The Waiting Room

My Critical Thinking student will be meeting with me and the DI tomorrow to discuss her paper. I honestly believe that she had someone write the paper for her. I double checked with the tutoring center. They have no record of assisting her with the paper. I also spoke to her Composition instructor who stated that he did not help her either. So, my guess is that someone helped her just a little too much.

I had a similar situation two summers ago. I had a student in my Survey of Law class write a paper for one of his friends who was also in the class. The problem was the he wrote the paper using the same writing style that he uses for his own work. Needless to say, both students were busted for academic dishonesty and received an “F” for the assignment.

The DI asked me to decide what the punishment should be for this student. Correct me if I am wrong, but isn’t that HER job? Anyway, I am going to give the student an “F” for the paper. She will fail my class, not because of that “F”, but because she did not turn in her research project which is worth 100 points.

The other problem with the ¼ paper is solved also, but not the way I would like it to be solved. I am required to grade her according to the rubric that the college provides for the course. This means that she gets points for only doing ¼ of the work. I am not allowed to reduce her grade. WTF is up with that?? At least the little work she provided was so crappy that she got an “F”.

But it chaps my ass to think that a student can pass an assignment and only do ¼ the work. That makes no sense to me. Someone had posted a comment that an employer would not accept ¼ work from an employee, so why should it be any different for students? I even tell my students that if they are going to do something, don’t do it half –assed. They should use their whole ass!

I asked the director of the General Education program if such a thing was just an oversight. He said that the standard was correct because they want to have some consistency... Constancy of what…crappy work passed off as acceptable? What the hell are we teaching these students? I then asked him why doesn’t the rubric have a category for incomplete assignments or assignments that were not submitted and have zero points attached? He said that he would bring it to the attention to the DI.

And they are just figuring this out now???