, I’ve seen occasions where somebody copied their neighbor’s answer on other questions (not the mutliple choice stuff), and it’s quite obvious, because Student A’s answer involves words that don’t even appear on his copy of the test (but that do appear on the other one)…
Monstre, that con-artist bitch story made me sick to my stomach. :mad:
I recently finished college, albeit at a medocre 2.5 GPA. It took me 5 and a half years to get my bachelor’s. Now I’ll be honest, I spent most of that time being a relatively lazy student who (regrettably) spent far too much time doing a half-assed job on my assignments/exams.
But I was an honest halfassed lazy bastard. I never cheated, even though my struggle in college created a ripe temptation. I never deliberately plagarized any work. I cited everything that needed a citation. I wrote and re-wrote drafts of essays. If I had a problem, I went to the teacher.
My college story was one of sweat, toil, tears, and blood (not necessarily in that order). Some people here worked hard to get good grades. I worked hard to get PASSING grades 
. Hearing your story really burns me up because that girl got by with perfect grades without really having to do any work, while I was busting my ass up to a C minus in some classes :mad:
Burned me up, too, Incubus, and not only because I believe she was likely pulling this crap in more than just my class… but also because she was abusing the Disability Center services as well, and making a mockery of a system set up to help students who have genuine needs. Like the deaf student who took my class and had a sign-language interpreter attend lectures and sign what I was saying. And like the blind students who took my programming class, one of whom did an exceptional job, despite the fact that much of my lectures rely on showing examples on the screen.
If there’s one thing good that came from this, it’s that the SDRC sharpened up some of their procedures after this (I think probably DUE to this). They started requiring students to get the instructor’s signature on that exam sign-up form (where the date and time of test is filled out). They also have their offices in a new building, and their testing rooms have closed-circuit camera monitors, for easier proctoring and monitoring, if needed.
Reading all of this has made me realise how different the US and British/Irish 3rd level educational systems are. In some ways the American system seems much easier to cheat in.
For example, for the first few years of my medical degree we had exams at Christmas and at Easter. There were no tests, quizzes etc during the year and as the lecturer can ask any question they wish from their chosen topic, it’s almost impossible to question spot. Our lectures are also mostly didactic, so there is little opportunity to ask the lecturer about what they feel are the most important topics. No TAs either.
The exam is taken in a large exam hall, usually with a student sitting a different exam from you on your right, left, in front and behind you so that you can’t cheat from their papers. Everyone doing the same subject sits the exam on the same day. If you can’t make that exam you sit the supplemental exam the following September. No exceptions. Students who need extra time sit in the hall after everyone else has left.
Nothing except pens, pencils, rulers and erasers may be brought to the desk, and they can’t be in a case. Graphic calculators aren’t allowed, and bags and coats are left at the back of the room after being searched. You must have your photographic student ID with you to be permitted to sit the exam. No ID means doing the supplemental in September.
All workbooks are provided and are given out after you are seated, you may not bring any paper (even tissues) with you. If it’s an open-book exam from given texts, they are university copies which have been previously checked over, you may not bring your own.
I think some of my North American classmates were shocked by our system, as they seemed to be used to lots of smaller tests which counted towards a final mark, rather than one big exam. They were also totally freaked out by the fact that you have to study a little of everything, because there isn’t the opportunity to question spot.
It’s a very all-or-nothing system, but it’s almost impossible to cheat at that kind of paper, in those circumstances.
On the issue of people using disabilities to cheat I have a lot of second hand knowledge of that, as my Dad set up the program for students with disabilities at a local college. He still runs it and has expanded it slowly, making sure that each person he hires understands that the students are to do their own work. He’s noticed a few expect the staff to do their work for them, but most of the students who have been assigned extra resources are eager to get away form the system and seem like normal college kids. They’ll come in only if a course is actually impossible for them in its set up.
As for cheating myself I can only remember one incident. I had been out sick for a few days and came back to school to a test in physics first period. Although a bit nervous I recognized the majority of the material and felt I was doing okay. Until I hit the last part that was optics. I missed the entire bit on optics. It hadn’t appeared on the sheets that came home to me. I went to ask the teacher about it and he said to just stick it out and we’d talk about it after. On the way back to my desk I glanced at the page of someone just starting on that part, to see what the answers were supposed to look like. I’ve never actively cheated since, and that doesn’t weight too heavily on my mind given that I had no clue what was expected of me on the problem.
I’ll have to add that I have a special hate for people who cheat on coding assignments. Because of them my Data Structures class was miserable. The professor had given up dealing with people who cheated on homework and decided that people could work in groups, but to compensate he devalued homework to less than 10% of your grade. Unless you handed in nothing, then you could get penalized above its actual value. Now I understand him being pissed, and I respected his knowledge of the material and his ability to convey it, but he couldn’t make tests to save his life. He could have asked for help making tests from other computer science professors, or a colleague in another department, but he figured that statistical mashing of test grades would compensate for test design. I would say that if your final exam has an average of 64 and a std. deviation of about 1 something has gone wrong in the test design. As the first class subjected to his new scheme we were fairlly harsh about it on our feed back (given before the final exam). My friends and I who worked together, under his sanction, were especially pissed as we were looking at low grades despite having the best homework grades. Of all the groups there were two whose final assignment actually worked, ours and the group including a guy who had a job with Sun Microsystems already.
We busted a cheater one time because his answers on the short-answer and essay section were absolute gibberish! I mean, not even English! It seemed like random words, some of them seemingly made up, strung together with various articles and prepositions into something vaguely approximating sentences.
A few papers down in the stack was another exam written by someone with very bad handwriting. There was one oddly chosen word that rang a bell (I totally forget what it was, but it was a layspeak near-synonym to a jargonny word), and sure enough, when I put the papers side by side, it was clear that the dufus cheater hadn’t even known enough about the subject to guess at the cheatee’s meaning from context, and had just done an extremely poor job of trying to transcribe the cheatee’s answers word-for-word.
I TA’d Intro to Archaeology one quarter when I was in grad school. I had three sections (45-50 students) and they had weekly essay assignments that they had to turn in.
Anyways, this one kid turns in an essay that is clearly not his own work, in fact it seems strangely familiar…he had copied 90% of his essay out of the text book. My first question to him was “Do you think that I have not read the text book!!!” He stammered and answered “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” At which point I pulled out the text book, pointed to a section, and asked him to start reading…that’s when he started crying. Fucking pathetic.
Two things…First, I don’t understand why students think that turning in a piece of work that could have come out of a peer-reviewed journal will not raise suspicion. And second, the stinkin’ text book? Christ kid, put some effort into it.
HAHAHA…
I’ve had a few students turn on the ol’ waterworks in that kind of situation, as well.
What really astounds me (and your incident made this come to mind) is when a student has the gall to keep trying to lie to me and make it sound like total coincidence when I have caught them copying. Just like yours did here.
Monstre: Can you explain to me why your code is identical to that of another student?
Student: I don’t know. I did the work totally by myself. I don’t even know that other student.
Monstre: Look at these two code listings side by side. Not only are all the algorithms the same, but the variable names, function names, spacing, indentation – all the same.
Student: I don’t know how that happened. It’s quite a coincidence. I did all my own work, though.
Monstre: You do realize that this assignment was to use this graphics class to draw a picture? Any picture. So it’s not a situation where the algorithms would even be similar. It would be like me handing you a piece of paper, telling you to draw a picture, and you just “happening” to come up with an exact copy of the Mona Lisa. By chance.
Student: Ummmmmm…
Even when students are required to supply the blue books, the way to prevent cheating is simple: require that the students hand their unmarked blue books to the teacher/proctor at the front desk upon entering the room. Students then take their seats and wait. At test time, the teacher hands out the books from his stack, row by row. Since no student is guaranteed to get the same blue book he gave to the teacher, there’s no point in their trying to cheat by writing in the blue book. I’ve had a few classes run this way.
WHoA
Congrats to him!
The correct strategy at this point, of course, is “Holy shit! That son of a bitch copied my code! If I get my hands on that bastard, why, I’ll . . .”
When I went to an all-girls’ Catholic school, the preferred method of cheating was to write answers on your thighs, so that during the test, you could cross your legs, pull your skirt up a little, and check your notes. I never did it, mostly because that school was really easy academically, but also because I always wore tights.
When I went to an all-girls’ Catholic school, the preferred method of cheating was to write answers on your thighs, so that during the test, you could cross your legs, pull your skirt up a little, and check your notes. I never did it, mostly because that school was really easy academically, but also because I always wore tights.
I was a TA my senior year for a 3rd year Business class. Next class after a term paper assignment was due the Prof asked me to stay after class b/c a student was angrily complaining that we had “lost” her term paper. The conversation went like this:
Her: I left it in your (The prof’s) office later that night!
Me: What time was this?
Her: Around 9pm.
Me: I didn’t see you. I was in his office all night studying.
Her: (Slight pause) I know - looked through the window and saw you in there, but I didn’t want to bother you so I slid it under the door.
::Me and Prof look at each other:: Uh…the office doesn’t have any windows. It also doesn’t have a door.
The Prof had removed his office door years ago b/c he felt it made him too inaccessible to his students. It never had any windows that faced the hallway, and his desk faced the empty doorway.
Cheater Note: Consider visiting a professor’s office at least once if you are going to later lie about leaving a paper there. 
I once heard of a high school student who had written notes for his exam on his chair (seat). The teacher kept giving him funny looks the whole time because he was always looking down and peeking between his splayed legs to see the notes!
When I was in college, we brought our own blue books. At the beginning of the test period, the proctor would tell the room, “Open your blue books to page 3 (or page 4 or whatever; the point is, it was a random number every time) and draw a smiley face/X/star/whatever over that page. You may begin.” That way, no one could have it written out in the book ahead of time.
And I’ve actually encountered this problem before, too. Both as a lame attempt to lie (like in the example above), and in a case where the person being copied genuinely didn’t know that the other had gotten her code.
This was due to not logging off properly in the computer lab. There were also cases of students lurking near the lab monitor desk and grabbing printouts of other people’s code, before the person who owned it could make it to the desk to get his/her print job.
I feel your pain, Monstre. I’ve never taught full-time, but I’ve taught part-time at several colleges. In the first school, I was teaching a group of court reporting students how to produce court transcripts using computer-aided transcription (CAT) systems. This was in the 1980’s. I wanted to make sure they really understood how the software worked, so I varied the format and layout on every transcript they had to produce, and made them re-create each style sheet from scratch.
The style sheet in a CAT system is similar to what you’d encounter in a word processor. It specifies question and answer formats, indentations, line spacing, parenthetical formats, and so forth. Setting one up is complex, and if I’d just used the school’s style guide, each semester’s students would just pass it on to the next batch. My way, they bloody well understood how style sheets worked or they couldn’t get through the class.
I went to state, local, and Federal courts and to local deposition firms to get the formats. My rationale was that when these kids got out of my class, they’d be able to set up a CAT style sheet anywhere. Two of the students came to me early in the class and complained that I wasn’t using the school’s official style sheet that their other teachers all required. “That’s because I’m teaching you about the real world,” I told them.
I mentioned this to another instructor at the school, and she told me an entertaining story of a graduate (from before I taught there) who landed a coveted assignment in Federal court. Her first day, the Judge handed her the court’s style guide for transcripts. She looked at it and said, “But Judge, this is wrong,” because it didn’t match the school’s “official style guide.”
Hint: If you’re working for a Federal Judge, do it his way, not the way your college profs told you to do it.
A week later, I was called before the dean to explain why I was violating school policy by using unauthorized style sheets. I explained my rationale, and repeated the anecdote. I was told that I had to use the school style guide only.
That was one of the primary reasons I quit at the end of that quarter.