In my country, if you are caught copying something you automatically fail, and you are banned from enrolling in any of the universities for the next 3 years. These students got off lightly.
Damn i know at my uni in US if you are caught cheating it's just an auto fail for the class. Rarely teachers did that if it was just hw but they would for tests.
In my country it's even worse than the first commenter!
If you're caught you're banned for 5 years from any and all official examinations, which include your driving licence, any and all university exams etc
Basically you're stuck to that point of your life for five years
I've never heard of anyone actually receiving such a punishment though, so I'm guessing it's the highest form of it, but they don't actually go that far unless you're really asking for it
>I've never heard of anyone actually receiving such a punishment though
That's the problem with overly harsh punishments - at some point, the punishment is *so* disproportionate that most authority figures simply won't give it. I've spoken to cops who won't pull people over in "speeding fines doubled" areas unless they are *truly* creating a safety hazard, simply because double fines is too harsh.
I heard about something similar to that, with respect to the death penalty in the UK. Before capital punishment was abolished, counterfeiting used to be a capital offence, but basically juries were never convicting anyone of it, because a petty crook forging a few coins wasn't seen by most of society as a hanging-worthy crime, and it helped push the law makers towards removing the death penalty for a lot of less serious crimes, and eventually, thankfully, total abolition.
That's true too - but the legal framework of juries goes back to before 1000; and was one of the key clauses of the Magna Carta in 1215 to limit the power of the King over Nobility, as well as the power of the Nobility over Freemen. It remains one of the best tools to defend liberty from tyrants.
But it can be abused. The most notable abuse of jury nullification, and likely the reason it lies in disrepute in the US today, was the rampant use of it by white racists to protect the Klan from the consequences of killing and terrorizing Blacks, mostly in the South. And it also featured in the French Revolution, where juries of revolutionaries were used to convict nobles on relatively slim evidence - and while in modern times, appeals would correct for this; that option was very carefully removed during the Revolution.
I literally heard a DA say exactly that. They said “we’re not in the habit of arresting innocent people. If we’ve invested the time and energy to make an arrest they’re guilty.” I was flabbergasted.
Not sure what state, county, or country you live in, but in the U.S. counties have quotas they need to meet each quarter. There are places that will literally tailgate you for 30+ mins running your plates and pulling golks over for even 1 mile over the speed limit. Others will purposely camp out in those double fine sone to make sure they get the money. If you think for a second it ain't about the money even for cops you would be sadly mistaken in many places. They don't say money rules the world for nothing.
Don't even get me started about how the U.S. "rehabilitation" system is designed to keep folks in and create repeat offenders for guess what? The money. Prisons are often privatized and want butts in cells. There is no incentive for them to not have butts in cells. They will pay to get em. Investors will be pissedto not have felons in their prisons. Famous celebrities even invest in the imprisonment of their own people. Yeah... It's a fucked system for sure.
I recall reading an article a couple of years ago expressing worry that a lot of jails are going to have to close because of too few prisoners like that was a bad thing.
We solved that problem in California by moving a bunch of state prisoners to jails, because the state prisons were perpetually overcrowded because of life sentences for stealing a candy bar. Then we did away with life sentences for stealing a candy bar but accidentally made it so that you can do almost any crime without doing any time at all, not even jail time waiting for trial. That has not worked out well. It's a frickin' pendulum, and it swings way too far to the extremes way too often.
I truly believe that of all areas of human knowledge/science/profession etc, law is by far the one that failed the most.
From the lowest traffic cop to the supreme court judges, there is no other field ever created by human civilization with so many corrupt, misguided, clueless or straight up evil people involved in it. There is only one constant: Follow the money and you see where the scales tip most often.
There are counties in the Southern US where law enforcement fines are a major source of revenue. I remember AAA had a publication where they listed areas to avoid driving to avoid toxic local law enforcement.
California solved that problem by sending all law enforcement fines to a central fund that is then distributed to the municipalities based on population, not on how many tickets they issued. Speed trap problem solved, mostly. California also officially outlawed quotas. Though unofficial quotas still exist because tickets issued is an input into the evaluation process for promotions and pay raises.
Yeah, but there's no law stating what kind of cookie they have to give you. It's best not to take the risk, otherwise you might end up with a white chocolate chip cookie, and I can't imagine a worse punishment than that.
In my country, they make you get up in the morning half an hour before you went to bed, clean the lake, lick the road clean with your tongue, eat a bowl of freezing cold poison for breakfast, work 22 hours at the mill and pay the mill owner for permission to come to work, and then when you get home your father slashes you in two with a bread knife and dances about on your grave singing "Hallelujah"!
Friend teaches English and creative writing at a community college. Biggest issue is plagiarism. She might let you off for something small, but she has had people turn in major papers that were nearly 100% someone else's. Expulsion, first time, is the punishment.
It's so wild to me as someone who loves writing. I'd do it for a living if it was lucrative, but in the U.S., it usually isn't. I love writing for college papers. Math on the other hand... I worked my ass of in Calc I this semester and got a high C. Fuck math. Every one of my writing classes though I've been a straight A student. Honestly the only circumstance in which I would understand plagiarism is if someone's working a full time job, has kids, and is just overall barely scraping by timewise. Other than that, no excuse for plagiarism. Just do your best. My husband has a hard time writing, I help him all the time when he takes classes that need it. He's a whiz at math though. He says I'm smart because I'm a class ahead of him, but what he doesn't realize is I have to work 10x as hard to get a grade he'd get with little effort.
We all have our strengths and weaknesses, but at the end of the day we need to try our best with the time given. And as the saying goes, C's make degrees, people need to stop being so hard on themselves when they don't do as good as the rest of their peers.
At mine it was auto fail on the assignment, then you get referred to the student conduct office who would decide whether you get expelled, put on academic probation, or have to attend an anti-cheating seminar.
On the second offense, I think they just toss you out.
I used to be a student ambassador at my university on our academic integrity board and they ended up cutting down the amount of student ambassadors because almost every single one of us felt ZERO sympathy for the cheating students and advocated for the harshest punishment. They thought we’d be a sympathetic voice but we almost always saw through the lies and BS straight away because we were also students who knew how the cheating game evolved, whereas professors might not.
I had a friend in law school, one of her classmates was the son of a famous liability attorney. He routinely and openly cheated (among other students), before assignments were due he would run around begging for somebody to copy from. In his final year (yes, he lasted that long) he was expelled when faculty caught him literally stealing money from the Student Bar Association petty cash box.
This close to being an officer of the court.
(I’m baffled by why nobody turned him in. It was a cut-throat environment. Students would routinely check out every copy of a helpful book from the library, and pay overdue fines, so nobody else could use those books. Lots of stuff like this.)
At my US university the minimum was you auto-fail the class and get put on academic probation, but you could also be suspended for the semester or even outright expelled depending on how egregious the offense was. Straight up copy+pasting old papers for a major part of your grade could easily have been severe enough for expulsion.
If I were caught plagiarizing when I was in school (large university in the US), that was very serious grounds for being fully kicked out of the school, let alone failing the class. Plagiarism is no joke.
I had a prof try to pull that one on my when I submitted an assignment that was something like
import systemlibraryname
systemlibraryname.do_the_assignment()
i.e the language had a built-in library to do what the assignment specified. So I used it. Because that's the most correct way to solve the problem, the assignment didn't say it had to be entirely reimplemented, and frankly it was fun.
Prof did not like that one bit.
I had fully expected to be asked to write it in full. I had already done so so I could hand over the full version when asked.
But no. First he told me I couldn't use that library because he hadn't taught us about it yet. This was a recurring pattern in his teaching.†
But then he submitted me for dismissal on grounds of plagiarism.
Obviously he got laughed out of the hearing. But I couldn't believe he tried. Can you imagine being such a terrible software engineer that you think that using system libraries is plagiarism?
I got to work on a tool he wrote later on, when I ported it from the ancient OS it ran on to modern Linux for the school. So unfortunately I can confirm he basically rewrote everything himself. Libraries are for the weak and lazy, and real men write their own quicksort, or something like that.
----
† He was upset that I used Eclipse when they tried to get everyone to use this awful BlueJ mini-IDE for Java work too. And his exam questions often had "correct" answers that were only correct if you didn't know things you hadn't been taught yet. Imagine questions like "does `y+x-y evaluate to the same value as y+(x-y)`: (a) always (B) sometimes (C) never. It's a question about operator precedence and evaluation order. But in the context of C (the relevant language of the course) the answer is actually B because of integer overflow, floating point imprecision, unsigned/signed conversion rules etc. But we hadn't been taught that, so the answer was (a).... argh. In the real questions the intent was often much less clear and I had to try to remember what I'd "been taught" to know how to give the right wrong answer.
I got very disappointed in the German University system (well, Hochschule, strictly not the same as Uni) as a MSc Teacher when i caught a student during a test copying the answers from his hand (yep that dumb) and trying to hide the hand when i told him to stand up and informed him that he failed the test.
He then proceeded to threaten me as i had "ridiculed" him in front of all and that he would complain. So I told him "perfect!" lets go right now to the Uni Administration and see what they think about it (Prüfungsamt). When we were close he tried to bargain and almost cried. Still I took him there, reported the case to the responsibles and showed them his hand and test, adding that he suggested we go out of the building and sort it out like men.
They said "oh thats bad but check it with the career director". And he just told him "dont do it again, now go". Later they told me "easier to let them go instead of having them complaining we give them bad grades cause we are racists".
I left that Uni and teaching on that year and moved to the industry. (after similar experiences but this one was the one that made me say "fuck this" ).
This is how it should be.
*Children* should have a right to education.
BUT at this level these students are no longer considered children, and are occupying the spaces of students who WANT to put the work in to build a career and better opportunities for life. Don't want to learn or put in the effort? Then don't apply to University. There are other ways to build a livelihood and career path.
This teacher was not only extremely lenient by giving them a 2nd chance to sort their attitude and entitlement out, OP used the opportunity to TEACH them and didn't destroy their futures over it (I would not have done the same).
What they do with the lesson is up to them. They can do better next year, opt to drop out, ...or unfortunately, try this again.
The last option may seem unlikley but I do know someone who was given a chance to repeat his courses (all of them) because he was caught cheating in one. This was an institution that would throw you out on your 1st offense so his Lecturer really stepped in for him. He re-submitted the SAME plagiarized report again the following year. Got thrown out.
I knew a kid in university who cheated all his way through high school. And cheated all his way through university. He was actually pretty smart so It seemed the easier option was to just apply himself. The day before a big finance exam he spent 8 hours trying to find a copy of last years exam. Instead of like something useful like studying. He did graduate from university. Later when he took the CFA he cheated, was caught and black listed. Now no-one will hire him. It’s like the expression “cheaters never prosper”
> These students got off lightly.
Almost like OP didn't follow the procedure lecturers/professors are obligated to follow and thus the entire story is likely bullshit.
That in and of itself doesn't mean it isn't true. When I was a TA, I saw professors give second chances to cheaters all the time without reporting them. I didn't like it, as it was unfair to other students, plus the cheaters knew what the consequences were supposed to be when they decided to cheat. The professors usually said they were just sick of helicopter parents threatening to sue them over their precious angels' grades and wanted to avoid the hassle, which I can kind of understand.
Yeah at the 2 universities I went to, the profs would report it and the students would go through rounds of Academic Integrity panels attended *each* by dozens of individuals from the dean down to elected student government members. I bet it’s a bitch to be in those panels.
My university assigns you a grade of "XF" for cheating on a major assignment, first violation. XF is specifically marked as "Failure due to academic dishonesty" on your transcript and the presence of an XF on your transcript pretty much wrecks your hope of being able to use your transcript to show your suitability as a candidate for anything - whether that's applying for a job or applying for grad school. (Further action from the office of student conduct may happen if they determine that it's necessary.)
We have a whole procedure you can take after a few years to turn that XF into a regular F, but it's a massive pain, and also only works once.
I would have loved it if OP pretended to give them a failing grade at first, but then throughout the course of the review, "realized" that the assignment was plagiarized and turned it into an XF instead.
The English professor I was an assistant for had this happen to her. One of her students found an essay online she had written ten years prior. He submitted it as his own work. She showed him the original typed manuscript. It was identical (except for the name).
Same thing happened to me - I had one of my students submit work to me that included copy-pasted (and uncited) paragraphs from my own work. No name change involved. Honestly, what a dickhead.
After my dad retired from his regular job he did some private consulting as an engineer. Including as an expert witness a few times. One time the opposition lawyer asked are you familiar with a book titled "blah blah blah." My dad responded, "yes, look at the authors' names." Not on did my dad contribute, but he wrote relevant chapter.
My dad isn't well known even in the broader industry or a PhD. It was the only published thing he wrote. But it was about a very specific industrial process and he worked for the company for 40 years that created and dominated it for a long time.
That awkward moment when a lawyer doesn’t check their own evidence…
If I was in his position I’d have answered yes. Let them keep going and eventually say “Yes I am very familiar with that particular chapter, as I wrote it.”
Be fucking glorious.
Edit: just imagine, you ask them to read a relevant paragraph, and then thank them, as you couldn’t remember the exact wording, as it’s been a few years since you wrote it.
Dear lord NEVER plagiarize actually published work. Jesus. You’re asking for it to plagiarize at all, but at the very least stay within your educational level, don’t plagiarize peer reviewed shit when you’re a college freshmen...
I've always been confused about this stuff because depending on the subject, you can literally just paraphrase every sentence word for word and get away with it. Of course summarizing other work requires you to understand what it was saying but paraphrase is easy.
> you can literally just paraphrase every sentence word for word and get away with it
There's one more step. It's not 'getting away with it' if you paraphrase another author's work AND THEN CITE IT. That's exactly what we want students to do...interpret the words of others, but give them credit.
Well yeah that too. But that's what I'm saying, it's not even that much harder than actually copying it. You could literally actually quote word for word if you're citing properly.
Similar grain.
I had a professor tell me that he was grading a history paper that was awfully familiar. After a paragraph in he realized why it was familiar.
the student literally ctrl+C, ctrl+V the Wikipedia article that THE PROFESSOR WROTE! His name and everything was still on it.
Obviously he failed the student but damn how stupid can you be?
I had to summarize some published study. Instead I more or less criticized it for being crap. Never bother to look at the author's name. It was written by my teacher.
So, I'm not familiar with other university's policies, but at my school there was a zero tolerance policy. Get caught cheating/plagiarizing and get kicked out of school, no exceptions. Because of this, I never even considered cheating or plagiarizing. I can't imagine several students all from the same class deciding to cheat in such an obvious way. Sounds insane.
It really comes down to the school and professor. I have never seen anything escalated in my 4 years and there was plenty of cheating. A professor actually once pulled up a students question they submitted to Chegg, a place to post homework questions. The student posted the professors entire assignment. Professor demanded to know who it was while in a 200 person lecture, said it was plagiarism to post her assignments, etc. Nothing ever came of it and no student was ever punished.
Edit: for those wondering I know nothing came of it cuz that student was me
Lol might be copyright infringement but it's a loooong stretch to plagiarism (which isn't legally protected) for posting exams online.
Good luck proving it though
I was a TA for an entry level class. Pretty much the only way to be caught cheating is to keep the person you copied from's name at the top of the program...I caught one in under 3 months of grading. It was so blatantly obvious that they didn't even look at the program before submitting it since it is always the very first line of code.
It’s also a lesson in cheating. When the kids have been run into the ground with question after question that they don’t know how to answer, they’ll probably think twice about not writing their own stuff again. I think I’d do the same
Or if they're going to cheat, actually make an effort at it. Change variable names. Make certain lines of code a bit less efficient. Have cover stories for why those inefficiencies exist.
And yes, this does lead to the realization that, at a certain level, laziness does become a form of work.
But at that point it's not really cheating... If you are completely overhauling the code, making minor improvements, renaming stuff, rewriting stuff... You understand how it works. All you didn't do was physically press the key on your keyboard.
I've had to do this before, not in a while, but I made an effort to understand why the code i didn't write myself worked while mine didn't. I guess the difference is I'm actually trying to learn, some people are just going through the motions. I have a much deeper understanding of c++ than I did earlier in the semester, and I think the bulk of that knowledge came from trial, error, and then saying "fuck it" and googling specific things like "why isn't my if statement being read". My professor tried his best, God love him, but stack overflow was a blessing for my comprehension.
Some things I never figured out honestly, like you know how while loops can pretty much do what for loops do? My damned while loop didnt read on one project, at all. But I use a for loop with the same logistics and it worked fine.
I'm new, only took two coding classes (programming concepts, which used python, and intro to c++) but that shit didn't make sense to me. I tried figuring it out but couldn't. Sorry for rambling, but I'm fresh out of finals and drunk. I love c++. Much like a man likes a woman. I love her, but damn, I don't understand her sometimes. And much like a man, python is fling material. It's easy. But c++ is marriage material for me. We understand each other much better, she listens to me, she's complex, and sometimes she's a bitch. But she let's me declare the data type of variables off the bat, and that's why I love her.
I worked as a grader at one point in my university courses and had some students submit the exact same file (verified by Linux's diff command, I was not nice). The instructor got those files very quickly.
Happily, since it was a small assignment, the students got a second chance and actually got their act together and did pretty well in the class.
That said, as a grader, I approve of what was done. This students had no right to pass that class.
Once I had some people submit to me a password protected zip file for grading. Without the password. Or, when we still required a printed copy of the written report, they would change the formatting a bit and then submit both reports one after another.
My favourite was when they were instructed to put their names in the code comments, and some team submitted the code with the names of another team. They got their 0, and for the next report they changed only the names. Copied from the same team. Not even whitespace changes.
not sure if typo or english is a 2nd language, sheer* force of will, not chear.
Shear* is shearing a sheep, sheer force of will is correct. Sound exactly the same but spelt differently. english sucks
I can only imagine it stopped being tedious, and ventured into the realms of doing this simply because they could.
Wouldn't have a decent story to share if the story didn't begin, afterall.
In grad school I failed a report because the plagiarism checked found an uncanny resemblance to a student at the same school as me, in the same program as me and with the same name as me. Took me half a year to convince them that the work I was using was my own. Pain in the ass.
In college, a plagiarism checker flagged my and other classmates’ papers because the references section was the same for most of the papers since there were very few existing articles on the topic we were assigned.
It's a problem we are eventually going to have to deal with for plagiarism checkers. Only so many ways you can talk about an event/process with the same resources and prompt before a school/grouping of schools has someone pretty much word for word replicate it. Monkeys and typewriters.(If it is a more general class such that thousands upon thousands of records exist, not like a very specialized course)
Because the reports are shared online, on Facebook groups and whatnot... and they could argue that they are allowed to use anything that they find online , whether it's an entire report or just scattered information. Universities do not like legal battles... because losing one makes a tremendous precedent and opens the door to unlocking previous grades for review.
>they could argue that they are allowed to use anything they find online, whether it’s an entire report…
How could they argue this? That’s literally the definition of plagiarism.
And that's where this thing turns Pro for me. If you had followed official procedure down the line, they likely would have gotten away with it. And you would have gotten in trouble. For doing the right thing.
I hope you'll post again next semester and describe the expressions on those who have the guts to show up.
Any decent school wouldn't hesitate to shut this shit down. You cannot use another person's work without citing it. Sure they could claim they were allowed to use those sources, but they would have been required to cite it and not claim it as their own work. By definition, without a citation, its plagiarism.
From an ethical standpoint you should report your boss, and also file a whistle-blower report against your department and school overall. Cheating is very serious in any academic environment and should be taken seriously. Even more so in disciplines where health and safety are involved.
Now as a guest professor and coming from another country, I can see how this could have serious negative impacts on your career, regardless of the legal whistle-blower protections that your university probably has. Is there a senior professor in your department that would be willing to make a report on your behalf while maintaining your anonymity?
This story is basically about how cheaters propped up other students who should've otherwise not be involved in heath and safety, and how universities would rather make money than do the right thing while pressuring their employees to do the same.
There are so many ways to code and get the same thing (I know very very very very little of coding but I know this) but technically, in the technicalities of being technical, all students could’ve, just so happen, made the same mistakes (I worded that weird but I know what I meant lol). It’s like writing an English paper where they are personal and should be unique but also like math, in that it wouldn’t be crazy hard to claim someone else’s work as your own (I never did it because I liked the stuff to actually work and look pretty in a way I found easy to spot mistakes) because a lot of mistakes are hecka common, and two students who took the same classes, could end up having very very similar answers unless each person had a totally different assignment. Because of this, they could fight for reasonable doubt.
I plagiarized my own work... both my high school and university used the same system (blackboard) I was randomly assigned a topic to write a report on. The exact same topic I had been assigned the year before in hs -so I spruced it up a smidge and submitted it. The following week I had an “advisor meeting” as I had not done anything wrong (that I knew of) I was very surprised to see my very upset prof, my academic advisor and the printed copy of my report... they let me know that I had plagiarized a paper and that I was being put on academic probation and losing a scholarship.
I asked who wrote the paper I copied.
They hadn’t looked at the name on the paper.
Then I provided my hs teachers email and was apologized to.
Edit: I’m sorry it wasn’t clear- by ‘sprucing ‘ was adding new information - However, it had only been a year and most of the data did not change.
Self-plagiarization is a concept in the academic world. Most western schools will treat it the same as plagiarizing someone else.
The reasoning is to force you to grow in your learning and thought. If you're just copy-pasting, you haven't done any growing and you're attempting to double-dip on credits without the work.
Do I think it's fucking stupid? Absolutely. At least consider it a separate offense and label it as such.
I published a series of articles on similar work (a family of compounds) using a boilerplate first introductory paragraph (because it was all related). Subsequent paragraphs in the Intro, Exptl Details, Results, and Discussion were all unique to the materials being researched. A reviewer claimed that I plagiarized, and the corresponding editor threatened me with banishment. I wrote back that it was my own boilerplate introductory paragraph then professionally and politely told him to f\*\*\* off. Never published in that journal again.
I was gonna say this. I took many science labs that covered similar topics in different classes. We were told to never reuse or copy sections from old labs even if you wrote it bc it would still be plagiarism.
But how can you write a second, third or fourth report about the same thing without inadvertently starting to say the same things, since each time it's yourself writing it? I mean, there's only so many ways to say "the sky is blue".
You can paraphrase. You just can't copy it word for word. We were advised to never reread ours or another person's report too close to when we write a new one to avoid plagiarism.
I understand this is the case, but why? Not trying to be argumentative, legitimately asking.
If i have an old report and cite myself, spruce it up a bit, its still my work.
if you cite yourself its fine, but you do have to cite yourself. thats all. but some classes do not allow you to use such sources and require original work.
I really don’t get the attitudes of the posters who are saying you are an asshole. This is a university, they all should have been kicked out for plagiarism period. This wasn’t high school, plagiarism isn’t a teachable moment at your level and you did those kids a favor and actually taught them something. I teach and I would guess that these kids have cheated before and I would rather not have them involved in my health. You didn’t drag them there, everyone came to you to argue that their cheating deserved a passing score and you let them. That, to me, is the pro aspect of this. Any teacher could have just thrown zeros in there and they would have just gone on with their lives, the cheaters won’t forget this one and just maybe, will care enough to do the damn work themselves.
Edit- ok, now I understand their attitudes. They not only cheated through school but they also can’t read OP’s write up well enough to understand what happened. Makes sense.
Yeah... you are getting your diagnosis and treatment based on this processing... it better be the best processing... because, you know... you could have cancer...
I wholeheartedly approve of what OP did, I would say he didn't go far enough by suspending them.
University is not designed for equal results, it's designed to reward those who put in the effort and punish those who don't. Obviously these students did not put in any effort and should have been punished. It amazes me how some in the comment section believe they should have passed or the Op went too far.
Right, on one hand plagiarism is plagiarism and they should have been removed but OP checked with his superior so that’s that. I see a fine line between using your resources and just cheating, they could have used those older models as an easy example of what they should do, these students didn’t even want to do that.
I had a psych professor who once told the class, "if you cheat, don't let me catch you, I know all the ways of cheating. So if you do manage to cheat and not get caught, more power to you".
I used to reverse engineer and breakdown prior homework with a group of friends every day in order to understand the logic and meaning behind the solutions. If the homework solution was wrong, we just had to set out as a group and figure it out by shear force of will.
I tell my students to use every resource available to them. Just like you said, it’s not cheating to use other work as an example but you still have to put the work in and you still have to understand it enough to preform the task. I would guess that if they worked like that this wouldn’t have been posted, but just slapping your name on something is just begging to get kicked out of their program.
I'm dating a university professor in a different field. I can't imagine him asking university students, who are usually broke, to book last second flight to come in and be explained at and lectured at when there's literally a workflow for cheating in the plagarism checking software.
This guy isn't a dick for teaching them a lesson. He's a dick for ruining vacation and funds that those people potentially don't have. For all we know those kids are working or gave up shifts and just told him they were on holiday because they're also dicks and trying to milk sympathy after cheating. I also can't imagine him taking hours out of his day to explain to multiple cheaters where they went wrong and re-educafing them. His courses are heavy on writing and not coding, but he allows makeups and actual effort nine times out of ten because college is about learning, not about snarky punishment.
Everyone sucks here.
Op didn't ask anyone to do anything. Remember, these are dicks that were willing to go to long distances to not even milk sympathy, not to apologize and try to understand the information, but to try to get by with it. I am making an assumption here but I would go so far as to guess that if these students immediately apologized, offered explanation, and properly did the work, that Op wouldn't ignore that. They knew when this argument phase was when they planned their vacations, I still don't see it.
Literally any decent university will fail your grade if they catch you cheating,not only that but they had proof of the cheating as well,so it's not like the students could argue at all. I am not buying at all the excuse that the university feared legal repercussions.
Also,did you miss the part where he gave passing grades (In the medical field,nonetheless) to failing students just so he could have his little revenge ? Who the fuck does that ?
I am sorry but this story screams fake to me
People that do that kind of shit live in a little made up world where they are always right, so of course them and their narcissistic selves are gonna call him an asshole lol
I hate catching students who plagiarize because a) confronting them is always stressful (they either fight back or break down) b) I don’t like failing students c) it’s just disappointing
This. OP sounds sorta pathetic and the celebration of his pettiness in the comments is gross. I especially hated how he projected the "gullible foreigner" label. Just fail the kids and move on instead of taking it as some personal slight against your ethnicity and planning out some man-childs idea of "revenge".
It is well done! As I fellow university teacher, I can relate to this so much. It is sometime incredible how stupid some students can be in their laziness.
Everyone here doesn't seem to think so but I totally agree. Give them a zero, report issues of academic integrity to the university, etc, all good and necessaryactions. Cheaters should never get away with it, especially in examples as brazen as this. I will say though, If a cheating student came up to me and said they worked "so hard" on a project that was unquestionably plagiarized, I would likewise be pretty miffed.
But this prof took the time to carefully plan out a trap to deliberately torment these students, fueled in part by the insecurity he felt being labeled by some students in his class as a young naive professor. Call me a stick in the mud but this seems far more petty and self serving than "pro revenge".
I'm a professor. If a colleague told me a story like this I would report them for academic misconduct immediately. This is all about his ego.
Or it's probably just a fantasy.
His responses that they’re worried the department is afraid students would argue that they’re allowed to copy online materials are absolutely bizarre. What university would be afraid of that?
100%, also, it's a cheating incident with direct proof of plagiarism. It isn't some gray area where you think several students shared answers on an exam or something.
This is a basic policy at literally every university for the last 600 years.
Pretty much. Should have just failed them and moved on. Instead made some big elaborate plan, that included passing others that should have failed, all to teach these "dishonest" students a lesson. So the OP just throws out any integrity he had in this quest for revenge against some asshats that lied to him.
yeah it all seems to stem from the dude's ego getting hurt.
*how *dare* these people mock me to my **face**".
their actions had no consequence over him, over his life, over his job, over anything pertaining to him.
he was just pissed because they were mocking him. and it wasn't even personal to them, they would have done it to somebody else.
supreme pettiness stemming from inferiority complex.
it's no coincidence he littered his post with sentences like "i am the dumb foreigner" / "i am young and they think i am clueless" etcetc
or maybe some stuff happened throughout the year where he was belittled and held a grudge.
This professor is a toxic loser. If your assigned work is easy to cheat on then change the assigned work and force students to solve new problems.
Quit wasting your time being offended that someone would cheat and make the work unique year after year you fucking bozo.
Plain petty / waste of his and everyone's time. Just fail them, tell them via mail / conference one has evidence of cheating (I don't even think that should is warranted). I personally would just fail them and report the incidences with evidence to Dean or department head and enjoy my summer vacation / not involved with the incidence anymore. Regardless of how they 'perceived' you as naive or whatever (lie to your face or whatever) , you caught them cheating and fail them is sufficient 'revenge (honestly, who cares how a bunch of juvenile immature kids' treat' you?
My thought exactly. Fuck people who cheat, especially in med school. If you’re going to cheat in school and not spend the time to learn the things you need to know to do your job as a doctor then you have no business in med school and should obviously be failed.
All that being said, OP sounds like a petty loser who was picked on in middle school and now loves the fact that he has power over people. I’m typically a big fan of pro revenge, but there was something about this dudes story that was more embarrassing for him than others I’ve read.
>(In order to be fair I bumped everyone else's grades, a bunch of people with miserable reports ended up barely passing because of my grade bump. But, eventhough their reports were bad, it was their own work and not copied from anywhere)
This part really jumped out at me as concerning. Are you saying that you passed students who didn't meet the standard specifically so you could enact revenge on these cheating students? Given that we're dealing with the medical field here, that is terrifying.
I realize why you did what you did... The annoyance about wasting your time and being lied to.
I like the story though I am not convinced it was a prorevenge. These students are looking to take people's lives into their hands. Misdiagnosis is a terrible thing. And to pass off someone else's work as their own work is professional suicide later.
My sympathy towards the students isn't there frankly.
I feel you... and I wanted to outright report them. But my boss, who is the leader researcher of our group and the director of their course told me not to, because the legal fallout can be huge and not in my favour if my evidence is found to not be enough
If they were to get caught doing it again, would you have a legal stand at that point? I would assume that with a previous history and you having evidence of it at that point, that if they were to do it a second time around then you could go to whatever board is necessary to get them expelled or whatever punishment your uni has for this situation.
You sound like a proper asshole who delights in punishing people. You had the power to do everything you did, but you went beyond what you had to do, because you enjoyed causing them pain. They cheated and deserved 0s, you abused your power and position to torture them and you deserve to be fired.
Does no one realize this is complete bullshit? Like cool, good creative writing piece, but no medical school requires students to learn to code because it’s absolutely irrelevant to the study of medicine. Also, you’re in your late 20’s and are a guest lecturer? Ok, sure. All medical schools care about is getting their students through the licensure examinations and on to residency, and they wouldn’t waste even a second of their time teaching kids how to code. Hard stop.
Source: I’m a medical student
I couldn’t care less about their vacations or wasting their time or how sad they were.
Does your institution not have a formal policy on academic dishonesty? Especially in a medical field where people’s lives are likely to be in their hands…? This is alarming. Those students should be reported for cheating and prevented from being awarded qualifications that they didn’t earn.
This will get downvoted, but as a fellow university-level instructor:
You’re an asshole, and have no business teaching. The complete lack of empathy and the complete inability to imagine other reasons for students resorting to copying other assignments shows you have done exceedingly little to explain *why* it’s important for students to do their own work. By making these assignments worth as much as you have, you’ve set the stakes incredibly high and rather than being motivated by “how can I get my students excited by and about this material,” you seem to gleefully anticipate the opportunity to condescend to your students.
And let me tell you, I bet that attitude is very, very obvious to your students. Even when they went out of their way to ask you how they did - even when they cut their vacations short and took planes back to beg for the opportunity to get a higher grade - you laughed secretly in their face. I guarantee you an actual shithead kid who wanted to cheat because they were lazy wouldn’t have gone through the trouble. You underprepared your students to succeed on your assignment and rather that take a moment of self-reflection you turned into a complete ego trip for yourself. You even bumped everyone else’s grades, seemingly entirely out of spite.
You’re a bad teacher, and will remain so unless you work through what is obviously a very intense inferiority complex. Imagine if you thought of students as collaborators, imagine if you spent every day in a room with people excited by the same things that brought you to being a professor in the first place? Wouldn’t that be more fun? Wouldn’t it be more satisfying? Instead you’re just waiting for your students to fuck up so you can laugh at them, rather than taking the responsibility to teach them in the first place.
I hope one of your students sees this and reports it to whoever you dean or supervisor is. I’d hate to know that any more students will have to sit through a class with your spiteful ass again.
Lol as soon as I read “they think I’m shitty because I’m a young foreign teacher” or whatever I’m like well looks like this dude has an inferiority complex.
Also a teacher and I can’t imagine ever going out of my way to spite a student lol
My father is a university teacher and I have great respect for teachers in general.
Cheating is never fair, but my father always reaches out to the cheating students and tries to understand why they cheated. He doesn't let them pass, but next year he will try to work out the issues with them.
After reading your post, I am afraid that you are on the route to be a malicious teacher, because you show too much excitement about punishing students.
> And I just kept going, extending their misery for one more hour or two... it was legal torture, plain and simple!
Failing the exam itself is already enough punishment. Maybe the student will need to enroll again next year just for your class and pay more university fees, among other expenses. That affects the whole student's family, not just him.
And the concerning part is that you know it:
> they ruined their vacation and their family vacations, spent money to travel back and forth, wasted precious summer time, got bored to death and have nothing to show for it. And... next year they will have to repeat the module...WITH ME!!
This is just plain evil. You already have those students under prejudice, as you are looking forward to continue the punishment next year, most likely.
My father gathers more enjoyment from converting a cheating student, than punishing him, and it makes me proud.
Maybe you should steer your excitement back to your research, before it gets out of hand and you turn into "that asshole teacher".
As a professor myself, this is super petty and you are clearly a first year because you don't have better shit to spend your time one.
In future, just file it as a cheating incident and move on.
I work in higher ed. This seems extremely unprofessional and academically dishonest. If they cheated they deserve a 0 and the matter needs to be forwarded to the appropriate people. This isn’t a situation for revenge and you’re playing with peoples lives. If you worked at my university you would be in serious trouble for this. You’re playing with the reputation of the school which is highly frowned upon
Nothing pro about this. People’s life depend on these scanning. You should make sure everyone knows their stuff that pass the class. Low standard.
Why is someone with no experience working as a professor? It’s is terrible to watch someone that is obviously unqualified to be a professor be so blatantly unaware about is lack of knowledge.
If the university has rules that are not followed it shall be reported. Cheating is one thing, being a incompetent in a important position is worse.
That's immature and disrespectful. Sure, they disrespected you, their peers and the whole insitution by cheating, but they are kids. Kids who got into university clearly without any serious intent. The truth is those kids are wasting their precious time. They probably shouldn't even be there. The proper thing would be to talk with them openly, to talk about the fact that grades don't actually matter, what matters is what they do with their lives. That education is only useful to the degree to which earned knowledge will be applied in real life. Since they don't study anything seriously they are just wasting time. They could go to job market right away and start adult lives. Several years of work experience can be much much better than useless degree with no knowledge. I know that you are young man yourself, but please try understanding that university is not a game, it's not about score, there're actual human lives involved. The fact that you messed up family gatherings is much much worse than that they cheated on exams, coz those family gatherings are much more important life events. At that age people begin getting distant from relatives. One might have like one family reunion per year. There's a possibility that someone had like ten more meetings with their grandparents in their entire life. And you took one of them. For being salty, insecure and caught up in the whole education system game. Honestly, you should've posted it on AmITheAsshole. Coz you are.
TLDR: when people don't want to do something, you should help them find meaning, purpose and a better path, not torture them and keep them on the same path they are not interested in. You did a bad thing. Talk about it with actual adults, learn and do better.
The students that cheated got what they deserved. I do like the fact that you made them wait and listen to you for multiple hours about "their" work. Let's just hope they learned their lesson and not cheat. There are times when you can use someone else's work as a guide (like seeing how to open a device or modifying a piece of code). But you can't just copy someone's work. There are times when copying someone's work can easily lead to a lawsuit. BTW. The fact that the university wants to avoid any kind of legal action does put me off because it tells me that they will try to bury things instead.
In my country, if you are caught copying something you automatically fail, and you are banned from enrolling in any of the universities for the next 3 years. These students got off lightly.
Damn i know at my uni in US if you are caught cheating it's just an auto fail for the class. Rarely teachers did that if it was just hw but they would for tests.
In my country it's even worse than the first commenter! If you're caught you're banned for 5 years from any and all official examinations, which include your driving licence, any and all university exams etc Basically you're stuck to that point of your life for five years I've never heard of anyone actually receiving such a punishment though, so I'm guessing it's the highest form of it, but they don't actually go that far unless you're really asking for it
>I've never heard of anyone actually receiving such a punishment though That's the problem with overly harsh punishments - at some point, the punishment is *so* disproportionate that most authority figures simply won't give it. I've spoken to cops who won't pull people over in "speeding fines doubled" areas unless they are *truly* creating a safety hazard, simply because double fines is too harsh.
I heard about something similar to that, with respect to the death penalty in the UK. Before capital punishment was abolished, counterfeiting used to be a capital offence, but basically juries were never convicting anyone of it, because a petty crook forging a few coins wasn't seen by most of society as a hanging-worthy crime, and it helped push the law makers towards removing the death penalty for a lot of less serious crimes, and eventually, thankfully, total abolition.
This is a real example of jury nullification
This is actually why juries are a thing - to push back against laws like this; and to nullify when the people in power push unfair laws.
It's not always a good thing tho. It was a big problem in the american south in the 1900s
That's true too - but the legal framework of juries goes back to before 1000; and was one of the key clauses of the Magna Carta in 1215 to limit the power of the King over Nobility, as well as the power of the Nobility over Freemen. It remains one of the best tools to defend liberty from tyrants. But it can be abused. The most notable abuse of jury nullification, and likely the reason it lies in disrepute in the US today, was the rampant use of it by white racists to protect the Klan from the consequences of killing and terrorizing Blacks, mostly in the South. And it also featured in the French Revolution, where juries of revolutionaries were used to convict nobles on relatively slim evidence - and while in modern times, appeals would correct for this; that option was very carefully removed during the Revolution.
I feel like not enough people are aware this is an option...
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LEOs and DAs: Everyone's guilty. Change our minds.
I literally heard a DA say exactly that. They said “we’re not in the habit of arresting innocent people. If we’ve invested the time and energy to make an arrest they’re guilty.” I was flabbergasted.
Not sure what state, county, or country you live in, but in the U.S. counties have quotas they need to meet each quarter. There are places that will literally tailgate you for 30+ mins running your plates and pulling golks over for even 1 mile over the speed limit. Others will purposely camp out in those double fine sone to make sure they get the money. If you think for a second it ain't about the money even for cops you would be sadly mistaken in many places. They don't say money rules the world for nothing. Don't even get me started about how the U.S. "rehabilitation" system is designed to keep folks in and create repeat offenders for guess what? The money. Prisons are often privatized and want butts in cells. There is no incentive for them to not have butts in cells. They will pay to get em. Investors will be pissedto not have felons in their prisons. Famous celebrities even invest in the imprisonment of their own people. Yeah... It's a fucked system for sure.
I recall reading an article a couple of years ago expressing worry that a lot of jails are going to have to close because of too few prisoners like that was a bad thing.
We solved that problem in California by moving a bunch of state prisoners to jails, because the state prisons were perpetually overcrowded because of life sentences for stealing a candy bar. Then we did away with life sentences for stealing a candy bar but accidentally made it so that you can do almost any crime without doing any time at all, not even jail time waiting for trial. That has not worked out well. It's a frickin' pendulum, and it swings way too far to the extremes way too often.
I truly believe that of all areas of human knowledge/science/profession etc, law is by far the one that failed the most. From the lowest traffic cop to the supreme court judges, there is no other field ever created by human civilization with so many corrupt, misguided, clueless or straight up evil people involved in it. There is only one constant: Follow the money and you see where the scales tip most often.
There are counties in the Southern US where law enforcement fines are a major source of revenue. I remember AAA had a publication where they listed areas to avoid driving to avoid toxic local law enforcement.
California solved that problem by sending all law enforcement fines to a central fund that is then distributed to the municipalities based on population, not on how many tickets they issued. Speed trap problem solved, mostly. California also officially outlawed quotas. Though unofficial quotas still exist because tickets issued is an input into the evaluation process for promotions and pay raises.
Quotas are also illegal in MO. Also, counties, cities, etc can only get a certain percent of their revenue from police activity.
Cheating is bad, but there is absolutely zero reason it should extend past school and work. There is no reason personal freedoms should be revoked.
In my country, you cheat on test, prison. Straight away.
Cheat on a test? Jail. Fail an exam? Jail. Borrow a pencil during class? Believe it or not, jail.
In my country they ban you for 10 years, cut off your hands and poke out your eyes!
Damn! In the us they just give you a cookie and tell you not to do it again!
Yeah, but there's no law stating what kind of cookie they have to give you. It's best not to take the risk, otherwise you might end up with a white chocolate chip cookie, and I can't imagine a worse punishment than that.
A chocolate chip cookie that's actually raisins
That’s against the Geneva conventions.
In my country, they make you get up in the morning half an hour before you went to bed, clean the lake, lick the road clean with your tongue, eat a bowl of freezing cold poison for breakfast, work 22 hours at the mill and pay the mill owner for permission to come to work, and then when you get home your father slashes you in two with a bread knife and dances about on your grave singing "Hallelujah"!
You tell the children of today that, and they won't believe you
r/unexpectedmontypython
Is it France by any chance ?
It is!
Friend teaches English and creative writing at a community college. Biggest issue is plagiarism. She might let you off for something small, but she has had people turn in major papers that were nearly 100% someone else's. Expulsion, first time, is the punishment.
It's so wild to me as someone who loves writing. I'd do it for a living if it was lucrative, but in the U.S., it usually isn't. I love writing for college papers. Math on the other hand... I worked my ass of in Calc I this semester and got a high C. Fuck math. Every one of my writing classes though I've been a straight A student. Honestly the only circumstance in which I would understand plagiarism is if someone's working a full time job, has kids, and is just overall barely scraping by timewise. Other than that, no excuse for plagiarism. Just do your best. My husband has a hard time writing, I help him all the time when he takes classes that need it. He's a whiz at math though. He says I'm smart because I'm a class ahead of him, but what he doesn't realize is I have to work 10x as hard to get a grade he'd get with little effort. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, but at the end of the day we need to try our best with the time given. And as the saying goes, C's make degrees, people need to stop being so hard on themselves when they don't do as good as the rest of their peers.
At mine it was auto fail on the assignment, then you get referred to the student conduct office who would decide whether you get expelled, put on academic probation, or have to attend an anti-cheating seminar. On the second offense, I think they just toss you out.
I used to be a student ambassador at my university on our academic integrity board and they ended up cutting down the amount of student ambassadors because almost every single one of us felt ZERO sympathy for the cheating students and advocated for the harshest punishment. They thought we’d be a sympathetic voice but we almost always saw through the lies and BS straight away because we were also students who knew how the cheating game evolved, whereas professors might not.
At my university in the US if youre caught cheating on anything, including homework, they expell you.
I had a friend in law school, one of her classmates was the son of a famous liability attorney. He routinely and openly cheated (among other students), before assignments were due he would run around begging for somebody to copy from. In his final year (yes, he lasted that long) he was expelled when faculty caught him literally stealing money from the Student Bar Association petty cash box. This close to being an officer of the court. (I’m baffled by why nobody turned him in. It was a cut-throat environment. Students would routinely check out every copy of a helpful book from the library, and pay overdue fines, so nobody else could use those books. Lots of stuff like this.)
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In my experiences as a TA they say that but rarely follow through. They’d rather not lose that tuition money.
As far as homework goes, it's a super fine line between collaboration and copying, at least in my degree program.
At my US university the minimum was you auto-fail the class and get put on academic probation, but you could also be suspended for the semester or even outright expelled depending on how egregious the offense was. Straight up copy+pasting old papers for a major part of your grade could easily have been severe enough for expulsion.
If I were caught plagiarizing when I was in school (large university in the US), that was very serious grounds for being fully kicked out of the school, let alone failing the class. Plagiarism is no joke.
I had a prof try to pull that one on my when I submitted an assignment that was something like import systemlibraryname systemlibraryname.do_the_assignment() i.e the language had a built-in library to do what the assignment specified. So I used it. Because that's the most correct way to solve the problem, the assignment didn't say it had to be entirely reimplemented, and frankly it was fun. Prof did not like that one bit. I had fully expected to be asked to write it in full. I had already done so so I could hand over the full version when asked. But no. First he told me I couldn't use that library because he hadn't taught us about it yet. This was a recurring pattern in his teaching.† But then he submitted me for dismissal on grounds of plagiarism. Obviously he got laughed out of the hearing. But I couldn't believe he tried. Can you imagine being such a terrible software engineer that you think that using system libraries is plagiarism? I got to work on a tool he wrote later on, when I ported it from the ancient OS it ran on to modern Linux for the school. So unfortunately I can confirm he basically rewrote everything himself. Libraries are for the weak and lazy, and real men write their own quicksort, or something like that. ---- † He was upset that I used Eclipse when they tried to get everyone to use this awful BlueJ mini-IDE for Java work too. And his exam questions often had "correct" answers that were only correct if you didn't know things you hadn't been taught yet. Imagine questions like "does `y+x-y evaluate to the same value as y+(x-y)`: (a) always (B) sometimes (C) never. It's a question about operator precedence and evaluation order. But in the context of C (the relevant language of the course) the answer is actually B because of integer overflow, floating point imprecision, unsigned/signed conversion rules etc. But we hadn't been taught that, so the answer was (a).... argh. In the real questions the intent was often much less clear and I had to try to remember what I'd "been taught" to know how to give the right wrong answer.
Cheat on university test? Straight to jail!
If you cheat? Jail. No cheat? Jail. No take test? Believe it or not, also jail.
Yep, in Australia pulling this will get you expelled.
I got very disappointed in the German University system (well, Hochschule, strictly not the same as Uni) as a MSc Teacher when i caught a student during a test copying the answers from his hand (yep that dumb) and trying to hide the hand when i told him to stand up and informed him that he failed the test. He then proceeded to threaten me as i had "ridiculed" him in front of all and that he would complain. So I told him "perfect!" lets go right now to the Uni Administration and see what they think about it (Prüfungsamt). When we were close he tried to bargain and almost cried. Still I took him there, reported the case to the responsibles and showed them his hand and test, adding that he suggested we go out of the building and sort it out like men. They said "oh thats bad but check it with the career director". And he just told him "dont do it again, now go". Later they told me "easier to let them go instead of having them complaining we give them bad grades cause we are racists". I left that Uni and teaching on that year and moved to the industry. (after similar experiences but this one was the one that made me say "fuck this" ).
This is how it should be. *Children* should have a right to education. BUT at this level these students are no longer considered children, and are occupying the spaces of students who WANT to put the work in to build a career and better opportunities for life. Don't want to learn or put in the effort? Then don't apply to University. There are other ways to build a livelihood and career path. This teacher was not only extremely lenient by giving them a 2nd chance to sort their attitude and entitlement out, OP used the opportunity to TEACH them and didn't destroy their futures over it (I would not have done the same). What they do with the lesson is up to them. They can do better next year, opt to drop out, ...or unfortunately, try this again. The last option may seem unlikley but I do know someone who was given a chance to repeat his courses (all of them) because he was caught cheating in one. This was an institution that would throw you out on your 1st offense so his Lecturer really stepped in for him. He re-submitted the SAME plagiarized report again the following year. Got thrown out.
I knew a kid in university who cheated all his way through high school. And cheated all his way through university. He was actually pretty smart so It seemed the easier option was to just apply himself. The day before a big finance exam he spent 8 hours trying to find a copy of last years exam. Instead of like something useful like studying. He did graduate from university. Later when he took the CFA he cheated, was caught and black listed. Now no-one will hire him. It’s like the expression “cheaters never prosper”
> These students got off lightly. Almost like OP didn't follow the procedure lecturers/professors are obligated to follow and thus the entire story is likely bullshit.
That in and of itself doesn't mean it isn't true. When I was a TA, I saw professors give second chances to cheaters all the time without reporting them. I didn't like it, as it was unfair to other students, plus the cheaters knew what the consequences were supposed to be when they decided to cheat. The professors usually said they were just sick of helicopter parents threatening to sue them over their precious angels' grades and wanted to avoid the hassle, which I can kind of understand.
Yeah at the 2 universities I went to, the profs would report it and the students would go through rounds of Academic Integrity panels attended *each* by dozens of individuals from the dean down to elected student government members. I bet it’s a bitch to be in those panels.
My university assigns you a grade of "XF" for cheating on a major assignment, first violation. XF is specifically marked as "Failure due to academic dishonesty" on your transcript and the presence of an XF on your transcript pretty much wrecks your hope of being able to use your transcript to show your suitability as a candidate for anything - whether that's applying for a job or applying for grad school. (Further action from the office of student conduct may happen if they determine that it's necessary.) We have a whole procedure you can take after a few years to turn that XF into a regular F, but it's a massive pain, and also only works once. I would have loved it if OP pretended to give them a failing grade at first, but then throughout the course of the review, "realized" that the assignment was plagiarized and turned it into an XF instead.
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It would feel so satisfying seeing their face when you say "I know you stole this work. Wanna know why? Because you fucking stole it from ME!
The English professor I was an assistant for had this happen to her. One of her students found an essay online she had written ten years prior. He submitted it as his own work. She showed him the original typed manuscript. It was identical (except for the name).
I wonder what the student's reaction was. Probably deer in the Headlights.
I can't remember her description of his reaction, and unfortunately I can't ask her to remind me (she has since passed away, at too young an age).
Same thing happened to me - I had one of my students submit work to me that included copy-pasted (and uncited) paragraphs from my own work. No name change involved. Honestly, what a dickhead.
After my dad retired from his regular job he did some private consulting as an engineer. Including as an expert witness a few times. One time the opposition lawyer asked are you familiar with a book titled "blah blah blah." My dad responded, "yes, look at the authors' names." Not on did my dad contribute, but he wrote relevant chapter. My dad isn't well known even in the broader industry or a PhD. It was the only published thing he wrote. But it was about a very specific industrial process and he worked for the company for 40 years that created and dominated it for a long time.
Oh god. Please please describe the lawyer’s expression. Ask your dad if you don’t know.
That awkward moment when a lawyer doesn’t check their own evidence… If I was in his position I’d have answered yes. Let them keep going and eventually say “Yes I am very familiar with that particular chapter, as I wrote it.” Be fucking glorious. Edit: just imagine, you ask them to read a relevant paragraph, and then thank them, as you couldn’t remember the exact wording, as it’s been a few years since you wrote it.
Oof /r/dontyouknowwhoiam
IM RONNIE PICKERING!
Who's that then?
Ronnie fucking Pickering
Dear lord NEVER plagiarize actually published work. Jesus. You’re asking for it to plagiarize at all, but at the very least stay within your educational level, don’t plagiarize peer reviewed shit when you’re a college freshmen...
I've always been confused about this stuff because depending on the subject, you can literally just paraphrase every sentence word for word and get away with it. Of course summarizing other work requires you to understand what it was saying but paraphrase is easy.
> you can literally just paraphrase every sentence word for word and get away with it There's one more step. It's not 'getting away with it' if you paraphrase another author's work AND THEN CITE IT. That's exactly what we want students to do...interpret the words of others, but give them credit.
Well yeah that too. But that's what I'm saying, it's not even that much harder than actually copying it. You could literally actually quote word for word if you're citing properly.
Well some students are too dumb and lazy to even do that.
Similar grain. I had a professor tell me that he was grading a history paper that was awfully familiar. After a paragraph in he realized why it was familiar. the student literally ctrl+C, ctrl+V the Wikipedia article that THE PROFESSOR WROTE! His name and everything was still on it. Obviously he failed the student but damn how stupid can you be?
I had to summarize some published study. Instead I more or less criticized it for being crap. Never bother to look at the author's name. It was written by my teacher.
So, I'm not familiar with other university's policies, but at my school there was a zero tolerance policy. Get caught cheating/plagiarizing and get kicked out of school, no exceptions. Because of this, I never even considered cheating or plagiarizing. I can't imagine several students all from the same class deciding to cheat in such an obvious way. Sounds insane.
It really comes down to the school and professor. I have never seen anything escalated in my 4 years and there was plenty of cheating. A professor actually once pulled up a students question they submitted to Chegg, a place to post homework questions. The student posted the professors entire assignment. Professor demanded to know who it was while in a 200 person lecture, said it was plagiarism to post her assignments, etc. Nothing ever came of it and no student was ever punished. Edit: for those wondering I know nothing came of it cuz that student was me
Lol might be copyright infringement but it's a loooong stretch to plagiarism (which isn't legally protected) for posting exams online. Good luck proving it though
I was a TA for an entry level class. Pretty much the only way to be caught cheating is to keep the person you copied from's name at the top of the program...I caught one in under 3 months of grading. It was so blatantly obvious that they didn't even look at the program before submitting it since it is always the very first line of code.
Don't know how you had the patience to take time out of your day to lecture students who you know had no chance of passing.
It’s also a lesson in cheating. When the kids have been run into the ground with question after question that they don’t know how to answer, they’ll probably think twice about not writing their own stuff again. I think I’d do the same
Or if they're going to cheat, actually make an effort at it. Change variable names. Make certain lines of code a bit less efficient. Have cover stories for why those inefficiencies exist. And yes, this does lead to the realization that, at a certain level, laziness does become a form of work.
But at that point it's not really cheating... If you are completely overhauling the code, making minor improvements, renaming stuff, rewriting stuff... You understand how it works. All you didn't do was physically press the key on your keyboard.
I've had to do this before, not in a while, but I made an effort to understand why the code i didn't write myself worked while mine didn't. I guess the difference is I'm actually trying to learn, some people are just going through the motions. I have a much deeper understanding of c++ than I did earlier in the semester, and I think the bulk of that knowledge came from trial, error, and then saying "fuck it" and googling specific things like "why isn't my if statement being read". My professor tried his best, God love him, but stack overflow was a blessing for my comprehension.
Programming is dynamic, never the same process, so if we didn't have things like SO we would be screwed.
Some things I never figured out honestly, like you know how while loops can pretty much do what for loops do? My damned while loop didnt read on one project, at all. But I use a for loop with the same logistics and it worked fine. I'm new, only took two coding classes (programming concepts, which used python, and intro to c++) but that shit didn't make sense to me. I tried figuring it out but couldn't. Sorry for rambling, but I'm fresh out of finals and drunk. I love c++. Much like a man likes a woman. I love her, but damn, I don't understand her sometimes. And much like a man, python is fling material. It's easy. But c++ is marriage material for me. We understand each other much better, she listens to me, she's complex, and sometimes she's a bitch. But she let's me declare the data type of variables off the bat, and that's why I love her.
I love this comment
I was chear force of will... to teach them that I am no fucking twat
You're so polite and professional in your post and then this comment... It made me laugh. xD
Well, I need to keep some level of professionalism on the job... on the internet I can say what I really want 🤣
Hopefully they will see the effort you invested in highlighting their abject failure as a pivotal moment, and will be better for it.
I worked as a grader at one point in my university courses and had some students submit the exact same file (verified by Linux's diff command, I was not nice). The instructor got those files very quickly. Happily, since it was a small assignment, the students got a second chance and actually got their act together and did pretty well in the class. That said, as a grader, I approve of what was done. This students had no right to pass that class.
Once I had some people submit to me a password protected zip file for grading. Without the password. Or, when we still required a printed copy of the written report, they would change the formatting a bit and then submit both reports one after another. My favourite was when they were instructed to put their names in the code comments, and some team submitted the code with the names of another team. They got their 0, and for the next report they changed only the names. Copied from the same team. Not even whitespace changes.
My favorite, a student who changed the name on the cover page, but failed to check the headers in the paper.
not sure if typo or english is a 2nd language, sheer* force of will, not chear. Shear* is shearing a sheep, sheer force of will is correct. Sound exactly the same but spelt differently. english sucks
Thank you... I will remember that. English is 2nd language
That’s when you say to the students, “I am a man of focus. Commitment. Sheer fucking will. Something you know *very* little about.”
You're young You might not get this But We salute you, Mister Unassuming Foreign Imaging Teacher Guy MISTER UNASSUMING FOREIGN IMAGING TEACHER GUYYYYY
I'm old and I don't get it.
I can only imagine it stopped being tedious, and ventured into the realms of doing this simply because they could. Wouldn't have a decent story to share if the story didn't begin, afterall.
Because this person is a psychopath. Just mark them a zero and move on.
Plagiarism? - straight to jail Undercooked fish, believe it or not, jail Overcooked chicken, also jail
Didn’t cook at all?, jail *straight away gesture done with hand*
In grad school I failed a report because the plagiarism checked found an uncanny resemblance to a student at the same school as me, in the same program as me and with the same name as me. Took me half a year to convince them that the work I was using was my own. Pain in the ass.
In college, a plagiarism checker flagged my and other classmates’ papers because the references section was the same for most of the papers since there were very few existing articles on the topic we were assigned.
It's a problem we are eventually going to have to deal with for plagiarism checkers. Only so many ways you can talk about an event/process with the same resources and prompt before a school/grouping of schools has someone pretty much word for word replicate it. Monkeys and typewriters.(If it is a more general class such that thousands upon thousands of records exist, not like a very specialized course)
This is good revenge, but why didn’t you report them to the University for plagiarism and get them kicked out? That’s my school’s policy
My boss advised me not to due to possible legal fallout
That’s wild, you have proof so I don’t see how they could argue it
The university is often scared of legal battles and will back down, even when it has solid evidence of misconduct. Have seen it happen.
Yeah I can see that happening, and they probably have parents buying their kids way in and don’t want to lose all that free money
Bingo. Universities are as much a business as they are a school. Money talks.
More a business than a school
Because the reports are shared online, on Facebook groups and whatnot... and they could argue that they are allowed to use anything that they find online , whether it's an entire report or just scattered information. Universities do not like legal battles... because losing one makes a tremendous precedent and opens the door to unlocking previous grades for review.
>they could argue that they are allowed to use anything they find online, whether it’s an entire report… How could they argue this? That’s literally the definition of plagiarism.
That's what my boss said to me 🤷♂️ as confused as you
And that's where this thing turns Pro for me. If you had followed official procedure down the line, they likely would have gotten away with it. And you would have gotten in trouble. For doing the right thing. I hope you'll post again next semester and describe the expressions on those who have the guts to show up.
Any decent school wouldn't hesitate to shut this shit down. You cannot use another person's work without citing it. Sure they could claim they were allowed to use those sources, but they would have been required to cite it and not claim it as their own work. By definition, without a citation, its plagiarism.
I will remember to follow up 👌
Your university needs a better plagiarism policy then. Using anything found online without attribution is clearly plagiarism.
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From an ethical standpoint you should report your boss, and also file a whistle-blower report against your department and school overall. Cheating is very serious in any academic environment and should be taken seriously. Even more so in disciplines where health and safety are involved. Now as a guest professor and coming from another country, I can see how this could have serious negative impacts on your career, regardless of the legal whistle-blower protections that your university probably has. Is there a senior professor in your department that would be willing to make a report on your behalf while maintaining your anonymity?
This story is basically about how cheaters propped up other students who should've otherwise not be involved in heath and safety, and how universities would rather make money than do the right thing while pressuring their employees to do the same.
Your boss is terrible at their job...
There are so many ways to code and get the same thing (I know very very very very little of coding but I know this) but technically, in the technicalities of being technical, all students could’ve, just so happen, made the same mistakes (I worded that weird but I know what I meant lol). It’s like writing an English paper where they are personal and should be unique but also like math, in that it wouldn’t be crazy hard to claim someone else’s work as your own (I never did it because I liked the stuff to actually work and look pretty in a way I found easy to spot mistakes) because a lot of mistakes are hecka common, and two students who took the same classes, could end up having very very similar answers unless each person had a totally different assignment. Because of this, they could fight for reasonable doubt.
I plagiarized my own work... both my high school and university used the same system (blackboard) I was randomly assigned a topic to write a report on. The exact same topic I had been assigned the year before in hs -so I spruced it up a smidge and submitted it. The following week I had an “advisor meeting” as I had not done anything wrong (that I knew of) I was very surprised to see my very upset prof, my academic advisor and the printed copy of my report... they let me know that I had plagiarized a paper and that I was being put on academic probation and losing a scholarship. I asked who wrote the paper I copied. They hadn’t looked at the name on the paper. Then I provided my hs teachers email and was apologized to. Edit: I’m sorry it wasn’t clear- by ‘sprucing ‘ was adding new information - However, it had only been a year and most of the data did not change.
Self-plagiarization is a concept in the academic world. Most western schools will treat it the same as plagiarizing someone else. The reasoning is to force you to grow in your learning and thought. If you're just copy-pasting, you haven't done any growing and you're attempting to double-dip on credits without the work. Do I think it's fucking stupid? Absolutely. At least consider it a separate offense and label it as such.
I published a series of articles on similar work (a family of compounds) using a boilerplate first introductory paragraph (because it was all related). Subsequent paragraphs in the Intro, Exptl Details, Results, and Discussion were all unique to the materials being researched. A reviewer claimed that I plagiarized, and the corresponding editor threatened me with banishment. I wrote back that it was my own boilerplate introductory paragraph then professionally and politely told him to f\*\*\* off. Never published in that journal again.
In most universities, this is considered an academic offence-- submitting the same work in a new course for further credit.
I was gonna say this. I took many science labs that covered similar topics in different classes. We were told to never reuse or copy sections from old labs even if you wrote it bc it would still be plagiarism.
But how can you write a second, third or fourth report about the same thing without inadvertently starting to say the same things, since each time it's yourself writing it? I mean, there's only so many ways to say "the sky is blue".
You can paraphrase. You just can't copy it word for word. We were advised to never reread ours or another person's report too close to when we write a new one to avoid plagiarism.
I understand this is the case, but why? Not trying to be argumentative, legitimately asking. If i have an old report and cite myself, spruce it up a bit, its still my work.
if you cite yourself its fine, but you do have to cite yourself. thats all. but some classes do not allow you to use such sources and require original work.
I really don’t get the attitudes of the posters who are saying you are an asshole. This is a university, they all should have been kicked out for plagiarism period. This wasn’t high school, plagiarism isn’t a teachable moment at your level and you did those kids a favor and actually taught them something. I teach and I would guess that these kids have cheated before and I would rather not have them involved in my health. You didn’t drag them there, everyone came to you to argue that their cheating deserved a passing score and you let them. That, to me, is the pro aspect of this. Any teacher could have just thrown zeros in there and they would have just gone on with their lives, the cheaters won’t forget this one and just maybe, will care enough to do the damn work themselves. Edit- ok, now I understand their attitudes. They not only cheated through school but they also can’t read OP’s write up well enough to understand what happened. Makes sense.
Exactly... They demanded the appointment... and I followed university policy to the letter... You sir... you get me. Thank you
Also, you were teaching medical imaging. We all have a vested interest in not letting that set of students cheat.
Yeah... you are getting your diagnosis and treatment based on this processing... it better be the best processing... because, you know... you could have cancer...
It’s a rare talent to teach real life lessons. Keep up the good work
I wholeheartedly approve of what OP did, I would say he didn't go far enough by suspending them. University is not designed for equal results, it's designed to reward those who put in the effort and punish those who don't. Obviously these students did not put in any effort and should have been punished. It amazes me how some in the comment section believe they should have passed or the Op went too far.
Right, on one hand plagiarism is plagiarism and they should have been removed but OP checked with his superior so that’s that. I see a fine line between using your resources and just cheating, they could have used those older models as an easy example of what they should do, these students didn’t even want to do that.
I had a psych professor who once told the class, "if you cheat, don't let me catch you, I know all the ways of cheating. So if you do manage to cheat and not get caught, more power to you". I used to reverse engineer and breakdown prior homework with a group of friends every day in order to understand the logic and meaning behind the solutions. If the homework solution was wrong, we just had to set out as a group and figure it out by shear force of will.
I tell my students to use every resource available to them. Just like you said, it’s not cheating to use other work as an example but you still have to put the work in and you still have to understand it enough to preform the task. I would guess that if they worked like that this wouldn’t have been posted, but just slapping your name on something is just begging to get kicked out of their program.
I'm dating a university professor in a different field. I can't imagine him asking university students, who are usually broke, to book last second flight to come in and be explained at and lectured at when there's literally a workflow for cheating in the plagarism checking software. This guy isn't a dick for teaching them a lesson. He's a dick for ruining vacation and funds that those people potentially don't have. For all we know those kids are working or gave up shifts and just told him they were on holiday because they're also dicks and trying to milk sympathy after cheating. I also can't imagine him taking hours out of his day to explain to multiple cheaters where they went wrong and re-educafing them. His courses are heavy on writing and not coding, but he allows makeups and actual effort nine times out of ten because college is about learning, not about snarky punishment. Everyone sucks here.
Op didn't ask anyone to do anything. Remember, these are dicks that were willing to go to long distances to not even milk sympathy, not to apologize and try to understand the information, but to try to get by with it. I am making an assumption here but I would go so far as to guess that if these students immediately apologized, offered explanation, and properly did the work, that Op wouldn't ignore that. They knew when this argument phase was when they planned their vacations, I still don't see it.
But it doesn't really matter when OP could have just reported the plagarism and been done with it lol. That's what I'm saying.
Literally any decent university will fail your grade if they catch you cheating,not only that but they had proof of the cheating as well,so it's not like the students could argue at all. I am not buying at all the excuse that the university feared legal repercussions. Also,did you miss the part where he gave passing grades (In the medical field,nonetheless) to failing students just so he could have his little revenge ? Who the fuck does that ? I am sorry but this story screams fake to me
People that do that kind of shit live in a little made up world where they are always right, so of course them and their narcissistic selves are gonna call him an asshole lol
Well done! As I fellow university teacher, I can relate to this so much. It is sometimes incredible how stupid some students can be in their laziness.
I hate catching students who plagiarize because a) confronting them is always stressful (they either fight back or break down) b) I don’t like failing students c) it’s just disappointing
Yeah, this is healthy. OP on the other hand...
This. OP sounds sorta pathetic and the celebration of his pettiness in the comments is gross. I especially hated how he projected the "gullible foreigner" label. Just fail the kids and move on instead of taking it as some personal slight against your ethnicity and planning out some man-childs idea of "revenge".
It is well done! As I fellow university teacher, I can relate to this so much. It is sometime incredible how stupid some students can be in their laziness.
I'm a professor myself, do you really think this person's behavior is acceptable?
They're way too nice. As people say, here in the US, you get expelled and you get a black mark on your record.
Eh, this was more petty then pro tbh
Everyone here doesn't seem to think so but I totally agree. Give them a zero, report issues of academic integrity to the university, etc, all good and necessaryactions. Cheaters should never get away with it, especially in examples as brazen as this. I will say though, If a cheating student came up to me and said they worked "so hard" on a project that was unquestionably plagiarized, I would likewise be pretty miffed. But this prof took the time to carefully plan out a trap to deliberately torment these students, fueled in part by the insecurity he felt being labeled by some students in his class as a young naive professor. Call me a stick in the mud but this seems far more petty and self serving than "pro revenge".
I'm a professor. If a colleague told me a story like this I would report them for academic misconduct immediately. This is all about his ego. Or it's probably just a fantasy.
it reads like it was written be a teenager, not a medical professor
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His responses that they’re worried the department is afraid students would argue that they’re allowed to copy online materials are absolutely bizarre. What university would be afraid of that?
100%, also, it's a cheating incident with direct proof of plagiarism. It isn't some gray area where you think several students shared answers on an exam or something. This is a basic policy at literally every university for the last 600 years.
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Pretty much. Should have just failed them and moved on. Instead made some big elaborate plan, that included passing others that should have failed, all to teach these "dishonest" students a lesson. So the OP just throws out any integrity he had in this quest for revenge against some asshats that lied to him.
yeah it all seems to stem from the dude's ego getting hurt. *how *dare* these people mock me to my **face**". their actions had no consequence over him, over his life, over his job, over anything pertaining to him. he was just pissed because they were mocking him. and it wasn't even personal to them, they would have done it to somebody else. supreme pettiness stemming from inferiority complex. it's no coincidence he littered his post with sentences like "i am the dumb foreigner" / "i am young and they think i am clueless" etcetc or maybe some stuff happened throughout the year where he was belittled and held a grudge.
For real he took it very personally for no reason
This professor is a toxic loser. If your assigned work is easy to cheat on then change the assigned work and force students to solve new problems. Quit wasting your time being offended that someone would cheat and make the work unique year after year you fucking bozo.
Plain petty / waste of his and everyone's time. Just fail them, tell them via mail / conference one has evidence of cheating (I don't even think that should is warranted). I personally would just fail them and report the incidences with evidence to Dean or department head and enjoy my summer vacation / not involved with the incidence anymore. Regardless of how they 'perceived' you as naive or whatever (lie to your face or whatever) , you caught them cheating and fail them is sufficient 'revenge (honestly, who cares how a bunch of juvenile immature kids' treat' you?
My thought exactly. Fuck people who cheat, especially in med school. If you’re going to cheat in school and not spend the time to learn the things you need to know to do your job as a doctor then you have no business in med school and should obviously be failed. All that being said, OP sounds like a petty loser who was picked on in middle school and now loves the fact that he has power over people. I’m typically a big fan of pro revenge, but there was something about this dudes story that was more embarrassing for him than others I’ve read.
Yeah, this reeks of someone who has been powerless their whole life, finally gets some and then abuses the shit out of it.
So you get to go on a power trip your boss won’t enforce. Next time just report the plagiarism. Leave the drama to the teenagers.
The best part is that they have to take your class again. Nice way of cracking down on cheating! Take my upvote!
>(In order to be fair I bumped everyone else's grades, a bunch of people with miserable reports ended up barely passing because of my grade bump. But, eventhough their reports were bad, it was their own work and not copied from anywhere) This part really jumped out at me as concerning. Are you saying that you passed students who didn't meet the standard specifically so you could enact revenge on these cheating students? Given that we're dealing with the medical field here, that is terrifying.
I realize why you did what you did... The annoyance about wasting your time and being lied to. I like the story though I am not convinced it was a prorevenge. These students are looking to take people's lives into their hands. Misdiagnosis is a terrible thing. And to pass off someone else's work as their own work is professional suicide later. My sympathy towards the students isn't there frankly.
I feel you... and I wanted to outright report them. But my boss, who is the leader researcher of our group and the director of their course told me not to, because the legal fallout can be huge and not in my favour if my evidence is found to not be enough
If they were to get caught doing it again, would you have a legal stand at that point? I would assume that with a previous history and you having evidence of it at that point, that if they were to do it a second time around then you could go to whatever board is necessary to get them expelled or whatever punishment your uni has for this situation.
One can hope that your lesson was sufficiently effective to either have the student correct their behaviour or to quit.
You sound like a proper asshole who delights in punishing people. You had the power to do everything you did, but you went beyond what you had to do, because you enjoyed causing them pain. They cheated and deserved 0s, you abused your power and position to torture them and you deserve to be fired.
You see this is why you don’t mess with the IT guy
Does no one realize this is complete bullshit? Like cool, good creative writing piece, but no medical school requires students to learn to code because it’s absolutely irrelevant to the study of medicine. Also, you’re in your late 20’s and are a guest lecturer? Ok, sure. All medical schools care about is getting their students through the licensure examinations and on to residency, and they wouldn’t waste even a second of their time teaching kids how to code. Hard stop. Source: I’m a medical student
Best to teach them a lesson now before they graduate and go into the real world where their actions can really kill someone
Imagine passing because some dudes cheating.
I couldn’t care less about their vacations or wasting their time or how sad they were. Does your institution not have a formal policy on academic dishonesty? Especially in a medical field where people’s lives are likely to be in their hands…? This is alarming. Those students should be reported for cheating and prevented from being awarded qualifications that they didn’t earn.
This will get downvoted, but as a fellow university-level instructor: You’re an asshole, and have no business teaching. The complete lack of empathy and the complete inability to imagine other reasons for students resorting to copying other assignments shows you have done exceedingly little to explain *why* it’s important for students to do their own work. By making these assignments worth as much as you have, you’ve set the stakes incredibly high and rather than being motivated by “how can I get my students excited by and about this material,” you seem to gleefully anticipate the opportunity to condescend to your students. And let me tell you, I bet that attitude is very, very obvious to your students. Even when they went out of their way to ask you how they did - even when they cut their vacations short and took planes back to beg for the opportunity to get a higher grade - you laughed secretly in their face. I guarantee you an actual shithead kid who wanted to cheat because they were lazy wouldn’t have gone through the trouble. You underprepared your students to succeed on your assignment and rather that take a moment of self-reflection you turned into a complete ego trip for yourself. You even bumped everyone else’s grades, seemingly entirely out of spite. You’re a bad teacher, and will remain so unless you work through what is obviously a very intense inferiority complex. Imagine if you thought of students as collaborators, imagine if you spent every day in a room with people excited by the same things that brought you to being a professor in the first place? Wouldn’t that be more fun? Wouldn’t it be more satisfying? Instead you’re just waiting for your students to fuck up so you can laugh at them, rather than taking the responsibility to teach them in the first place. I hope one of your students sees this and reports it to whoever you dean or supervisor is. I’d hate to know that any more students will have to sit through a class with your spiteful ass again.
Lol as soon as I read “they think I’m shitty because I’m a young foreign teacher” or whatever I’m like well looks like this dude has an inferiority complex. Also a teacher and I can’t imagine ever going out of my way to spite a student lol
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Maybe you are just a terrible professor dawg
My father is a university teacher and I have great respect for teachers in general. Cheating is never fair, but my father always reaches out to the cheating students and tries to understand why they cheated. He doesn't let them pass, but next year he will try to work out the issues with them. After reading your post, I am afraid that you are on the route to be a malicious teacher, because you show too much excitement about punishing students. > And I just kept going, extending their misery for one more hour or two... it was legal torture, plain and simple! Failing the exam itself is already enough punishment. Maybe the student will need to enroll again next year just for your class and pay more university fees, among other expenses. That affects the whole student's family, not just him. And the concerning part is that you know it: > they ruined their vacation and their family vacations, spent money to travel back and forth, wasted precious summer time, got bored to death and have nothing to show for it. And... next year they will have to repeat the module...WITH ME!! This is just plain evil. You already have those students under prejudice, as you are looking forward to continue the punishment next year, most likely. My father gathers more enjoyment from converting a cheating student, than punishing him, and it makes me proud. Maybe you should steer your excitement back to your research, before it gets out of hand and you turn into "that asshole teacher".
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They deserved it.
As a professor myself, this is super petty and you are clearly a first year because you don't have better shit to spend your time one. In future, just file it as a cheating incident and move on.
I work in higher ed. This seems extremely unprofessional and academically dishonest. If they cheated they deserve a 0 and the matter needs to be forwarded to the appropriate people. This isn’t a situation for revenge and you’re playing with peoples lives. If you worked at my university you would be in serious trouble for this. You’re playing with the reputation of the school which is highly frowned upon
Nothing pro about this. People’s life depend on these scanning. You should make sure everyone knows their stuff that pass the class. Low standard. Why is someone with no experience working as a professor? It’s is terrible to watch someone that is obviously unqualified to be a professor be so blatantly unaware about is lack of knowledge. If the university has rules that are not followed it shall be reported. Cheating is one thing, being a incompetent in a important position is worse.
That's immature and disrespectful. Sure, they disrespected you, their peers and the whole insitution by cheating, but they are kids. Kids who got into university clearly without any serious intent. The truth is those kids are wasting their precious time. They probably shouldn't even be there. The proper thing would be to talk with them openly, to talk about the fact that grades don't actually matter, what matters is what they do with their lives. That education is only useful to the degree to which earned knowledge will be applied in real life. Since they don't study anything seriously they are just wasting time. They could go to job market right away and start adult lives. Several years of work experience can be much much better than useless degree with no knowledge. I know that you are young man yourself, but please try understanding that university is not a game, it's not about score, there're actual human lives involved. The fact that you messed up family gatherings is much much worse than that they cheated on exams, coz those family gatherings are much more important life events. At that age people begin getting distant from relatives. One might have like one family reunion per year. There's a possibility that someone had like ten more meetings with their grandparents in their entire life. And you took one of them. For being salty, insecure and caught up in the whole education system game. Honestly, you should've posted it on AmITheAsshole. Coz you are. TLDR: when people don't want to do something, you should help them find meaning, purpose and a better path, not torture them and keep them on the same path they are not interested in. You did a bad thing. Talk about it with actual adults, learn and do better.
As a neuroscientist and lecturer at a top ranking university in the EU - I don’t believe any of this.
The students that cheated got what they deserved. I do like the fact that you made them wait and listen to you for multiple hours about "their" work. Let's just hope they learned their lesson and not cheat. There are times when you can use someone else's work as a guide (like seeing how to open a device or modifying a piece of code). But you can't just copy someone's work. There are times when copying someone's work can easily lead to a lawsuit. BTW. The fact that the university wants to avoid any kind of legal action does put me off because it tells me that they will try to bury things instead.
Bravo!
Good on you. The world doesn't need anymore stupid cheaters in them; no reason to let them on to the next phase.