We need a new thread.
For your enjoyment, I’ve put up conversation initiated by a complete stranger on twitter. Read from the bottom up. Either someone is an idiot or someone hacked someone’s Twitter and is setting her up. But…oy.
FWIW: I’m curious to wonder just how much she would pay for this service but not curious enough to ask and give her the impression I might do it. I also have no idea how one provides these answers surreptitiously. Is it in class with a cell phone? Online with screen shots? Once again: not interested enough to be involved in the “research” to find out!
Open thread.
A certain fraction of kids in college today should not be there. Some are under-prepared, but trying to learn. Others, like your correspondent, are clueless about it. In large lectures technology and lazy instructors enable this sort of cheating. Not surprising this one is a communications major — often a catch-all for students who are unmotivated to try harder curricula. She will be lucky if all she gets is a W (withdrawn) grade. A half-way alert instructor with some ethical nerve with catch and punish/report the cheating, hopefully after she’s paid for the answers.
Gary,
Obviously, I have no way of alerting her professor. I also can’t help but wonder how she got into physics ‘by accident’, nor how she didn’t figure out she was in physics early enough to withdraw.
She’s definitely naive to be contacting a random stranger on Twitter to ask help cheating. I have mentioned I’m a physics tutor on twitter, but have no idea how she specifically found me nor why she thought a physics tutor would be willing to help her by feeding her answers on a test.
This has the smell of a first-year student who learned how to cheat successfully in high school and isn’t quite up to speed on how college course enrollment works. She may have been placed in physics by an advisor who did it to fulfill a General Education science requirement. Some schools have a very short period to drop courses and she may have been unaware of that. The transition from the adult-managed high school environment to the one in college that requires much more self-reliance overwhelms some kids. They’re resistant to seeking help and tend to fall back on the behaviors that were successful previously.
Gary,
Oh. That’s probably more or less how it happened. But she still needs to be pretty inattentive.
It does sound like someone who didn’t understand there was a final drop date. Mind you, when college students send me syllabuses (which I request to know topics before they get to them) they nearly always mention the drop date. A freshman not knowing that suggests they are a person who hasn’t read their syllabus.
That’s not a great sign. It suggests inattentiveness at the outset.
My impression is advisors generally meet with students when the students are enrolling. That’s why they are called “advisor”. They usually need the student’s signature on the final request for classes.
Lots and lots and lots of kids know physics have a reputation of being difficult. Their response to a prof who suggested physics if it wasn’t specifically required would be “Whoa! Physics?! Is there another option?!” If it’s not required, the answer would usually be “yes”.
To approach a complete stranger on twitter, she really must think everyone cheats their way out of hard classes.
Oddly, given her twitter handle, I guess if I cared I might be able to track her down and discover more to rat her out. I’m not that great at hunting people down, but I suspect I could do it. I don’t care enough to spend several hours.
I doubt any school would follow up on a “ratting out” anyway. Soliciting help to cheat isn’t actually cheating and most administrators are likely initially to suspect a report from a stranger as a prank. Many are loathe to prosecute actual cheating because of the effort it takes and prefer that instructors prevent it in the first place. When I was a teaching assistant long ago, my professor required that we proctor exams with eagle eyes and to make it obvious the students were being watched.
That got me curious, so I browsed her Twitter feed, and found
this from a couple of years ago:
btw, the edit function almost worked. I wanted to add a note wondering why twitter would show me 2016 tweets. Edit opened up a window, allowed me to add the comment, and then failed to update the post. Just another data point for troubleshooting…
my commenting has been light for the past couple of weeks, but regarding the edit – I (used to) use it more or less every comment up to several minutes after a post. Worked fine for me.
[Yeah. This is an edit.] [Yeah. Still works. X2]
If my daughter drops any class after the add/drop date (a couple weeks into the semester) then she will lose her entire scholarship. She must also maintain a certain GPA. So I can see this situation occurring. There are some ways to appeal a scholarship retraction but it is scholarship dependent.
Tom Scharf – I can understand the GPA requirement, but it seems harsh to make the scholarship contingent on not dropping any classes. That would seem to punish an over-ambitious student who took on an extra class and found it to be too much.
Tom,
I can understand the motivation. I’m still sort of amazed she would approach a random stranger on the internet.
Based on what HaroldW saw, it cheating doesn’t seem to be new behavior though. I’m suspecting the concern isn’t loss of scholarship.
Gary (Comment #170802): “I doubt any school would follow up on a “ratting out†anyway. Soliciting help to cheat isn’t actually cheating and most administrators are likely initially to suspect a report from a stranger as a prank.”
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I suspect that they would be hesitant to get into a he-said-she-said situation, but more importantly, the modern approach is the do-nothing-until-you-have-to approach. We see it everyday, from top to bottom, and in many cases it is justified. In many cases it is not. For example, neither telcos nor ISPs are eager to go after spammers, after all, it was just ‘attempted’ fraud.
@HaroldW,
Scholarships often require full-time enrollment (12-15 credits depending on the school). Dropping courses above the threshold is acceptable. The underlying reason is to create an incentive for students to finish on time (four years) rather than drag out the time to graduation.
Here is the wording of my daughter’s scholarship:
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For an automatic renewal, an award recipient will have:
1. Earned credit for all hours enrolled by the regular drop/add period each term.
2. Earned a minimum cumulative GPA of 3.0 on a 4.0 scale.
Gary,
Requiring a minimum # of credits makes sense to me — as you write, to graduate on time.
Tom,
Perhaps the intent is to preclude late drops for courses in which the student is not doing well; by dropping the course, the student would avoid reducing his/her GPA, perhaps below the minimum required. Still, I’d prefer the minimum-credit rule which Gary described. If the student is handling 4 classes well but signed up for 5 as a stretch, I don’t see why a penalty should be imposed.
But…I’m not the one offering the scholarship.
Back to the original topic, though, this doesn’t seem to be a case of someone trying to take on an additional course. I’m still wondering how the young woman got placed into the course “by accident”. [I’m guessing that Gary is correct that the school has an early drop date which perhaps was not made clear to the student. Or maybe the consequences of having a late withdrawal on her transcript were not clear.]
I think usually, for the first week or two, there is one “add/withdraw” date where you can just be switching to fix schedules from early enrollment. Students often register before the previous semester is over. If they fail a class, they often need to seriously switch their schedule, and there’s about a week allowed for that.
When you do this, there’s no indication on your transcript you “dropped” because it’s really just getting things organized.
There’s generally a later last “drop” date that students use when they are going to fail or something happens and they decide not to continue school or something. You drop and a “w” goes on your transcript. People can see if you regularly resorted to that but that class then doesn’t affect your GPA.
It sounds like Tom’s daughter isn’t allowed to use the second drop date and also keep her scholarship. I don’t know if that’s common or not. I can think of reasons in favor of it or against it. But whoever creates the scholarship gets to make those rules.
The add/drop at UF is one week in. If you drop after that it will show up on your transcript as W. Drop after a later date and you get the grade. When I went to college add/drop was leniently about three months into the semester. There are exceptions for a medical withdrawal and a few others.
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She has two different scholarships. The Bright Futures one she just has to carry 12+ hours, if she completes less she has to pay back the difference.
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The other one is bigger and much stricter and also from the state. It is unknown why they do it this way. If you change schools you also lose it. It’s unnecessarily harsh IMO. They use the term “regular add/drop period” which I assume is the first date, but they have several drop deadlines and it could mean a later one.
https://catalog.ufl.edu/UGRD/dates-deadlines/2018-2019/#falltext
At the institution I attended for undergraduate studies and at which I now work, the drop date used to be about mid-semester. This was a reflection of a liberal attitude from the 1970s that college ought to be about exploration of various disciplines and trying courses that might be difficult. Higher education was relatively cheaper then. This policy tended to extend the time to graduation beyond the normal four years for many students, however. It also subtly encouraged laziness and procrastination with no academic penalty. A few years ago the drop deadline was moved much earlier in the semester as an efficiency measure. Students who delayed graduation paid more and incurred unnecessary debt and that was something to be discouraged proactively. Additionally the institution could avoid wasting resources (teaching effort, classroom space, scholarship money, etc.) on students who dropped late. So the message has been to get serious early on. There have been a few complaints, most for the special cases where student need more hand-holding (times have changed, but that’s another story). Overall the effect has been positive as credit accumulation rates have improved from this and other actions.
At schools I went to, the first add/drop date had no financial penalty. If you dropped by that date, you didn’t pay for the class. This was a very short period of time– as I mentioned, it was mostly to help kids sort out schedules. Occasionally, kids saw they got the “horrible” professor and used it to change into the “good” professors section of the same class. (You had to act quickly for that though! Because the “good” prof’s class would fill up.)
The later drop date which had no “add” component was generally somewhere near midterms. It could be as early as after the first 1/3r d of the semester or as late as the 2nd 3rd depending on the school.
If the prof was kind, they made sure to consider the date when picking the date of an important-to-grades exam and get that scheduled before the “drop” date so kids could have good information on their actual grade. If you dropped at this point, you got a “w”, but that was still better than an F.
OTOH, a prof who didn’t want kids to drop might do the opposite.
One of the kids I tutored had a 2nd midterm the day after the second drop date. Based on info I have, the average grades on the tests were scary low. But the late drop date for the 2nd midterm probably kept kids in the class. From info I have, it seems the curve ended up passing lots of kids with scary low grades many of whom might have dropped if they’d know these averages at the time of the drop date. (I don’t know what the lowest pass grade was, but I know what a C was. And on multiple guess! The grade that got a C was low enough a student might have given up and dropped based on assuming they risked F based on the stated syllabus. )
I wonder what a W really means in reality, it doesn’t affect the GPA. The only people who likely ever see the transcripts are HR and the hiring decision was already made / made by others made and it is confirmation only.
Tom,
Yes. I think a long string of “W” might need to be explained since it might suggest an excess tendency to not stick to things. But otherwise, one or two…. means very little. You could ask, and the student would probably give a reason. Some people would think it’s a bad reason, other people would think it shows judgement.
At the Canadian University where I taught, there was a drop/add date maybe two weeks in to term. After that, students needed permission to enroll in a course. The drop date was more than halfway through the term and we were required to give the students a certain amount of graded feedback before that date. Such withdrawals did not even show up on the transcripts. IMO it made the University complicit in students gaming the system. And they did. Some pre-meds would drop any course in which it looked like they were no going to get an A.
I suspect that the administration knew full well what they were doing and maintained such a liberal policy since they would keep most of the students’ fees when a course was dropped after the drop/add date.
At my institution we have a ‘NW’ grade (no gradable work) that appears on the transcript. Too many students were abandoning courses without formally dropping on time or withdrawing. As an incentive either to stay or to withdraw, the NW was established. We have very few of NW situations now. A grade of I (Incomplete) is posted when some work is outstanding at the end of the term. One semester to finish up or the I evolves into a grade based on work completed which often is insufficient to earn more than an F.
Gary,
I’s at schools I went to were similar. At schools I went to, Incomplete “I” required permission. I think it generally only occurred if the student was ill, had a death in the family or so on. Admittedly, profs decided on a case-by-case basis. The student then had to complete within a defined time frame at which point the prof entered a new grade. If the prof did not enter a new grade, the “I” I turned into an F.
This tended to make prof reluctant to give “I” without a good excuse because they were going to have to grade homework and evaluate materials and generally keep track. So profs did want to see an excuse they considered good enough and weren’t going to give out I’s like candy.