Two stories about cheating and plagiarism back from College a couple of decades (plus) ago
Bio 2 was the departments “weeding” course, you know, the one for would-be majors where they got rid of the dead wood. I was getting extremely frustrated – I was running a low B average, working my butt off, and doing it honestly. The was perhaps 1/2 dozen kids running As and High Bs, and it was SO obvious that they were cheating during exams, it wasn’t funny. Then came the final – worth 60% of your grade, and the Professor totally rearranged HOW the exam was given, and basically made it impossible for the students to cheat. The cheaters flunked the exam, and when he graded the course, he curved the course slightly (he never curved any exams), and I ended up with a B+ – not great, but… The bad part was that before the finals, I had decided to drop out and go to electronics school based upon what was going on..
The other story was English Compost ion – the semester before. I can’t remember the topic of the non-fiction paper I had to write, but along I went, footnoting my paper, siting my sources, etc, and I hand my paper in. I get my grade – F – and report to the disciplinary hearing to be throw out of school for plagiarism. Huh? It seems my conclusion paragraph exactly (and I do mean exactly) matched the conclusion paragraph on a book on the exact topic of my paper! The interesting thing was I had TRIED to get a copy of that book inter library, but it was just a student PhD paper, and there were no copies available – it seems my professor had the ONLY copy available for interlibrary loan. That ended up being my defense, that I couldn’t have copied the final paragraph, as he had the only copy I could have copied FROM, with out a 500-600 mile trip to get a copy. That, and the fact that I had done proper cites throughout the rest of the paper swung the board to back me (plus the fact it wasn’t even a term paper, but a weekly homework). Classic case of the Million Monkey syndrome actually happening
