How to cheat good

I just submitted my last set of grades for the semester. This is always a big weight off my shoulders, but since it will be the last set of grades I ever submit at the University at Buffalo, it is an even greater relief. And so I think it’s time for me to “give back” as the kids say.

I had a 24 hour take home (distance course, so “keep home”?) final exam. Students had to submit it in text–and most submitted it in Word. In the exam, I noted that “I expect everyone to behave honorably,” and noted that receiving assistance from others or plagiarizing work was a bad idea.

I would prefer that students don’t cheat. Yes, they really are mostly cheating themselves, so fine. But it also reflects poorly on the community. Rationally or not, what particularly irks me is that it is disrespectful: of me, of their fellow students, of the university, of the institution of learning, and of themselves. And–did I mention–of me? It is particularly irksome when their cheating implies (reminds?) that I am a fool.

So, to help students across the country cheat better, saving themselves both from easy detection and from incurring the wrath of insulted faculty, and leading to a much more harmonious school environment, I offer the following tips, based on recent experience:

1. Don’t cheat off family.

If you are in a class of several hundred people, and you share an unusual family name with another student in the class, it is best if your reply to an open ended short-answer question is not identical, word-for-word. This is particularly true when the answer is wrong, and when it is wrong in an idiosyncratic way. Many profs, as I do, grade “blind,” without reference to the names of the students, but still, it’s easy enough when you find something like this to track back to the names. My suggestion, in this case, is to continue to cut and paste the answer, but to legally change your name. A convenience marriage may do the trick.

2. Don’t talk British.

The only people allowed to use the word “colour” are those with Indian surnames. “Weight,” you may argue, “I was bourne and razed in the english countryside.” I have no doubt, but your Commonwealth heritage is not easily detectable by your surname, so I’m afraid you will need to switch to Amerkin spelling for work in my classes. (If you are Indian, but your surname has suffered from various Colonial incursions, I’m afraid you’ll have to lose the U’s as well.) Otherwise, fair or not, it somehow appears that you have copied your work from another author.

3. You Google, I Google

How do you think I check suspicious work? It’s not like our state university is shelling out for TurnItIn. I am pretty good with that Google thingy. And changing two words won’t send me off the trail. So copy from something a bit more obscure. Or–and this is really tricky–try making up your own stuff.

4. Dont rite to good

When you “write” a sentence like “The veil of ignorance, to mention one prominent feature of that position, has no specific metaphysical implications concerning the nature of the self; it does not imply that the self is ontologically prior to the facts about persons that the parties are excluded from knowing,” you have two ways of being caught up. First, while I make no claim of having anything approaching an eidetic memory (more like an idyllic memory), it may ring some dusty bells and heck, I might be able to pull the book you stole it from down off my shelf, even if you followed the advice of #3. If my memory fails to serve, as is frequently the case these days, Google Print might help out.

The second way you can trip up is by following this with your original words, which tend to be less sophisticated, or equally sophisticated material from an entirely different source that simply does not seem to make sense in this particular context.

As a corollary here, try not to plagiarize the teacher. You will be less likely to suffer her ire, since it will amuse her and her colleagues to no end, but you are more likely to be caught. Steal her ideas and rephrase them in your own prose, because there is nothing teachers like more than knowing that students can write well but have no original ideas.

5. Malaprop big words

Make sure you pick a word that sounds impervious and use it incorrigibly, or inventorate words. We’ll be udderly convinced of your genuinity (not to mention your precedential potential). Snuff said.

6. Use the word “rediculous.”

This almost magical word will cause any instructor to instantaneously turn off all internal plagiarism detection.

7. Borrow from someone who writes as badly as you do.

Don’t do what one of my graduate students did, and steal a text on Korean feminism from someone who wrote slightly better English than he did. I’ll notice the slightly better writing, even before I notice that you have expressed no interest in or knowledge of feminist perspectives in the past. (Once kicked out of our program, he applied to the English department. No kidding.)

8. Edit > Paste Special > Unformatted Text

This is my Number 1 piece of advice, even if it is numbered eight. When you copy things from the web into Word, ignoring #3 above, don’t just “Edit > Paste” it into your document. When I am reading a document in black, Times New Roman, 12pt, and it suddenly changes to blue, Helvetica, 10pt (yes, really), I’m going to guess that something odd may be going on. This seems to happen in about 1% of student work turned in, and periodically makes me feel like becoming a hermit.

If you follow these simple rules, you are almost guaranteed to pass off your plagiarism and cheating as your own work. This will allow the faculty to remain in blissful ignorance, believing that–despite the low pay–they are spreading knowledge in the world, while at the same time convincing your parents to continue to pay for several more years of school, drunken orgies, and Prada bags. Your classmates who do not follow the above rules will constitute the “low hanging fruit,” easily picked off and tormented by mean-spirited unfulfilled teachers for their own amusement. You, however, will rise above the fray, secure in your superious ability to act smart, even if you don’t understand the text you are passing off as your own.

And what if you follow all eight points and still get caught? Here’s your “get out of jail free” card. Simply say this to your teacher (no, no one has tried these exact words on me yet), and you are off scot free:

“Like a postmodern version of Searle’s Chinese Room, I am able to re-articulate existing knowledge through my command of its (re)presentation and manipulation. Any claim to originality ignores what I like to call our ability to stand on the shoulders of giants. By this, I mean that there is a well-known correlation between book sales and height, and we should use their height to our own advantage, to avoid mud and small dogs.

“Also, is it really all that original to give me an F? After all, I’ve already received an F from two other profs this semester alone. Be an original: give me a C.

“By the way, I don’t know who this ‘John Rawls’ guy is–is he even in our major?–but I think it’s possible he cheated off me.

“Finally, and I think this is most vital, my plagiarism in this case is a clear indictment of the educational system. After all, I’ve been failed by my high school and by three years of university, while continually passing. I don’t think it can be entirely my fault if I’ve gotten this far by plagiarism, and in this, my last class, you decide that it is somehow ‘wrong.’ Clearly, you should use this outcome as a way of evaluating your own teaching and expectations.”

You have my permission to use the above excuses, verbatim and without attribution, in any discussion with your respected faculty. I don’t guarantee their success, but would be happy to hear from any of you who employ them as to their efficacy.

Update (6/16): Be sure to read the huge number of comments below, because they have some top-notch cheating tips. Also, a few have asked whether they can reprint, borrow this in some way. It got lost with my last blog redesign, but everything here that is original is Creative Commons licensed for non-commercial, attributed use. So have at it, just don’t say you wrote it… and don’t turn it in for a grade!

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43 Comments

  1. Tom
    Posted 6/2/2006 at 11:09 pm | Permalink

    My favorite example from teaching is the student who’s essay homework included a long paragraph stolen from the internet, as if it were his text, including the original inline citations (i.e., “blah blah blah (Author Year) yadda yadda”), but without any corresponding list of references.

  2. Shadowstar
    Posted 6/3/2006 at 12:23 am | Permalink

    Hm. Original? From the grades I saw people get throughout uni, what got good marks and what got bad marks, I didn’t think professors wanted anything but the opinions espoused in class repeated… at least, not in undergrad…

    Though, I like number 1. I saw one of those kinds, without the family part, when I TA’d. So very sad. Three of the same programming assignment with the same strange error from people in the same tutorial (there were probably 30 tutorials, as it was first year– variety is the spice of life, kids!) All they did was change the variable name from i to j and i1. And two of them handed it in late. First kid apparently thought he was helping by giving the other two the solution after everyone had submitted.

    Altogether a good article.

  3. Posted 6/3/2006 at 12:39 pm | Permalink

    My favourite, as a second language teacher, is something that’s not only plagiarized, but also mechanically translated. A few years back, a student handed in a news article about “ventilators” fighting over the ball that Barry Bonds had hit into the stands. I had to reverse translate to figure out the original word was “fans”.

  4. Posted 6/14/2006 at 8:05 am | Permalink

    I’ve found that the Wikipedia hyperlinks embedded in the doc are also a dead give-away.

  5. Posted 6/14/2006 at 11:53 pm | Permalink

    I cant believe it
    ur little notes screwed my final science!

  6. G. E. H.
    Posted 6/15/2006 at 7:24 am | Permalink

    This made me smile. I’m still in school, nearing the end of compulsory education, so I’ve known people to do this.

    My personal favourite was when we were given an example evaluation for our IT Coursework. Hidden in it, in very pale grey, were the words ‘Copyright Edexcel, to be used as an example only’, in several instances. It didn’t show up very well on screen, but it was rather obvious when he printed them out.

    However, he didn’t check the print, and handed the piece of work to the teacher. He seemed honestly surprised when he was told to do it again.

  7. Brian
    Posted 6/15/2006 at 7:27 am | Permalink

    The flip side to this is that some professors are almost as useless as the students.

    I remember someone making me an offer I couldn’t refuse to draft the major paper for a high level graduate course. The paper was half the grade in the class. I wrote the draft during the insanely boring meetings I attended at my job at the time.

    Despite the fact I’d never had a class in this area, the paper was turned in as-is and received an A. Frankly, if I can get an A in a class like this, the prof deserves to have her students cheating.

    Which brings me to the best method to cheat on papers — always have someone just a little bit smarter than you write an original paper and turn that in.

  8. Henry
    Posted 6/15/2006 at 7:41 am | Permalink

    To absolutely and positively throw the teacher off the scent simply transcribe each sentence of your essay from a different student in the class.

  9. Sean
    Posted 6/15/2006 at 7:55 am | Permalink

    I’m a student in an engineering program. “Work groups” are essentially expected from TAs and profs, but there is still a level of stupity of students that knows no bounds. One math asssignment, a peer attached the photocopies of the solution they cleverly copied from with what they handed in.

  10. Christina
    Posted 6/15/2006 at 8:01 am | Permalink

    When I was a physics TA, I had two students turn in identical homework assignments. Now, they were allowed to work together, but we did say we wanted everyone to at least write out their own work. These geniuses? One’s was a CARBON COPY (literally, a carbon copy) of the other.

    I reported it, the professor did her job, the entitled kid sued. Classic.

  11. JP Craig
    Posted 6/15/2006 at 8:29 am | Permalink

    This is a funny article. I don’t get as much plagiarism now that I encourage my students to talk to me if they feel inclined to it. I also tell them how disgusting it is in plain terms. I also find that having students turn in outlines and such early helps prevent plagiarism, or slow it down. If any of you are feeling really cynical about your students, try doing some of these things to help beat back the cheating. (My comments are for teaching first and second year undergraduates; I would be merciless with a graduate student caught at this.)

  12. Gordon
    Posted 6/15/2006 at 8:36 am | Permalink

    Thank you! Having just got my bachelors, I am always frustrated by the poor effort people give when they plagiarize…

  13. Posted 6/15/2006 at 8:45 am | Permalink

    I taught an introduction to programming class, and had an interesting occurrence of group-cheating.

    Who I like to call “The Fantastic Five” turned in the exact same solution to an assignment. There were, of course, minor differences. In total, three of the assignments had the same person listed as the author, some had slightly different variable names, and all had the same tragic errors.

    As a scare tactic, I gave each of the Fantastic Five an oral test and easily determined that one person had written the solution, two others knew how it worked, and the last two blindly copied the file (leaving the author’s name as their own).

    I thought the scaring them had worked, since four of them had admitted copying. Two weeks later, I saw the Fantastic Five identical solutions again. In fact, one of the students later submitted an online exam solution using his student ID but someone else’s name.

    Some tips learned from here:
    1. If you submit an assignment via email, please make sure your name is the one on the submission.
    2. Try to make sure you’re the only one in your class copying from a source.

  14. Chris
    Posted 6/15/2006 at 8:46 am | Permalink

    I teach a chemistry laboratory, and a good tip-off that I frequently see in lab reports is perfect calculations, that arrive at the correct answer–but don’t start with the same numbers the students report as their data. Another bit of advice is that before copying another student, make sure you can read his handwriting.

  15. Steve
    Posted 6/15/2006 at 8:46 am | Permalink

    As said before, extra “u” does not always equal British spelling. Have you ever heard of Canada? Way to be a fucking idiot while you’re trying to school people.

  16. Posted 6/15/2006 at 8:59 am | Permalink

    Great article, a must read for all students. You’ve been linked from
    http://www.antiwikipedia.com !

  17. Posted 6/15/2006 at 9:00 am | Permalink

    I am an American. Like most Americans I grew up reading children’s literature written by British authors. I instinctively spell color as “colour” and behavior as “behaviour”. Get over it.

  18. Charles Steelman
    Posted 6/15/2006 at 9:04 am | Permalink

    [during a PTA conference]

    teacher: Yes Mrs. Wimberly, your son is quite remarkable. Despite being in the third grade, I find that he is already plagiarizing /at a fifth grade level/.

  19. mo
    Posted 6/15/2006 at 9:06 am | Permalink

    My favorite is when cheaters get perfect scores. One class, way back when I was in high school, we all had the answers to the multiple choice tests because a senior had saved them from the year before. Cheating actually hurt my grade because I knew I had to get at least one wrong, which I wouldn’t have done if I had just taken the stupid test. The teacher started to notice when the village idiot kept getting 100s. Eventually he switched up the order of two questions and caught half the class that didn’t bother to even read the questions. One student didn’t actually just brought a piece of white lined paper with the answers already on it. He’d sit quietly for a couple of minutes and then turn it in. Didn’t matter that it wasn’t the same kind of paper the teacher passed out.

  20. mo
    Posted 6/15/2006 at 9:07 am | Permalink

    My favorite is when cheaters get perfect scores. One class, way back when I was in high school, we all had the answers to the multiple choice tests because a senior had saved them from the year before. Cheating actually hurt my grade because I knew I had to get at least one wrong, which I wouldn’t have done if I had just taken the stupid test. The teacher started to notice when the village idiot kept getting 100s. Eventually he switched up the order of two questions and caught half the class that didn’t bother to even read the questions. One student just brought a piece of white lined paper with the answers already on it. He’d sit quietly for a couple of minutes and then turn it in. Didn’t matter that it wasn’t the same kind of paper the teacher passed out. Maroons.

  21. Posted 6/15/2006 at 9:12 am | Permalink

    I may have to steal/plagiarize this bit of genius for my syllabus:
    “As a side-note: of course I expect my students to use standard American English. Just as, when I publish in a journal based in the UK, I am expected to use their house style. Code switching isn’t rocket surgery. I also force them—kicking an screaming—to use APA rather than their own made up citation style (or MLA or Chicago, etc.). Why? Because I am an evil imperialist pig and consumed by dark forces.”

  22. Noam
    Posted 6/15/2006 at 9:19 am | Permalink

    Great article!

    Another one about programming. I once had two students hand in a printed program (one page). They looked so similar I just put one on top of the other and held them up to the light. Sure enough they were identical.
    If you’re too lazy to change variable names, add some white space…

  23. Jack
    Posted 6/15/2006 at 9:22 am | Permalink

    I taught writing at a technical college for a few years, so this brings back many bad memories. I encouraged many of the students to write about their interests, which for most meant cars and such. I specifically recall one essay which carefully referenced “our July issue, page 42.”

  24. Christian
    Posted 6/15/2006 at 9:35 am | Permalink

    I’m just a student and not a teacher, but it would seem that teachers of younger students have it worse. When I was at primary school (~= Elementary School + Middle School), a friend of mine printed out a website, stapled it together and handed it in. Never mind it had the URL it was printed from written accross the bottom of the page. Slightly better was in High School, when a different friend handed in a physics paper with no original work, but every paragraph sourced and properly attributed. I never could understand that.

  25. Jerry
    Posted 6/15/2006 at 9:42 am | Permalink

    Years ago I was grading computer program lab assignments and discovered two students had identical errors in their solution. Laying the two sets of code side by side, I noticed they had changed the variable names and even the line spacing, but the two submissions were identical line by line logic of a WRONG solution. I gove them each 50% of the credit they would have gotten for the lab problem.

  26. Jim
    Posted 6/15/2006 at 9:44 am | Permalink

    As a professor at a large state university (1 250 person class and 2 40 person classes), I’d like to ask the following:

    1) Did you ever consider changing the assessments you were using? Perhaps a take home assignment is not appropriate for your teaching methods. Many on-line systems, including software like Blackboard and WebCT allow for relatively sophisticated assessments that are more difficult to cheat on if set up correctly.

    2) Why not *require* TurnItIn? You can get the sudents to pay for it just like any other course materials. Our university pays for this service and it is VERY EFFECTIVE! Combined with a rigid honor code/code of conduct, many students can be scared straight.

    3) Did you ever think to change the content of your assessments? I, for one, do not use the same questions from semester to semester.

    4) Did you ever prosecute/turn in a cheater? I have and you’d be amazed at how the word got out and cheating dropped significantly. This is especially true when the student in question is expelled (as mine was). We also have a grade of “XF” which can be issued in the event of cheating and is truly permanent on a transcript.

    Finally…

    I suggest that professors of most undergraduate classes switch to remotes from companies like eInstruction or Turning Point. I have effectively reduced cheating and increased attendance and participation through the use of RF remotes (purchased for $25 by the students) for assessments, live student feedback, etc.

    Just my $.02.

  27. Posted 6/15/2006 at 9:44 am | Permalink

    Rule #1 should be: if you submit another student’s paper, make sure to change the author’s name in the header/footer.

    Also, if you submit electronically make sure you rename the file. For example submitting john_smith_cmpt183-01_hw_3.doc when your name is Peter might sometimes be viewed as a dead giveaway. Metadata is also a good place to find the name of the “original” author.

  28. David
    Posted 6/15/2006 at 9:47 am | Permalink

    As an Organisational Behaviour lecturer (Yes, In England. Get over it. And as far as I could tell, the point was about consistency, not spelling), my best advice to students who want to plagiarize is as follows:
    1. If asked to write an essay about the Hawthorne studies (a set of seminal studies in the field), try to avoid paragraphs comparing Hawthorne with Edgar Allan Poe and Melville.
    2. When copying and pasting from a website, even if you do the formatting thingy, remember to remove the lines referring to other products on offer from the site, as well as all references to the colection of links at the bottom of the page.
    Yes, really.

  29. Posted 6/15/2006 at 10:02 am | Permalink

    Passing off somebody else’s ideas as your own is like trying to pass off vomit as food. Turning it in implies that the teacher is too stupid to smell the difference. I enjoyed this because it was true and funny; most talk plagiarism leaves me angry and fuming. Thanks for keeping your sense of humor & for passing it on.

  30. Posted 6/15/2006 at 10:05 am | Permalink

    Jim:

    1) Did you ever consider changing the assessments you were using?

    Yes, but I think writing in the essay form is a (perhaps the) vital skill to learn in university. I dislike Blackboard for a lot of reasons, and although I have used its built-in assessments, they are hardly a salve for cheating…

    Why not require TurnItIn? You can get the students to pay for it just like any other course materials.

    I’ve considered that. Despite the whining (or is that whinging ^_^) above, my Dean did pay for me to use Turn-it-in for a while, and I suspect SUNY Buffalo will pick it up campus wide in the near future. I realize it will be a hidden cost to students when they do, but I just felt a little uneasy about making students pay to police themselves, particularly when those who plagiarize in any given class remain a minority. Why should the ethical students have to pay for the unethical ones. Though I suppose that is often the case.

    Did you ever think to change the content of your assessments?

    I always do. I can’t imagine folks who do not. Especially on campuses with fraternities…

    Did you ever prosecute/turn in a cheater?

    At least once a semester, both in my own classes and in the graduate program I directed. And yes, as noted in the post, that included expelling a student from the university. I don’t know how much of a deterrent this is when I’m the only prof doing it. One of my colleagues pointedly refused to prosecute a plagiarized paper that was reported by a student, saying he “was not a policeman.”

  31. Posted 6/15/2006 at 10:16 am | Permalink

    David:

    I can see that… Doesn’t the “Poe Effect” refer to tendency of individuals in the company of poets to commit tragically horrific acts?

  32. Johnny
    Posted 6/15/2006 at 10:22 am | Permalink

    I shat a whole in my pantz aftre reading this

  33. Posted 6/15/2006 at 10:33 am | Permalink

    On the subject of British/American spellings, there is a slight problem with REQUIRING one or the other… If you were brought up reading (and writing) in a particular way then you might not know about the alternative. I know some of the American spellings but given the lack of consistency in American Orthography (it’s Aluminum but not Radum or Uranum?) how can I be expected to know all of them?

    If submitting a paper for publication I would do my best to follow whatever house style was required but I wouldn’t expect to have to change cultural references or spelling to match those of the editor. If it bothers the editor he can talk with me about it or reject my paper.

    Z.

  34. Posted 6/15/2006 at 10:40 am | Permalink

    LOL!! This was great. Yeah, I remember when that Shakespeare guy cheated off me and made me look bad. He even back-dated his work by a few hundred years to make it look convincing. What a scammer!

  35. Dave
    Posted 6/15/2006 at 10:48 am | Permalink

    I LOVE JOHN RAWLS! Read any Nussbaum? The capabilities principle is really neat.

  36. Posted 6/15/2006 at 10:48 am | Permalink

    Plagiarism drove me nuts last semester; that’s why I’m nuts today, in fact. I had a student swear his paper was his own work because he “dinnit cut and paste, he DINNIT, he typed it all out his own self.” And since I teach ‘writing intro’ at a community college, his sentence was actually pretty good.

    I LOVED your post, by the way. Would you mind if I typed it all out and signed my name to it? I dinnit want to plagiarize by cutting and pasting. . . .

  37. Posted 6/15/2006 at 10:51 am | Permalink

    My favorite cheating story wasn’t actually cheating. My dorm neighbor in college was a dumb jock (DJ). No offense, there are plenty of smart jocks, he just wasn’t one of them. A smart(ish) guy (SG) who’d had the same class before “helped” him write a paper by giving DJ the paper SG had written for the same class. He really tried to make DJ rewrite SG’s ideas into his own words, but DJ had so little understanding of the topic that he completely mangled it beyond readability. It was obvious to me, a fellow student, what he’d done, imagine what the prof (who’d seen SG’s paper originally) must have thought.

    I did a lot of cheating in high school but that’s just because the classes were so lame (it was the 70s) that I was more challenged to find ways to cheat than I would have been to actually study.

    re: color/colour – I think it’s the inconsistencies that jump out. If someone is writing in ‘Murkin and then has a paragraph in British, it does catch one’s eye.

    last but not least, on the business side we have
    BA – big a**hole
    MBA – Much bigger a**hole
    CPA – Chrome Plated a**hole

  38. Posted 6/15/2006 at 10:52 am | Permalink

    Zwack: Although I expect it, I’ve never actually required American spelling. Frankly, a lot of these comments are tempests in teapots. It’s actually never come up as a serious issue for me. (I wonder if others *have* had such an issue.) If I were to teach in UB’s programme in Singapore, I would naturally be fine with non-American spelling. I’ve had plenty of students from Canada, Australia, and India; I don’t recall having regional dialect issues come up.

    I’m in the same boat as you: I let the editors make the changes because I am not sure I’ll get it right.

    In the post above, non-American variants–especially inconsistently used–are often an indication that the writing is not the students’ own. I apologize to the wounded cultural pride if this offended anyone in the world. I think you talk pretty.

  39. John
    Posted 6/15/2006 at 11:20 am | Permalink

    You left out the one where students not only answer the wrong question, but they include a bibliography citing a different professor from a different course from a different university in a different city. And then, when caught, swear that they just happened to drop in on some random lectures when they went home for a few days.

  40. Mark
    Posted 6/15/2006 at 11:24 am | Permalink

    Good job, very funny.

    When I was an undergrad I had to write a paper for some social science class and was quite bored. So I took the challenge to write the entire paper out of sentences stolen from other articles. It was really a lot of work! More work than writing the paper would have been. But I had fun. The rules that I set for myself were that I had to use entire sentences, and no 2 that were together could have appeared together in the original. I even included some graphs and diagrams.

    The paper turned out to be a disjointed mess. The only comment the teacher had was that I didn’t reference the graphs in the text. I think I got a C, which was fine.

  41. Thinker
    Posted 6/15/2006 at 11:29 am | Permalink

    One of my colleagues once told he had to correct some paper on phyiscs. The author had copied from someone and changed every ROT (german for red) to BLAU(german for blue) Too bad “ROT” meant “Rotation” in this case…

    And in my beginners course on computer programming 12 groups of 3 students each were accused of cheating. They turned in the same solution on an assignment. And the computer reported them by refusing to recompile the executable when given some new source.
    Nobody of them wrote the code in the first place – that was me. And my group was not accused because I optimized the code after mailing it to some desperate girl…

  42. Posted 6/15/2006 at 11:31 am | Permalink

    As part of my job at a community college, I am required to audio tape student hearings. I thought I had heard every excuse under the sun, but apparently not!

    This article was beautiful! So true. What’s sad is that people are failing to realize the humor. You’re not “yelling” at people for using British spellings, but merely asking for consistency. A course I just took summed it up perfectly – “It doesn’t matter if you’re a bad speller. What matters is that you’re consistently bad.”

  43. Scott Bier
    Posted 6/15/2006 at 11:36 am | Permalink

    My favorite was when one of my students cut and pasted too much and included “in this website was helpful, click here for more information”

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