Re: Attention Experienced Professionals

"--CELKO--" <jcelko212_at_earthlink.net> wrote in message news:18c7b3c2.0410090721.234e5fec_at_posting.google.com...
> >> This is one of the times of the year when we start getting a lot of
> questions from students. There have been several of tehse lately.
> Sometimes they state that they are students, and sometimes they try to
> disuise an assignment as a business problem hoping that someone will
> give them the answer. <<
>
> In the US and most other countries, presenting someone else's work as
> your own will get you expelled from college. I suggest that you hunt
> down the school from which the post was made and report it to the head
> of their computer science department. I have gotten at least one kid
> in New Zealand kicked out of college myself.
>
> Another give-away I found is the some professors use my SQL PUZZLES &
> ANSWERS for questions. I can usually recognize these :) If the
> students are going to ask me to answer my own questions, they could at
> least buy the book.
>
> --CELKO--
I was an adjunct at a noted Eastern U.S. University (consitently ranks high un U.S. News & World Report). I taught three terms before becoming completely disillusioned with the job due to the amount of cheating among students. Mind you I was teaching seniors, junors, and grad students. I could not believe that they got this far and the suddenly started cheating. This meant that profs were "looking the other way". Why? Maybe student reviews went into tenure or reserach decisions. I don't know. All I know is I caught cheaters in every class I taught. Without trying to. The most memorable example was on a take-home final. Stop laughing. How did I catch them? It was a DBA type of class, and I had given a business problem that needed to be analyzed and designed. I asked specific questions. The question had to do with the "best" naming of data files and tablespaces in Oracle (using OFA conventions). Basically, "What would you name the datafiles and tablespaces and why?" One student gave me DDL that created a bunch of tables that may have ultimately been used in the application. He had answered a question (incorrectly at that) I didn't ask. A couple of papers later, I think, "Didn't I _just_ read this?" The student made a very poor attempt at changing some attribute names, sizes and ordering, but had the same incorrect answer to an unasked question. UN-BE-lievable...

Anyway, the punishment was up to me. Anything up to and including getting an "F" in the class. The incidents go on their "permanent records", and if there is another instance, they're out. Too lenient, IMO. Anyway, the "joke" of the whole incident was that both of these students (foreign, BTW, as alll the cheaters I caught except one happened to be) were both failing the class anyway. A projection of their grades showed that even if student 1 had gotten a 100 on the test (not going to happen, of course), he would barely have eked out a D. The other was flunking no matter what. My options? I could have been evil, and made them take another test knowing that they would flunk anyway, or just give them an F in the course. Giving another test would have made more work for _me_, so I just gave them both an F.

Oh, I had made it abundantly clear in the first class and on the syllabus what types of collaboration were allowed and what weren't. I even explained how to post in newsgroups (identify yourself as a student, show the work you've done so far, and ask for advice, not answers). The final was given as "no collaboration". Received on Mon Oct 11 2004 - 02:15:48 CEST