For many of us, back-to-school season means remembering the good, the bad, and the ugly. For the very first episode of Spark (airing September 5), we’re working on a story called “Plagiarism 2.0.”
Have you ever snuck a peek at your neighbour’s test paper? “Borrowed” a classmate’s bibliography? Swiped an essay off the net and tried to pass it off as your own?
Spark wants to hear your stories about cheating in school.
Leave them in the comments, or better yet, leave us a voice message. The best confession gets a handsome Spark grocery bag.
Photo: Tiered Classroom by cogdogblog
Pam! Now that's a savvy technological cheat! I didn't even think of all the sports-related stories.
Well I have never cheated on papers, I have, while marking papers for a professor, caught a few students cheating.
I just have this to say: If you are going to copy something from the internet and try and pass it off as your own, don’t copy it from Wikipedia. At least try and find some obscure web-site to steal. It only takes a matter of seconds for markers to find the information on Wikipedia. And believe me, we can tell if an essay doesn’t make sense.
Although, while marking I often had the suspicion that there were some students getting the better of me.
Hilarious!
I think I was only in Grade Nine at Riffel High School in Regina when a huge scandal broke out. “Finals” as we called them were held in the gym. It was just like what was to come in university. Hundreds of desks were filled by students from different grades, writing exams for various subjects. The whole intimidating procedure was as stressful as it got in high school.
Somebody in Grade 12 got a hold of one teacher’s answer sheets to all the final exams. Luckily, I don’t think that particular teacher taught Grade Nines, so I wasn’t presented with the conundrum of whether to cheat or not. Dozens of others were, and probably weren’t very subtle about the answers written on their arms under a sleeve or on tiny folded papers in their pockets. Of course, they were caught and things blew up.
Police were involved and it was all over the television news. It was actually kind of scary for a kid who just finished her first year of high school. I’m not sure whether it was that or my Dad’s head whipping around to look at me and ask, “Did you cheat?” I hadn’t, but I’ve never been tempted to so much as copy a sentence from a book since then!
I was always a pretty good student, and usually studied for tests, but nothing killed me more than grade 8 science. It was horrible! We sat in a dark lab for 45 minutes every day, listening to the lab teacher’s drone, and I would poke myself with a pencil to keep from falling asleep! Well, we started a chapter in our textbooks on electrical conductors. I hated it. Didn’t study a word. And neither did anyone else! So when it came time to write the test, nobody had read up on the lesson. So a few of my friends snuck into the lab one day, and looked around for a copy of the test. They managed to find it! Well, I learned the test answers inside out, convinced I would pass with flying colours. Test day came…. and the questions on the sheet looked NOTHING like the test we got our hands on! Needless to say, a bunch of us wound up with F’s that afternoon, and detention!
As a kid, my mother used to give me money for getting good grades. One year when I did really bad in math, I attacked my report card with some white out and a pin.. and then took the now blank report card to the typewritter and gave myself all As. I scored $100.00
Part of being in school is school sports. and THAT is where I liked to cheat.
I played on the flag football team, and we wore plastic flags velcroed to little regulation belts. To be “tackled”, an opposing player would have to rip off one or both flags.
Well, before every tough match, all the girls would spray their flags with Pam cooking spray. That way nobody could get a good grip.
Karma intervened and we were still humiliated in the playoffs.
Thanks Spark!
I really hate cheating a lot, and be-moan all those university paper-byers while I remember slaving away on each and every one of my own back in the day. But I do remember one and one one instant, on a Grade 6 Canadian politics test, when asked the name of our monarch. Could not remember if Liz was I or II – a quick glance to my neighbour cleared that up and I haven’t forgotten since. Thanks neighbour!
Let me preface this by saying I prefer to think of my indiscretions as “working the system”! While I would never blatantly plagerize someone else’s work, I am more than willing to take advantage of, erhm, loopholes?
I have two incidents to tell, both from my university days.
While taking algebra, I quickly realized that my tutorial leader spoke very little english. When I didnt understand something, rather than explaining she would write out the correct answer for me. Stuck on a test one day, I decided to see what would happen if I asked a question during the test! I always wondered how during marking she didnt notice that there were two sets of handwriting?
In physics we were required to do an online timed quiz sometime before class each week. As we didnt have much time to devote to or any real interest in quantum physics, the non-science people in the course banded together. Around 8 of us would meet in the computer lab to work out the questions together(so we did actually try the work!) The test picked randomly 5 questions out of 8. On a rotational basis one of us would go first and ‘take it for the team” to figure out the correct answers. After that the rest of us logged in and completed ours. Teamwork!
I remember sharing a calculator with a friend during a junior high science exam, and just passing it back and forth with the (multiple choice) answer typed on it. After all, sharing is caring, right?
When my daughter was in the 6th grade, she and a friend were doing a project on Ancient Egypt. Each girl was to have written up about half the project, and the two girls were at our house to do the final assembly of the poster presentation. I read the friend’s contribution and it sounded fantastic, like something that a university student would have written. This was surprising because this girl was maybe a “C” student (with a good tailwind blowing to help her along!)
With about a minute of searching online, I found the website from where the material was lifted. I then called the girl’s mother and said, “If I could tell that this work wasn’t your daughter’s, and could find it in less than a minute, then the teacher will surely be able to do the same.” The mother’s response: “Oh, that’s okay. Just send it home with my daughter and I’ll redo it.” Turns out that the daughter had not even done her own plagiarizing – her mother had done the deed herself.
I told the mother to bring over some night things for her daughter, that it was going to be a late night while the girls finished the project, and she could sleep over with my daughter. I then spent the next couple of hours teaching the girl how to do appropriate research, how to organize a short essay, and how to write it reasonably well – something that neither the school nor her parents had done by that time.
They received an A+ on the project, the very first A+ the girl had ever received. The best part of it was the pride the girl felt in achieving that mark because, in her words, “I actually did the work myself!”
And *that* is an example of the value of process over product in education.
In Grade 10, I tried to help a friend through the final exam for our music theory class. The exam was multiple-choice, and the teacher played passages from Ravel's Bolero and Pachelbel's Canon in D before each question.
I thought it would be clever to wave my left hand in time to the music, holding out 1 to 4 fingers to indicate the answer from A to D.
The fact that my friend was sitting one seat behind and to my right didn't occur to me.
I doubt that I was much help at all.
Good luck with the show, Nora. Looks like Spark’s gonna be a treat!
On to the ‘confession.’
A long time ago, while enrolled in a condensed and stressful U S Navy “C” school, one of the courses in the program involved cranking out a 10-paged ‘thesis.’ The powers-that-be wanted everything absolutely exactamundo, down to the footnotes, bibliography – the whole shootin’ match. Well, it was the first time in my life I ever had to prepare such a paper, and since there wasn’t a great deal of time to get up to Report Writing speed, I decided to ‘wing it.’
Since the idea of a topic was left up to each individual, and as I was into Yoga stretching exercises for relaxation, and the course I was taking was extremely intense, I decided to put it all together and fabricate something plausible to get through the task: “Relaxation Through Yoga.”
I went to the public library and fished out enough reference books to see how to build footnotes and a bibliography. After that, the ten pages of garbage I compiled looked so well and professionally researched, I had little doubt my work would be found to be sheer and utter nonsense.
The other things in my favour were the class size (tons of students); the time frame (things had to be done ‘yesterday’); and observing how the class instructor didn’t really seem to give two shakes about the course he was teaching (I think he was getting close to packin’ the whole navy gig in). I figured he’d never delve too far into the students’ submissions when he went about grading the papers. And I was correct. I ended up with a pretty decent letter grade. The instructor’s only remark — a marginal, red inked comment — was over the ‘British’ way I spelled a certain word.
Anyway, Nora… I don’t believe my story completely falls under the heading of plagiarism since I hadn’t actually stolen anyone else’s work. However, when it comes to stretching things a bit, shall we say?.. I remember this particular episode with great fondness & amusement.
Bye for now, d’Pappy
Good luck with the show, Nora. Looks like Spark’s gonna be a treat!
On to the ‘confession.’
A long time ago, while enrolled in a condensed and stressful U S Navy “C” school, one of the courses in the program involved cranking out a 10-paged ‘thesis.’ The powers-that-be wanted everything absolutely exactamundo, down to the footnotes, bibliography – the whole shootin’ match. Well, it was the first time in my life I ever had to prepare such a paper, and since there wasn’t a great deal of time to get up to Report Writing speed, I decided to ‘wing it.’
Since the idea of a topic was left up to each individual, and as I was into Yoga stretching exercises for relaxation, and the course I was taking was extremely intense, I decided to put it all together and fabricate something plausible to get through the task: “Relaxation Through Yoga.”
I went to the public library and fished out enough reference books to see how to build footnotes and a bibliography. After that, the ten pages of garbage I compiled looked so well and professionally researched, I had little doubt my work would be found to be sheer and utter nonsense.
The other things in my favour were the class size (tons of students); the time frame (things had to be done ‘yesterday’); and observing how the class instructor didn’t really seem to give two shakes about the course he was teaching (I think he was getting close to packin’ the whole navy gig in). I figured he’d never delve too far into the students’ submissions when he went about grading the papers. And I was correct. I ended up with a pretty decent letter grade. The instructor’s only remark — a marginal, red inked comment — was over the ‘British’ way I spelled a certain word.
Anyway, Nora… I don’t believe my story completely falls under the heading of plagiarism since I hadn’t actually stolen anyone else’s work. However, when it comes to stretching things a bit, shall we say?.. I remember this particular episode with great fondness & amusement.
Bye for now, d’Pappy
Good luck with the show, Nora. Looks like Spark’s gonna be a treat!
On to the ‘confession.’
A long time ago, while enrolled in a condensed and stressful U S Navy “C” school, one of the courses in the program involved cranking out a 10-paged ‘thesis.’ The powers-that-be wanted everything absolutely exactamundo, down to the footnotes, bibliography – the whole shootin’ match. Well, it was the first time in my life I ever had to prepare such a paper, and since there wasn’t a great deal of time to get up to Report Writing speed, I decided to ‘wing it.’
Since the idea of a topic was left up to each individual, and as I was into Yoga stretching exercises for relaxation, and the course I was taking was extremely intense, I decided to put it all together and fabricate something plausible to get through the task: “Relaxation Through Yoga.”
I went to the public library and fished out enough reference books to see how to build footnotes and a bibliography. After that, the ten pages of garbage I compiled looked so well and professionally researched, I had little doubt my work would be found to be sheer and utter nonsense.
The other things in my favour were the class size (tons of students); the time frame (things had to be done ‘yesterday’); and observing how the class instructor didn’t really seem to give two shakes about the course he was teaching (I think he was getting close to packin’ the whole navy gig in). I figured he’d never delve too far into the students’ submissions when he went about grading the papers. And I was correct. I ended up with a pretty decent letter grade. The instructor’s only remark — a marginal, red inked comment — was over the ‘British’ way I spelled a certain word.
Anyway, Nora… I don’t believe my story completely falls under the heading of plagiarism since I hadn’t actually stolen anyone else’s work. However, when it comes to stretching things a bit, shall we say?.. I remember this particular episode with great fondness & amusement.
Bye for now, d’Pappy