Current mood:

*sporfle!*

It's exam time, so instead of studying, I'm doing this! Baby's first wank report, &c.
So Columbia U has an unusually dense core for undergrads, one of the main features being the mandatory lit class taken by all freshmen. It's called Literature Humanities, Lit Hum for short, and the standardized exam was last Friday.

Some teacher apparently made her kids a cheat sheet. They apparently spread it around. The administration is apparently now attempting to hunt down cheaters, and the online community over at CU's Bwog is apparently going mildly nuts.

Is it cheating if the teacher gave them the notes? Is it cheating to hand the notes to other people? What if people's answers correlate to the cheat sheet by accident? (Given that it had one quotation ID question wrong, this is not merely achieved by being studious.) And why is admin trying to punish students at all?

Wonk wonk wonk. Lots of freshmen claiming in capslock that they were NOT CHEATING YOU GUYS. Lots of people who've already taken Lit Hum laughing at them, because it has never been a difficult exam. Animal House is referenced. SEAS (engineering) and Barnard undergrads, who don't have to take Lit Hum, point and laugh and get offended. There's even a strain of completely random racewank.

Bravo Bwog: "I've never been so glad to have gotten IDs wrong. I, for one, expect to get an 'A' by default. Anything else would be patently unfair."

Irony: "crime and punishment is the quote that's catching everyone?"

Adam K: "Raskolnikov refused the water with his hand, and softly and brokenly, but distinctly said:
“It was I found teachers' notes to the Lit Hum final and robbed them.”
Ilya Petrovitch opened his mouth. People ran up on all sides.
Raskolnikov repeated his statement."

Stop snitchin: "First off, the concept of grading on the curve is dehumanizing. Fuck that. If I do well, why should my classmate do poorly as a result? If you know the material on the exam, you should get a good grade. If everyone knows it, everyone should get a good grade. Curves are for Republicans."

And my personal favorite, not the least because it might actually be serious:

Sakiv: "Hey first years:

Here's a chance for all of you to boost your grades.

Regardless of what grade you get on your lit hum final, email the instructor and say that you want to know if you were penalized for cheating in the exam, even though you are innocent. If you get a no, well, have a nice summer. If you get an improbable yes, insist that you are innocent and raise hell until you get your grade bumped. Most likely, knowing Columbia, you'll get a form letter that won't tell you if you were punished. Take that letter, send it to Bwog and start CC'ing Martinsen on emails to FoxNews and NY Sun telling them about a witch-hunt at Islamo-fascist, liberal, anarchist Columbia University of Havana- North Campus.

Make like Matt Sanchez and leverage your way up the administrative ladder until a hush-money A+ is on your transcript!"

This: "is totally cheating. just because it was easy to do or because you thought you'd get away with it doesn't change the fact that you willingly and gleefully took actions that would help yourself and hurt others in the class. this is no political statement on how curves or the core or exams suck--if it were, i imagine you would've shared the guide with everyone in your class--no, it was for pure personal gain. this is exactly the mentality that leads to ppl going to jail for 10+ yrs for insider trading."

No, no: "pure personal gain is what leads to real criminals NOT going to jail for insider trading but innocent people going to jail for being black at the wrong place at the wrong time. sorry to bring race into this."

Columba Junior: "And yes, guy who keeps posting the same stupid things over and over, the core IS world renowned, but only among other pedagogical tools. It suprises me, then, not at all, that a pedagogical tool like yourself should have heard of it between tokes from The Professor or whatever you call the crutch you use to prop up your meaningless existence.

Shit, dude. How many barnard girls have dumped YOUR bitter ass?"

Oh Bwog. :') I love it when tiny places just randomly explode in wank. ~200 comments and growing.

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	linadarkstar 2007-05-08 03:32 am UTC (link)
	I know rite I have a prof who's known for exam medians in the low 40s. DEHUMANIZATION PLZ (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	ladysorka 2007-05-08 06:10 am UTC (link)
	...well, to me that says that there's either something wrong with their exams or something wrong with their teaching. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	(Anonymous) 2007-05-08 03:12 pm UTC (link)
	That sort of median grade is fairly common in the engineering college of both universities I've attended. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	(Anonymous) 2007-05-08 05:42 pm UTC (link)
	Hell, I had that kind of median grade in high school when a teacher said he was deliberately engineering the tests to have an average of 50%. He didn't curve or weight. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

aposiopetic
2007-05-09 12:12 am UTC (link)

I had a senile ass for an AP physics teacher who gave us an AP exam for our midterm. No, not carefully selected questions, an entire AP exam, covering stuff we hadn't gotten to yet (like light, waves, and electricity, which have never been my physics strong points). He then proceeded to "curve" the tests, where the highest grade became a 100.

It was so bad that my school made an exception and didn't force us to take the AP (when all other AP classes did), so I have "honors physics" on my high school transcripts, even though no such class ever existed.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

	dandywolves 2007-05-08 09:39 pm UTC (link)
	my friend who's an engineering major likes to talk about how they don't have an honors program, because there was literally no one in her entire year who's grade was high enough. (and this is why I'm an english major.) (Reply to this)(Parent)

	anonyrat 2007-05-10 06:28 am UTC (link)
	Actually, from what I've heard from my friends, that appears to be relatively common in the sciences. I'm not sure what to make of that, but there it is. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	eidolon_bird 2007-05-08 10:15 am UTC (link)
	Sounds like a chemistry professor I once had - great guy, very funny, but he should not have been trying to teach physical chemistry to a bunch of freshman chem students. Earning a 38% on my very first college exam sorta traumatized me for the rest of my academic career. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	(Anonymous) 2007-05-08 08:12 pm UTC (link)
	Well for Chemistry that seems quite high...even when I was doing secondary school Chemistry, in some exams the highest mark would be 30% (which can be a C in GCSE) - and that was in the top sets. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	mary_mac 2007-05-09 02:45 pm UTC (link)
	Not to mention the horrors that regularly occur in A-Level Chemistry, especially for CCEA and Excel. I didn't even do Chemistry and I'm scarred for life. Here's to the entire class failing Module 1 in January of sixth year and coming into the social in incoherent shock. Fun day, that. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

rachel_pi
2007-05-10 08:26 pm UTC (link)

Actually, a 38 on the US grading scale is pretty darn bad. Even 50 would still be failing.

When I was abroad in England, I got a 68 on my first essay and I freaked out, because in the US, that's not good. That's a D. Then, my professor assured me that it was actually a good mark in the UK and would be an A- on my transcript.

Still gave me a little twitch whenever I saw "60-something" on my papers, though.

This has been your random anecdote of the day.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

aposiopetic
2007-05-09 12:10 am UTC (link)

Waitwaitwait.

Did you mean that another professor would be more qualified to teach freshman pchem, or that a professor was trying to teach material that was far too advanced to freshmen?

Because I took pchem junior year and holyfuck, I don't think I would have been able to survive that freshman year.

And it was actually really refreshing being a chem major, because the whole 150 person class pretty much got our asses handed to us on our first exam,* which set me up not to freak out if I had a low grade that was on par with everyone else.

* Although some people were worse off than others. The professor actually said, "...and if you got below a XX, I've put the drop code on the front of your test booklet for you." He certainly was clever, but he was a complete son of a bitch *L*

(Reply to this)(Parent)

	ladybirdsleeps 2007-05-08 03:46 pm UTC (link)
	I have a math prof whose exam averages range from 50%-60%. Although, in her case, there actually is something very very wrong with the course. It's not unusual for more than half of the class to fail. ...and this is Intermediate Algebra. (Everyone hates her. She stopped talking to my TA because he disagreed with her. Etc etc.) (Reply to this)(Parent)

	(Anonymous) 2007-05-08 11:37 pm UTC (link)
	::anecdote:: One of my professors tells us that back in the day he had a professor who wound up giving out negative test scores. (Reply to this)(Parent)

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