college

Last week, I spoke to one of my history professors who I’ve had for many classes. He was telling me about how in the class I had with him last semester, four people turned in plagiarized papers of the blatant sort - they went online, copied, and pasted.

In this professor’s syllabus, he outlines very clearly how he deals with plagiarism: you flunk the course. He attempted to flunk all four of them them, but the students got around it by simply dropping the course, as the withdrawal date had not gone by yet. He went to the dean, hoping to get some support on keeping their grades as Fs; however, the dean ended up backing the students. They were allowed to drop the course and simply get withdrawals on their audits, rather than the Fs. His line of argument was that they were still being punished, as they had to pay for the course anyway, and they’d have to retake the course.

I think such an argument is bogus. Yeah, they had to pay for the course anyway, but shouldn’t there be more punishment than that? Aren’t universities supposed to represent a bit of integrity? Allowing them to drop the course and simply get a “withdrawed” on their degree audit allows them to more or less erase the fact that they tried to cheat. Having an F on their audit wouldn’t broadcast the fact that they tried to cheat, I realize, but at least it would affect their GPA, which in turn might have effects down the road if they wanted to go to graduate school.

How do you all think academic dishonesty should be dealt with? Is receiving an F for the entire course too drastic? Perhaps an F on the assignment would be more suitable, but I think plagiarism (especially of the deliberate sort as described above) is a serious offense, and should be dealt with with a serious response. Admittedly, though, I’m biased - I work my butt off to do well in my classes, and it drives me up the wall to think that people are getting similar grades simply by cheating.

It’s that time of the year semester again, in which I find myself running about putting out fires that have either 1) burst forth just recently or 2) been smoldering all semester while I ignored them. The biggest fire is the aforementioned term paper, which sort of.. smoldered and burst forth. I knew it was there, I paid attention to it, lovingly prodding the firewood, but it still didn’t behave properly, and now it’s burning me. In other words, I need to get the paper written soon, preferably within the next couple of days. That way I’ve still enough time to study for final exams, which are next week. Where the frak did this semester go?

I’ve started on the paper, and am 1/8th done with it (and yes, I can be that specific - it has to be a minimum of 8 pages ). Once it’s done and out of the way, I’ll have a bit of breathing space. Until then, I’m going to feel like a Cylon baseship is looming over me. Not a very comfortable feeling, especially when all of those Cylon raiders start zipping out like bees.

So, what am I getting at? All of the above is a roundabout way of getting to this: for the next week or two, expect nothing from me. I might find time and energy to post, but I wouldn’t count on it. I believe that, due to horrid luck, all of my final exams are crammed into next Monday and Tuesday, back to back. I’ll have to doublecheck, but I’m pretty sure that’s the lay of the land. If it is, my brain should be fully rebooted by next Wednesday or Thursday, at which point I’ll get back to the System. Until then, the blog has not been moved to a back burner, but has been taken off of the stove completely and put in the fridge. (I will, however, be keeping an eye out for comments to moderate / respond to. I suppose that’d be on par with opening the fridge once a day and making sure the dish wasn’t developing some weird out-of-control fungus covering. Not to say you people are fungal, of course - you get what I’m saying…)

I wrote a couple of days ago about having some serious problems with getting started on a term paper for one of my classes. Things with it have moved forward a bit, and so I wanted to toss an update out:

I now have enough material to write the paper. However, only one of my sources is an article; the other two are books. Therein was my problem before. In a previous class with this professor, he specifically stated: articles only. In this class, he focused on getting everyone in the class up to speed with the school’s article databases, but, in hindsight, he didn’t specifically say that we had to use articles only.

I met with him last Friday and had him look over what I had. He came to the same conclusion I had come to: while each individual article would have been fine to use, they didn’t come together very well at all. While they all dealt with intelligence or espionage, they dealt with different spheres of it. His recommendation? Take one of the articles and get two books that the author of the article had cited repeatedly.

I ended up hurting myself by focusing so much on scholarly articles; while they were stressed much more over books (books were more or less not mentioned in class), I could have gone to the professor sooner and asked. Hell, my paper would be written if I’d done that; I had three different books on the influence that the American Revolution exerted on European countries! To be fair, though, he recognized that he’d stressed articles as well, and he’s going to alter the syllabus for later sessions of the class, to clarify that any academic source can be used - articles, books, etc.

As an aside to all of this, it’s funny how so many people have the peculiar idea that “history is done” - that is, there’s nothing to study per se, if you want to know something, you go and look it up in a book. While this is true for a lot of history, most - all, even - of our history can be expanded upon, and in some specific areas, there’s simply nothing written at all. While there are some books on espionage during the Revolutionary War period, there’s a relative dearth of academic articles on the topic.

It’s that time of the semester again - that is, close to its end. I think just about anyone who’s done the whole college thing would say that the end of the semester, the last few weeks, are the worst. Even if you stay on top of things the rest of the time, things start falling apart near the end - more and more things are due, more and more studying has to be done. That’s been my experience, anyway.

At the end of last semester, I actually said I’d be away from the blog for a week or two, due to lack of time. I’m not at that stage yet, but it may be quickly approaching.

Like last semester, I’ve got to write a term paper. 8-10 pages long, on anything I want, as long as it ties in with the American Revolution. Compared to the last term paper I had to do, which was about the American South, I figured doing one about the Revolution would be a piece of cake; I mean, it’s the Revolution, there should be plenty of articles about it!

Sort of.

There are indeed masses of articles about the period. However, I’m having a really hard time finding 3 good articles about the same thing. I’ve gone through hundreds of search results in research databases, probably having spent 8 or 9 hours on it at this point, and I’ve just not come up with anything solid. The first topic I wanted to tackle was how the American Revolution was received in European countries, and how the Revolution influenced conditions there (besides the obvious “It helped lead to the French Revolution!”). This ended up being a total flop. While I was able to find some books on Spain’s involvement, they didn’t lead me to any usable articles; I simply didn’t find anything at all in the research databases on the topic.

The next topic I chose, which I’m still fighting with, is espionage during the war. I’d prefer to focus in on one facet of it, such as military intelligence or political espionage, but again, I’ve not found enough on either of those to prop a paper on. I’ve found one excellent article on the development of the British military intelligence; one article about Britain intercepting letters from the colonies and creating extracts to see what colonial opinion was (not very suitable for what I’m trying to do); and one article that, while I thought it was going to be excellent, is ultimately, I think, not going to work. It had no abstract, but was entitled British Secret Service and the French-American Alliance. Well, hey, the title sounded great… Unfortunately, when I received it through interlibrary loan, I discovered that it’s an examination of a few people in London who were double agents. The extreme focus on these people, rather than a wider view, is not going to work, I’m afraid.

I’m at a standstill right now. I’ve one more article on the way via interlibrary loan which I hope will give me enough overall to work with. I’ve a long list of other articles I can request through interlibrary loan, but I’d really prefer to see if the one that’s (supposedly!) on the way will allow me to get to writing or not. The paper is due on the 2nd, so I’m running out of time, and ILLs take time. Furthermore, I have to pay for every article I get through interlibrary loan, and if I start requesting things willy nilly, I’ll soon have $50+ in my paper, which I’m not exactly keen on doing (at all). The articles are only $.10 per page, but those dimes add up quickly.

I’m meeting with the professor of the class Friday to essentially show him the articles I have and say “help!” Hopefully he can help me get things going. This is driving me nuts, as those of you who follow me on Twitter have probably noticed.

There’s an older fellow in one of my classes this semester, who has indirectly put me in a bit of a bind. I’m stuck considering when one should go from tolerating rudeness and derogatory remarks, to not tolerating it anymore and doing something about the problem. Let me explain:

The class is about world history up to 1600. As to be expected, we started out with a primer on prehistory, and then moved on to Mesopotamia, Egypt, China - the river valley civilizations. From the very start, the man in question has kept taking over the class. He has interrupted the professor and started talking loudly, usually about the Bible’s take on the history. Such-and-such passage says this about the Egyptians; such-and-such passage says that about Babylon. He’s gotten into arguments with the professor about the history, usually because her take on it (or the view presented in our text) did not mesh well with his Biblical view. He’s asked the professor a question about what she was teaching, and then would not allow her to answer; she’d get about 3 words out and he’d drown her out, “No, no, I know that, what I’m asking is…” Often, he has interrupted and just started spouting off something about the Bible, something that wasn’t at all related to what she was lecturing on.

All of this, he’s done practically every class session. Everytime he has done it, it’s clear that the professor is uncomfortable with the situation, as is everyone else in the class; you can feel the tension practically zipping around the room. Thus far no one has said anything; the professor has been able to steer things back onto course (often repeatedly in one session).

Last Tuesday, he hit his high mark (or perhaps it’d be better to call it his low mark). We were working on the chapter about the rise of Islam, and so we were obviously dealing with Mohammed. It was prime territory for the guy to do some Bible-beating, and he pounced on the chance. He started arguing with the professor about the generally kinship-based successions in the caliphates, saying that that went against Jesus’s word, because he had said that only God could select a ruler^[1]. He asked, if Muslims believe in the Christian God, why are they disrespecting Jesus in such a way? The professor patiently explained that, despite believing in the same God, the fact is, Mohammed said that Jesus had some things wrong, and that Mohammed’s way was the right way to do things. After all, Mohammed created Islamd; he didn’t follow Christianity. She was not “standing up” for Islam, simply stating the facts about the history of the religion. The guy’s response was: “Well, huh, Mohammed’ll have something coming to him, then, heh heh. He’ll see.”

Now, am I being overly sensitive about this, or is that remark just completely discriminatory? I’m not Muslim, but if I were, I’d find that pretty insulting. If the guy has his beliefs, that’s fine, but saying something like that in a room full of, more or less, strangers? Not cool. It’s this remark that has me pretty much ready to go to someone who can take action against the guy. I’m not even going to bother attempting to talk to him in private about it, because while I’m not omniscient, I think I have a pretty good idea how productive the conversation would be.

What do you folks think? He’s an irritation at the least, and his “my history via the Bible is better than all of this!” attitude is maddening, but being irritating and having some peculiar ideas about history doesn’t warrant reporting him to someone. Does his remark warrant it? I feel like it does, but like I said, maybe I’m not seeing the situation clearly; I admittedly can’t stand the guy. Then again, I’d say that holds for the majority of my classmates…

(By the way, some of you might be wondering, if this guy is so bad, why hasn’t the professor done something? Good question. Answer: this particular professor is extremely nice, and goes above and beyond her duty to keep the peace. I truly believe that if this guy pulled this stuff in some of my other classes, he would have been booted weeks ago, with or without the knock at Islam.)

1. I’ve no idea if that’s actually in the Bible or not; just writing what this fellow said. I’d say it’s fairly obvious that I wouldn’t trust this guy’s word much. [↩]