My Crazy Thoughts
my thoughts on various topics.

Haven't posted much lately. I thought that as soon as school wasn't pressing down on me so much I would get back to posting like normal. But I just haven't felt like that lately. But I'm going to post anyway. I saw my grades today. They are better than last semester. I was worried after 2 of my finals. One of them I did MUCH better than I thought I did. The other I didn't do well on, but well enough to pass, which is what I told myself I would be happy with when I walked out of the exam. But over all I'm happy with them. I'm still amazed at how I'm so willing now to just pass a class, when a year ago I would have been upset that I had gotten a C.

So...The Incident. It's boring.
It was basically like this. In one of our classes we had an assignment. It was an assignment that had been assinged in previous years, so the key was floating around. In the class we were told my our facilitator that if we didn't know the answer then to write down the answer when she gave them to us in class, she knew that there were keys around, but she gave everyone the opportunity to get the correct answer even if you didn't have one. She wanted everyone to get credit and to learn the material. We actually had three assignments over three weeks. And then a couple weeks later we had the exam (I think it was a couple weeks). Apparently for the second assignment some people didn't bother doing it, they just printed out the key from the previous years and turned it in. And then apparently some people also just copied it down word for word on the paper. You have to remember that there are 4 campuses, and the gnv campus has several different facilitators so who knows what they were told. But some people also copied down parts of answers or most of an answer while they were in class. So a few weeks after this assignment we take the exam, on a wednesday. The grades are up on Friday, along with our final grades. Before this in every class it takes at least a week for grades to come back, and a lot of times longer. So I was amazed. And I wrote about it before. The average was a D. In previous years it is said that everyone got an A, no problem. So I'm wondering what happened. Luckily I got a C, and ended up with a B in the class. A lot of others weren't so lucky. People who always do better than I do. Significantly better. People who had been studying with me right before the exam. People who had answered my questions and helped clear up concepts for me. That's one of the good things about being early for exams, you can get your questions answered and get a feel for what other people think are the important points, and you learn things that you didn't catch or hadn't thought was important. So I have a good idea of how prepared other people were. Not that I was unprepared or should have failed or anything. Anyway, grades were out Friday, I was amazed. On Monday I find out what happened. On the Friday that grades came out a lot of people were called in to their respective offices for conference calls to the course coordinator to talk about their cheating. They all got zeros for that assignment. Also on that Monday I find out why the exam was so hard and why the average was so low. She was mad. She apparently told the Gainesville students that she was going to make the exam hard, and either said directly or it was implied that it was because of this incident. Of course, no one told me until the Monday after the exam. It is said that she sat at the front of the room in gainesville while the test was being given with a big smile on her face. So, because a few people were stupid enough to PRINT OUT THE KEY and turn it in we all did poorly in the class. It wasn't enough for her to just punish those involed, she had to punish everyone. And while this was one of our smaller classes this year, it will be a much bigger class next year, and everyone is afraid to say anything more about it because we all fear for our grades next year. This includes those who say that they didn't cheat in the classic way I talked about but just wrote down one of the answers when we were in class, like our facilitator told us. These people also got called in, got 0s AND because of the difficulty of the exam, most likely got Ds in the class and are now on permanent academic probation. And they were afraid to explain what happened because they were told if they argued they would end up before the academic honesty board, and that is a terrible fear for all of us. So that's the incident.

I'm not editing this, so sorry if it's long and rambling and doesn't make sense and has a lot of typos.

posted by Malissa at 10:11 PM