Stupid Cheater Tricks

The BBQ Pit
121

Wouldn’t some level of office hours be in his contract? That kind of teacher is cheating too, in a way.

The programs in the assembly language class I TAed for were run on a PDP11 with a punch card reader, so people doing the assignment had to be right there. We set up shop in an office down the hall before the assignment was due, and got plenty of traffic from people who would never have made an appointment. With more modern systems most of the people who came for appointments were those who needed them least, it seemed.

122

It was the norm at my old college as well, and continues to be the norm at my current grad school. (I have to admit it took me a while to figure out how this whole concept of pre-loading blue books worked; I’m assuming that it only comes into play if the same professor is teaching more than one section of the same class, or if all sections have a standardized exam, neither of which has been the case for most of the courses I’ve taken.)

123

Usually it “works” by mere guesswork. In the case of the student I mentioned upthread a ways, she attended the last class meeting, in which I reviewed for the final exam. I assume that she then took her best guess as to the nature of the essay question that I would be providing and fashioned an appropriate response (or, more likely, had someone else fashion that response, as there was a noticeable improvement in her writing skills between the mid-term and the final). In some cases, I think it’s possible to guess pretty closely; if you’ve attended the lectures and done the reading, it should be pretty clear what the key concepts are. Unfortunately for her, she did very little of either, and therefore her best guess was pretty far from the mark. It also didn’t help that her reply made no mention of any of the material from the prompt. My exam asked the students to respond to a quotation that I had provided, and her essay failed to do so.

124

I would think so – I’m pretty sure that it’s a requirement for faculty here, although I don’t remember if it is a university policy, or a department policy.

But either way, it’s pretty bad form to not hold any office hours, and to limit any contact with students to the scheduled class times.

125

Hope this isn’t too old a thread to resurrect, but it seems an appropriate place to bring up the recent internet pummelling of cheater “Laura K. Krishna.” Too harsh? Maybe. Amusing? Yes.

The gist is that she solicited some blogger-slash-funny-guy out of the blue (via IM) to write her a paper on hinduism the night before it was due. He agreed to do it for $75, wrote an idiotic paper that she obviously didn’t read before handing it in (it contained the sentence “I made a doody.” and references to Dharma and Greg, for example), then blogged about it. The blog entry became a bona fide internet phenomenon that spread to a bazillion other blogs, and people started calling the girl and her school to harass her and try to get her in trouble. She stiffed him on payment, but it’s unclear whether she knew the paper was so awful by that time, so she might have intended to cheat him all along.

One slightly confusing thing to note when reading the story is that the first entry used her real name, which is not Laura K. Krishna, but when the shit really hit the fan, he agreed to take it off the site. So there are some confused comments from readers that say things like, “hey, I posted ‘Krishna’ and now it says ‘Krishna’…what’s going on?” because of his searching-and-replacing.

the start of it all
post two, where the author has realized it’s gotten out of hand
post three (ordeal mostly over)
and in conclusion…

126

Wow. I mean, wow.

Thanks for posting that, galt, that’s the first I’d heard of this. (I don’t hang around on blog sites, obviously).

Amazing to me how so many students, rejoicing at how the internet is making it easier for them to plagiarize, don’t actually realize that the internet typically makes it easier to catch them, too.

I’m still laughing over “I made a doody.” in the middle of the paper… :wink:

127

Haven’t finished reading that yet, but one thing that kills me is, she said money was no object, then offered him $75! Not even an even $100!

It also amazes me that there are quite a few (not the majority, but even one is too many) people shrilly accusing the blogger of “ruining a young woman’s life” and “scamming” her and so forth. GMAFB.

128

That’s brilliant. Makes me wish I could get some to ask me to write a paper for them. I’m real good at deconstructing texts.

129

At my high school, we had a student turn in a piece of hard-core porn; he was trolling for answers on some site, and just printed off what he got without looking at it.

130

What was he studying, biology?

131

My computer science professor told a story on the first day of class that I found amusing.

The professor was working in the lab, when a guy approached him, and asked which class he was in. The professor said CSE 30. The guy asked him if he wanted to buy some old midterms for $350. The professor looked them over, and found the print quality was really bad, and most of the answers were wrong. He haggled the guy down to $150, when one of his students approached him and said, “Hey professor…”.
When the professor looked back at the guy, nothing was left of him except the dustcloud kicked up in his hasty retreat.

132

(Answered due to the resurrect)

I doubt it. The school I was in did pretty much nothing to keep track of how well teachers taught. It was a ‘give us your money, we’ll give you a diploma’ school. (I went there because I wanted access to the excellent tech the school had.)
After the mid-term, the class consisted of the prof giving us a few film magazines each day, pointing to various shots in them, and saying, “Duplicate this shot.” Then he’d go into the back room and talk on the phone until the class ended 2 hours later, at which point he’d look at what we did, -sometimes- comment, and let us go for the day.
:wally

133

These stupid cheater stories are great, here’s one from my college days that involves me, the teacher, and another student.

Freshman English Composition at my college was (at the time) a required class for all majors. The instructor I had for it was a really nice guy, he was more concerned with you learning to write well about a subject, rather than what the subject was.

As such, our first assignment was to write a 2-3 page essay on any subject, he was very clear that there were no “wrong” subjects, he wanted to see how you wrote and what he could do to improve your writing.

I wrote something in a few hours and turned it in on time. Next class meeting, the instructor asks me if I still have a copy of the essay on disk. I did, and he asked me to let his secretary have the disk so she could make a copy of the essay.

At this point, I thought I was a dead man, even though I knew I was the author of the essay, and more importantly, my disk had the only electronic copy of the essay But as an 18 year old freshman in his second week of college, the dead man thoughts were the only ones that concerned me.

Turns out he wanted a copy of the essay to show the rest of my class and his morning class how to write, each semester he took an essay from each class and made copies to give out to the classes, so both classes had 2 examples of what he considered to be good writing.

Of course I was flattered, although he did hold me to higher standard than the rest of the class since I did so well at the outset.

Fast forward a month or so into the term, we had to write another essay on a subject of our choice. I wrote something, turned it in.

Next class, he asks me to look at an essay that was turned in, I look at it and notice some very striking similarities to my first essay, the one every in the class now had a copy of.

The similarities were even more striking when I noticed that he had copied my ENTIRE essay word for word, then he put his name on it. :dubious:

Yes, you read that correctly, he went through the effort of retyping an entire 2-3 page essay, an essay that close to 60 people had a copy of, an essay that the instructor himself handed out to 60 people, and he didn’t think he would get caught? :wally

After I confirmed that it was my original essay, the instructor called the student on it in class in front of everybody, and asked him why he had turned in a copy of my essay.

The dumbasses’ response:
“I only used his (points to me) as a guide, I wrote that paper myself!”

The instructor shot him a look that could have frozen hell over, he was kicked out of class for plagiarism that day, I never saw him again.

Moral to this story, if the instructor hands out something as an example, don’t copy it and try to claim it as your own work.

D. Pirahna

134

It’s been a long time since I’ve been an instructor in a classroom, but I was involved in a doozy.

I was a TA while working on my MBA. The BizSchool TA’s bullpen at good old Whatsamatta U was up on the third floor. It was two single offices with the wall removed, and three desks set up (hey, spare no expense for the TA’s, right?). Anyway, these were slightly oversized desks and I used to crawl into the leg well of mine when I wanted to do some studying. It was cramped, but I could scrunch myself into a reasonably comfortable position and catch (some Z’s) up on my reading.

Anyway, my best friend (call him Steve) was at his desk for his office hours one day. I came in and vanished into my cave to read up for a class I had later that day. About 10 minutes later, I hear voices. I normally tuned them out, but this I listened to.

Sweet Young Thing comes in to discuss progress in class with Steve. Steve points out deficiencies and makes some suggestions. SWT hems and haws about having to do work, then puts a move on Steve and offers to “trade for a grade”. Steve declines. SWT gets pissed. Steve declines again. SWT threatens Steve, saying in effect that if he doesn’t pass her with at least a B, she’s going to the Dean and rat him out and make it sound like he’s been screwing her all semester. Steve basically says knock yourself out, SWT, and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. SWT utters a few choice Anglo-Saxon epithets, stomps out, slams door.

I come out of my cave and we look at each other with one of those WTF expressions on our faces. We’re sitting there discussing exactly how to handle it when lo and behold, the door opens and here is SWT with the Dean of the BizSchool and the Department Head in tow. They tell me to leave and I tell them I need to stay, that I know what it’s about and have something to offer.

When I get around to telling my story, SWT’s face starts to resemble one of the melting Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark. When I finished, the Dean suggests that SWT and Dept. Head go back to his office and wait for him. They leave, he asks us to write up exactly what happened, as detailed as possible, and have it in his office in an hour.

Steve tells me two days letter that a drop form for SWT was in his mailbox. She was not seen on campus after that.

135

Oh, man, Clothahump, that is a beauty. I’d have paid to see it.

136

This thread, and the Machinery’s Handbook I’m using as an elbow rest, reminds me of a prof who allowed you to use any reference you wanted on his exams “because life is open-book.” His tests were written in such a way that the books did you little good and you learned quickly not to drag 100kg of books into class, but having a reference or two just in case was still reassuring.

137

Wow, what a story. Thank you for sharing. Of course, being a Doper, I have to point out that Sweet Young Thing’s acronym changed to SWT, and I’m speculating what SWT might stand for.

Sweet Wenchy Thing?
Sweet Wicked Thing?
Stupid ‘Wying Twit/Twat?

138

I noticed that one Laura K. Krishna comment had her real last name hyphenated. I’d mention it to her tormentor except he’s gone all nice.

139

Probably my favorite comment on that whole debacle:

140

A couple of years ago when I was teaching at a university in S. Korea, the English Dept. held an English essay contest. The Chairwoman of the English Dept. and a couple of my co-workers were the judges.

When I read the winning entry it seemed oddly familiar to me; and then I realized that I had read it before. It was one of those Chicken Soup for the Soul-type stories about (if I recall correctly) a teacher, who was the author, who one day had her elementary school students all write one nice thing about one of the other students in class and then share the nice things… several years later, one of her former students is sent to fight in the Vietnam war, and is killed. When they examine his belongings, they find a piece of tattered and aged paper with the nice thing written about him all those years ago by one of his classmates. A real tear-jerker, if you go for that sort of thing.

Anyways, I googled the first line and found the essay, word-for-word, on the internet. I then pointed it out to one of the judges.

What killed me, however, was that none of the judges (including, might I remind you, the Chairwoman of the English Dept.) had noticed the logical inconsistency: an 18 or 19 year old student writing an essay in the first person about having been a teacher with a student that grew up to be killed in the Vietnam War? :smack: