Monday, March 26, 2012

In the morning, I finally graded the midterms for my “Sex, Power and Identity” class. This was a take home midterm where students had access to all their books and notes and had four days to answer two questions in essay form. There weren’t even hard questions. And two students still decided it was easier to steal someone else’s essay and just reword it. Like I wouldn’t see that the ideas are the same! And one guy moved the paragraphs around, but forgot to change the footnotes (ibid was his first footnote). And then he tried to argue that the ideas were his even when I pointed out that all three papers had the same (wrong) idea in their definition of gender. Then he tried to point to a few sentences which he said he got from Wikipedia. Headdesk.

So from what I can piece together from the students. An ex-boyfriend of one girl in my class, who she is still friends with, knew the password to her email, took the essay once she sent in to me and later shared it with another friend of his. The girl is pretty much screwed here. I originally thought to just fail all of them and just give a warning, but I think it is getting too complex for me so I emailed the department chair for advice.

It just makes me mad that I gave the easiest possible exam – a take-home – and students still cheat on it.

The rest of the day was better. My Global class was doing a library class today – so less work for me, yay. And my Mysticism lecture went pretty well.