...a signed handdelivered note from God....

[dexfarkin]

For my academic friends, although I'd suggest anyone who's been through post-secondary education should watch this for the kind of lecture you would have wanted to be on the right end of.

Comments

[frito-kal.livejournal.com]

Is there a 'right end' of this kind of lecture? I guess if you're one of the students who got a bad grade and get to retake the midterm...

The students who didn't cheat and got good grades have to re-take an exam they already worked for, the ones who did cheat are basically getting off without serious punishment (4 hour ethics course? I have to take a 4-credit one just for my potential major!) and basically everyone is kind of screwed here.

As a couple of random points - the university this happened at is the second in the US, at something like 50,000 students. The cheating seems to be that some students had access to the bank of exam questions provided to teachers by the publisher of the textbook, and they used that as a cheat sheet or a study guide. I'm not sure which. There's about 600 people who took that exam.

[dexfarkin.livejournal.com]

I disagree. If you did the work and studied, retaking the exam isn't going to suddenly cause you to tank in marks. It's just a pain to reschedule. Personally, I'm all for that outcome, because the fucks that cheated no doubt relied on the test bank as opposed to the core material, which means even if they had decent marks prior, will likely go into the tiolet, making my mark look far better.

[frito-kal.livejournal.com]

It's not the grade but everything else that's got the potential to screw someone over. The added stress, the potential to have to take time away from other classes or a job or things you'd already planned or paid for.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_bounce_/]

Yeah, this.

I sure couldn't have done it last year or the year before, when hey, I was working 35-40 hours a week at, at one point, three jobs while studying because I couldn't arrange the extra time off for classes. I mean, I lost a job because I wanted to change my hours slightly for three weeks for a class.

[alasdair.livejournal.com]

This strikes me as a stinkingly unfair shit, punishing the 2/3rds of people in his class who didn't cheat. If he's so bloody sure he can identify the 1/3 of cheaters, then why does he expect 2/3rds of the people in his class to suspend the normal operation of their lives? By what measure is that reasonable or fair?

[d-benway.livejournal.com]

1) He gets a C- for applied statistics.
2) It is unprofessional and reckless to use a test bank. It is doubly unprofessional if he used the test bank in order to take advantage of automated grading.

[aliciam.livejournal.com]

When I first saw this I was assuming he was fibbing in order to get them to confess, to be honest... admittedly, my understanding of statistics is extremely minimal, but there's something about the wimping out on the penalty to those who did cheat that makes me wonder just how sure they were.

[frito-kal.livejournal.com]

The place I first saw this being discussed (here: http://www.metafilter.com/97736/The-UCF-Cheating-Scandal ), there was a lot of speculation basically along the lines of "He has no idea who the cheaters are, which is why he's throwing out everyone's grades." that sounded pretty reasonable to me, but I don't know anything about how this sort of thing works.

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you, because I couldn't figure out a. if his stats margin was just a travesty or if I didn't know enough about stats, and b. whether the test bank was what I thought it was (automated, pre-determined questions he didn't write himself). that you had this reaction means I wasn't crazy.

-lise

[moonandserpent.livejournal.com]

There is no right end to that. I would have walked out on this BS. That's a waste of time and money.