Rant VIII: The Reckoning

LittleSin

LittleSin

Sparhawk said:
"Yeah, now I've got a cool head scar that the chicks will dig. Instant sympathy 15 years from now."
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This is pretty much what his Dad said.

I was so sad. I didn't have the car so Steve had to go get him and go straight to the hospital. It would have been hard to go with the baby but, well, poor Jet. :( I wanted hug him.
 
Celt Z

Celt Z

Aaaaaaahh! First off, poor Jet, and secondly, poor you! I have the horrible feeling things like this are going to happen to Li'l Z and I'm going to be a nervous wreck. I mean, I was pretty calm when Mr. Z opened his head falling off of a moving car, but that's a boyfriend, not my baby. Jet seems to be in good spirits, or maybe that's the ice cream ( judging by the wood spoon). I hope you both rest easy tonight.
 
LittleSin

LittleSin

Celt Z said:
Aaaaaaahh! First off, poor Jet, and secondly, poor you! I have the horrible feeling things like this are going to happen to Li'l Z and I'm going to be a nervous wreck. I mean, I was pretty calm when Mr. Z opened his head falling off of a moving car, but that's a boyfriend, not my baby. Jet seems to be in good spirits, or maybe that's the ice cream ( judging by the wood spoon). I hope you both rest easy tonight.
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He's still rather high and I totoally blew his mine when he asked me to guess what he had at the hospital and I 'guessed' a vanilla dixie cup.

He was like "Woooooah mom! Can you read my thought through my stitches?!"

And i had to inform him, no, I could not.
 
Chad Sexington

Chad Sexington

LittleSin said:
He's still rather high and I totoally blew his mine when he asked me to guess what he had at the hospital and I 'guessed' a vanilla dixie cup.

He was like "Woooooah mom! Can you read my thought through my stitches?!"

And i had to inform him, no, I could not.
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You missed a golden opportunity to have him confess everything he does for years under the assumption he would be unable to lie.
 
Adam

Adam

FUUUUUUUCK.

I have been running my ass off for two straight years pretty consistently. I have been in half a dozen races and usually place middle of the pack.

Why on Gods green earth can I not beat my 6 minute kilometer average?? I can do a 4:46/km, but can't maintain that for more than 2K and then I'm just gassed by the end of it. The closest I've ever got is a 6:04.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Adam said:
Why on Gods green earth can I not beat my 6 minute kilometer average?? I can do a 4:46/km, but can't maintain that for more than 2K and then I'm just gassed by the end of it. The closest I've ever got is a 6:04.
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Too much braining?

--Patrick
 
Enresshou

Enresshou

Necronic said:
But that's not the rant. No, the rant has to do with my fellow students. The vast majority of our class are foreign students from a particular country (which I will not name), but lets just say they have a lot of chai-walla's there. Very few ever come to class. When they turn in homework (a time you would think they would come), one student shows up and turns in a stack of assignments, which makes it seem like they are copying each others work. When they are in class they talk constantly, or show up 10-30 minutes late. Keep in mind, this is a GRADUATE LEVEL ENGINEERING class.

And here's the kicker. The idea that they have to be told to STOP CHEATING in the middle of the test is beyond insane to me. These students were OPENLY cheating in the test. I was sort of ticked that the TA didn't just boot them from the class immediately, but I don't entirely fault the TA for giving them a pass on it once (she said if "I see you cheating again..."), because the end result of one of them being busted for cheating would be them losing their student visa's and being deported. It's an intense responsibility for a TA to have. But for that exact reason, the intensity of the repercussions, I can't imagine what in the world they are thinking, cheating on a test. And this of course ignores the (to me) even more important issue of how you could justify cheating at the graduate level. They will be expected to understand this material beyond this class. They can't cheat their way through a professional career.

I've seen cheating from all walks at the undergraduate level, but I was really shocked to see it in grad school. Is this something unique to the educational systems in certain foreign countries? The Chinese students don't follow this paradigm, they are generally attentive, punctual, respectful, etc.

Anyways. I was appalled. And....I dunno. I struggled really hard on this test, and the homeworks. The idea that other people are cheating their way through it is just shocking.
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Right there with you. I saw it several times when I was taking my first-year courses, and--now that I'm TAing one of those courses--we've run into more than ten instances of plagiarism already (and the semester's only half over). Now, some of these were on the fence--could be honest mistakes, like half a sentence has very similar wording to the source material when the assignment was "describe their experiment"--but some were more egregious. As in I was grading a test, and in the middle of one student's word salad the font completely changed and became coherent. I Googled it and they'd literally copy-pasted from a journal article and changed two or three words around (to avoid detection) but didn't cite anything. In spite of the fact they'd cited four other papers in that same answer.

Unfortunately, the current course policy is basically, "Plagiarize once you get a warning, second time you're remanded to academic affairs." Again, this is a first-year graduate level course; all of these students have had 4+ years of "PLAGIARISM IS BAD." Wtf.
 
Necronic

Necronic

Staff member
Well, I felt a lot better after we got the midterm back. I got the lowest grade out of the guys I study with (84), but the median was like a 65. Massive numbers of people failed.
 
Terrik

Terrik

Necronic said:
Well, I felt a lot better after we got the midterm back. I got the lowest grade out of the guys I study with (84), but the median was like a 65. Massive numbers of people failed.
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I know what you mean. I'm taking a chemistry course and we had an exam just this past Friday. I got a 92%. That's great---I've also gotten a 92% on the last two exams as well. I was kind of hoping for something a little higher, but then I found out the median was a 66% and suddenly I felt like a genius.
 
Vrii

Vrii

Christ, what a week. My uncle had a major heart attack yesterday morning and things don't look good, my sister's been in and out of the hospital for a week with what we're hoping won't turn out to be a tumor, and I'm sitting here across the country trying to focus on the two midterms and a paper I have to do this week.
 
Krisken

Krisken

Seven page paper due tonight. Four pages in. Stupid paper.

Paper written. Have nine pages. Still stupid paper.
 
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Squidleybits

Squidleybits

One of my friends posted a borderline racist rant on the topic today and I am quite honestly at a loss on how to respond. Is respecting that not everyone celebrates Christmas so hard?
 
HCGLNS

HCGLNS

Squidleybits said:
One of my friends posted a borderline racist rant on the topic today and I am quite honestly at a loss on how to respond. Is respecting that not everyone celebrates Christmas so hard?
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I was like, Poe's Law? Please be Poe's Law. Yeah, I'm just gonna stick my fingers in my ears and la la la la la la it's Poe's Law!
 
Squidleybits

Squidleybits

She went on about how Christianity was the oldest religion in the world and the only one that matters etc etc. I would be uncomfortable quoting much else but needless to say it went way downhill from there including appealing to Citizenship and Immigration Canada. It was gross.
 
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