True tales of stupid cheaters

IN THE NEWS
Poliblogger posted this link to a tale of incredibly stupid cheating. Wow, that's nothing. Wait until you teach at the college/university level. You've now added years to hone stupid cheating skills! Some personal examples from when I was still working in academia:

• A student turns in an essay that she clearly did not write. In fact, it's a well-known article by Eliot Cohen, "Why We Should Stop Studying the Cuban Missile Crisis." In international relations/foreign policy classes, this is about as smart as, say, handing in Huckleberry Finn to your creative writing instructor.
• I receive an essay that sounds vaguely familiar. In fact, it sounds a lot like something my advisor would have written. I show the essay to him, and without hesitation, he pulls down from a bookshelf a copy of the original article.
• Another essay is a random collection of quotes from Fire in the Lake. I later ask the student, "What exactly is this?" Her response: "I was working late, and in my extreme fatigue, I couldn't distinguish between my words and the sections of Fire in the Lake I had highlighted." My observation: "So when you're tired, you can't tell the difference between your prose, and that of a Pulitzer Prize-winning author?"
• Queenmommy catches a student red-handed, taking a test for another student. When both of them are confronted, the student who should have been taking the test said, "You can't fail me--you'd be depriving the world of a future doctor." Queenmommy's dead-on response: "We don't need doctors like you."
• A classmate in graduate school was caught plagiarizing from a scholarly publication for a major research project. His defense? "Intellectual property is theft!" Seriously.

And I could go on.

The only thing that surprised me in these cases was how uncomfortable the university was in punishing the offenders. You had people cold, doing something that is about the worst thing you can do as a student. (In the last example, it's even worse, when you're training to become an academic yourself.) Yet, university officials sometimes flinch at the prospect of angry students and parents, even when there's no question what really happened.

Comments

[jmnlman]

strikes me as they're just sliding to the standards they set for fellow professors. After all how many academic scandals have there been recently where professors somehow managed not to site quotations and nothing happens to them. Seems kind of ridiculous to string up a student but do nothing to his/her $60,000 a year professor.

[whome?]

That's nothing. I had a friend (not the smartest pea in her family) who went to a really good college thanks to her sister taking the SAT's for her, and getting her a score of 1350. Additionally, as she was about to graduate from said college, she needed one more grade to graduate, but unfortunately when she took her test in American Literature she failed miserably. So what did she do? She went to the Dean's office and complained about the fact that her American Literature class did not reference, or use any Latin authors, and neither did the exam. She argued that being a hispanic she could not be expected to learn about American Literature (even though this was an AM Lit course) because the school in so requiring was depriving her of her culture (complete bull, she never identified herself as Hispanic and generally looks down on hispanics).

The Dean, not wanting to confront the prospect (I assume) of having the political correctness or cultural sensitivity of his school questioned, within the week changed her F, to a B+ on account of the schools lack of cultural sensitivity. The funny thing was that had they given her an exam on Hispanic authors, she would have gotten an even worse grade on the exam as she has never in her life read any Latin, or hispanic literature. It is a sad commentary on our country's PC culture that people like her can get BA's from reputable institutions.

Just to clarify, my friend told me about this recently (we've been out of college for about 4yrs.), and I could not believe that this is how she was able to get her BA.