"Faculty and staff proctoring these tests were outnumbered about 10:1 by these belligerent cheaters for all of these tests. Most of the proctors and faculty are old, small, etc. -- in other words not people trained to handle a fight with a single 20-year-old let alone 100 of them. Had these angry belligerent cheaters decided to riot, we would have been overwhelmed," Egloff said in the report.
Honestly that anthro story means you could have had a stellar career as a consultant, banker, or expert witness. If you're not rich, joke's on you.
this math-modeling stuff was gosh-darn hard, gosh-darn it,
Isn't that what the controversial talking Barbie said before they pulled it off the market?
Saudis, the world's biggest shitheads, example #982.
controversial talking Barbie
The band names just keep coming.
Not to go all Trumpian, but I feel this was burying the lede.
ISU's associate dean of science and engineering David Rodgers told the Times 80 to 90 percent of cheating reported in recent semesters in his department involved the university's roughly 1,500 foreign students, of whom Saudis and Kuwaitis make up 77 percent.
Anyway, I feel bad that my first though was Chinese nationals.
So we're at the point now that state colleges don't have money from the state, they can't increase tuition any more and still get local students, so they have to throw the doors open to whatever foreigners will pay for degrees, whether they speak English or not, whether they are belligerent or criminals or whatever. Of course the situation in China and Saudi Arabia, where apparently any random degree from any random college in the US impresses people, won't last long either.
Can state governments in places like Idaho and Louisiana just officially shut down the state colleges already instead of making everyone this embarrassed about it?
2 is totally right. I hope you feel you've been rewarded for your pathological honesty and integrity.
8 is right, but I don't know what to do about it. I can't find statistics, but I would bet that educating international students is also a major plus in the U.S. trade balance.
I think Montana Tech is actually in pretty good shape, financially. It's where they churn out all the oil and mining magnates of tomorrow, so in-state tution is low and they can charge whatever they want for everyone else. And the school of mining & engineering is supposedly not unimpressive, in certain circles.
They just need to hire a bunch of bouncers for their exams, obviously.
Also pretend I spelled "belligerent" right in my band name.
And the school of mining & engineering is supposedly not unimpressive, in certain circles.
Not for long, if it's turning into an Idaho State / Western Kentucky style diploma mill for the wealthy bozos of the Orient.
Well, they didn't get diplomas. They got failed and/or kicked out.
7: anecdotally, they would be less blatant about it, e.g. simply hire someone else to take the exam for them. The sort of thing in the article (which is hugely long for a fairly minor story) is more kind of "I'm going to cheat because I can't be bothered working, and I am so sure of my impunity that I can't even be bothered to cheat subtly".
19: That's why I was thinking about Chinese students. The feds arrested 15 people here (that is, in just this city) for hiring people to take the SAT.
I feel like I pulled off a total scam in a sophomore (?) lit class. We had to write a paper on the Iliad and instead of doing any actual analysis, I wrote what was basically a recap in the voice of Huck Finn. (I'm hazy on whether we were reading Huck Finn at the same time or I just decided to use it.) It was so stupid. I wrote shit like "I ain't too bright, but seems to me that all these folks blah blah blah." Prof thought it was so creative and great.
I bet the prof had read too many actual analyses of the Iliad to give a fuck and was ready for anything new and plausible.
The sort of thing in the article (which is hugely long for a fairly minor story)
Come on, it's the local Montana Tech newspaper, this is the biggest story in years.
In high school, we had to write on The Fountainhead and my best friend and I were stuck on what to write our papers about (or maybe we realized that we had basically the same thesis; I can't remember) so we decided to write a joint paper Ayn Rand because that would be so ironic.
Our teacher let us get away with it. She was one of those weird great teachers who wore polyester pantsuits and was sort of harsh but actually taught us stuff.
22: Probably. I don't know how English professors can stand to read essays on the same books for years and years.
Huh this reminds me that I semi-successfully committed academic fraud in the 6th grade. I guess I should feel bad about that.
I almost feel like little kids should actually get academic credit for figuring out ways to successfully cheat.
26: Careful! There are other attorneys reading this blog, who may have a professional obligation to report you.
We had some project that you were supposed to be working on at home for like months. I think it could be anything, like write a play, or do a big artwork, or a science project. But I was just lazy and did absolutely nothing. Anyhow the day? weekend? before it was due I realized I'd done literally nothing at all and needed do something. So after desperately combing around on my parents' bookshelves I fuodn a book on the shelf with a picture of some ancient (I think) Sumerian art and figured it looked easy to make and I could just make a crappy looking sculpture out of clay and call it a project. So I tried that but my crappy sculpture was so bad that even that wasn't really plausible, certainly not as a mnay-months long project. So I went to some copy store and did a deliberately terrible job of photocopying the picture of the Sumerian sculpture, wrote up an extraordinarily thinly-disguised plagarized version of the text about the sculpture, and submitted the blurry photo of an object that kinda looked like my crap sculpture. Yay, here is the project I've been working on for months! I love archaeology! I think I passed, or at least I don't remember failing.
And that was when I learned that if you just procrastinate badly forever and then panic and do a crappy job, things work out sort of OK. The end.
That professor? You guessed it: Frank Stallone.
In HS I had a months-long geography project on which I similarly procrastinated and handed in crap. Then the teacher didn't release the marks. And didn't release the marks. And didn't release the marks, for months, despite the growing complaints of the tiresome diligent fuckers who had actually done the work. Then he died. Then his replacement revealed none of the projects had been marked, because the dead teacher had totally been procrastinating, and now would never be marked, because there wasn't enough time. And I was most gratified.
Dead teacher was also a total dick, so I don't feel bad about this.
33 I think that may be the best procrastination gets rewarded story I've ever heard.
I almost feel like little kids should actually get academic credit for figuring out ways to successfully cheat.
They get credit for that everywhere else, school shouldn't help.
And that was when I learned that if you just procrastinate badly forever and then panic and do a crappy job, things work out sort of OK.
This has proved to be a surprisingly effective client pitch for Tigre.
I almost feel like little kids should actually get academic credit for figuring out ways to successfully cheat
They do.
If they get caught then it wasn't successful.
Holy crap, 33 happened to me but it was a maths teacher.
How does one have a massive math project in school?
33 also happened to me, but it was the boss from my first post-doc, who wanted me to publish a paper or two based on some truly terrible, meaningless data we had spent a whole summer collecting. She kept hectoring me about it, and I kept begging off, for nearly a year, and then she got a lung cancer diagnosis and died within a few months. The project seems to have gone to the grave with her.
When I was barely out of college I took on a project doing drawings of a historic country church, but it was for an underfunded, small group of unrealistic locals, and I kind of dropped it. Then the church burned down, which I now realize means that my failure was extra-awful, but at the time meant that they wouldn't ever try to bug me.
I had a science-y guy do a project for me about a year ago that required a report. He was a nice, smart-seeming guy and did a nice job on preliminary parts, but then after some profuse apology-for-the-delay emails went AWOL and never delivered the report, and never even submitted a bill for the work that he did do. It wasn't a big deal (this was a personal thing, not for a client, not having it done was mildly annoying but I'd paid nothing for it and didn't care much at all). I keep thinking I should send him an email saying "don't worry, I'm not mad, and also check out the website www.unfogged.com"
33 kind of happened to me except that the teacher was quietly forced out for inappropriate relations with my future homecoming date. I had no idea why he mid-year decided to move to a farm in upstate New York.
I had no idea why he mid-year decided to move to a farm in upstate New York.
Same thing happened to my dog, when I was a kid. For some reason my parents just decided to send him off to live on a farm. Weird.
On the internet nobody knows that your teacher is a dog.
WOOF WOOF WOOF. WOOF WOOF WOOF WOOF WOOF.
In my senior year of high school, 1980, almost nobody had a computer, and no high school teacher had any idea how they worked or what they could do. Teh family of a friend of mine had one at home (farther was in the industry), and my friend's senior year geography project was going to be a computer simulation of Risk, in 1980 BASIC. Before long it proved beyond either his or his computer's capacity. He procrastinated for a few weeks, then faked the whole thing, printing out an enormous file of gibberish and claiming that a move by more recounting of a Risk game we played was the output of the program. Got an A.
Ironically, the guy later did figure out how computers work and became a pre-dotcom high tech zillionaire.
Your future homecoming date liked peanut butter?
51.last isn't even Alanis-irony.
I mean, my heuristic of early computer types is precisely that that sort of thing was indicative of future zillionaire status.
Ok, so how much of a faux pas is it to refer to a university as a college in a job cover letter? I'm assuming it means "app gets chucked in the garbage," right?
Though technically, if the dept you're applying to doesn't have a grad program it is a college, so they shouldn't get too offended, right?
Dear students, faculty, and members of the campus community,
We regret to inform you that Professor Snuggleflake had to go on indefinite sabbatical on a farm in Vermont. There is a giant library for him to frolic around in and he is very happy. He will not be responding to emails in the foreseeable future.
Warm Regards,
President Jackass
Would people really care about that? So many colleges are universities nowadays that they are basically synonyms. And it might even be a compliment, since anything that hasn't made the leap to University by now is a small liberal arts college.
The Ohio State College is probably more acceptable than Ohio State University.
WOOF WOOF WOOF. THE WOOF WOOF WOOF. WOOF WOOF WOOF WOOF WOOF.
When I've been on search committees, that sort of error got ignored. Even referring to the wrong college got ignored. But saying you wanted to work here because of something we're not got the app tossed.
60: "Wry Cooter" is still available.
That's good to hear. I am pretty sure this place was a college until a few years ago, anyways.
Hopefully I can look forward to the application getting rejected for a reason other than my own carelessness.
GOOD
LUCK
BUTTERCUP
I could never have done it...
I feel like I pulled off a total scam in a sophomore (?) lit class. We had to write a paper on the Iliad and instead of doing any actual analysis, I wrote what was basically a recap in the voice of Huck Finn.
Worked for Michicko Kakutani, right?
If this is the attitude of Saudi students, as it is, I give the "Thatcherite" reforms of the new crown prince even less than a 0.1% chance. Not that these guys could organise s revolution but they sure as shot couldn't stop one. The whole country must be like marching morons in that Kornbluth story
65 According to what looked like a really good article in the NYRB a lot of those reforms are aimed at curbing the power of the religious establishment and increasing the participation of women in the workforce. As much as I detest the criminal war he is undertaking in Yemen I wish him well in those reforms. Are you thinking of the partial ARAMCO privatization that was floated a while back?
64: Number 4 on this list is great.
http://observer.com/2005/08/quiz-who-is-michiko-kakutani/
66: it's the idea of getting the population off welfare, cutting the subsidies, removing feather beds from the civil service, and, yes, privatisations which worry me. Wonderful interview with him int he economist about a year ago, in which you can practically hear the noise as the interviewers' eyebrows scrape against the ceiling
Yeah, there's all that. They're basically fucked, it's true. But if they can take the imams down a peg or two that would be a good thing. And of course one of the ways they've been dealing with budget shortfalls is by abandoning and not paying their migrant workers.
63
THANKS!!
And good lord does it suck.
one of the ways they've been dealing with budget shortfalls is by abandoning and not paying their migrant workers
Trump has so much in common with so many people. Maybe his foreign policy would be just fine!
I know I often look at the US and think "boy, it sure would be nice if this country were more like Saudi Arabia."
And rainfall? Who needs that shit?
As do gold-plated Kalashnikovs.
And totally unembarrassed race-based slavery
Oh hang on NW, the Saudis treat their Arab guest workers like shit as well.Colour blind!
I feel like the Chinese government should somehow milk the fact rich Saudi assholes are even worse than rich Chinese assholes in their diplomatic efforts. "China! the lazy shitheads we send abroad aren't quite as bad as lazy Saudi and Russian(?) shitheads abroad."
They'd be following an established tradition. "Now listen chaps, yes we have invaded and colonised your country, but look on the bright side, it was us or the French."
Why doesn't one of them just pay a poor/less developed country to send more shitheads abroad to lower the bar for their own shitheads?
It just occurs to me, that's exactly what America did.
when they brought up that it could very well have been belgium the point was no doubt even more effective.