cheaters and heartbreak

My schedule is crazy from Sunday night until Wednesday, but of course the good part is that I am done with any out-of-the-house work at noon on Wednesday (this does not preclude in house work, but that's different). I mentioned in an earlier blog that I am working in a new program that I helped to create, in a new capacity which is great. Only, there is almost no curriculum available since I invented the class and have to create it all myself from scratch-- I try to use other people's stuff or text books that come with CDs and assignments but I just can't do it. I always have to make it my own. So I scramble and I write (four hours of lecture and four hours of lab work per week). It's a labor of love, but the operative word here is labor.

But tonight, after a major marathon of class material prep and writing the midterm I gave this morning, I decided to take a break and chill in my robe, play Bazza's quiz and generally dip back into the global friendspace.

After reading Quilldancers blog about her test, I had to convey one of the weird things that happened to me in grading my first graphic design project this week: Two people cheated.

I gave them an assignment in a page layout program where I give them the raw components--some digital images that are very large and have to be sized down and placed into a string of frames, some text in Word and a set of instructions also in Word. I also give them, only on the first assignment, an example, in the same program, that they can use to see how I constructed mine. I give them a speech that I only give them this one example in the same program that they are using on the first assignment because it is difficult the first time they use the program again after the Summer break. After that I give them a PDF file that will show them how an assignment looks but they cannot "strip it for parts." I told them that unforunately due to the fact that there has been cheating in the past I have had to resort to this, as much as I would love to give them as much information as they need to do the best job that they can.

After that speech, I figured there wouldn't be any cheaters trying to turn my own example back in renamed as their own. Plus the fact that I know these guys, they are in their second year, juried in, on track for their degree.

So I'm going through this first project, pulling them up one at a time and they are all designed to look like mine, but it's amazing how accurate the human eye is-- I can tell that they are different. It's like, give someone a picture of cut out shapes of paper arranged into a collage, then give them the same colored paper and ask them to cut out their own and paste them up. They won't be exactly the same as the picture but very similar. There are differences in proportion, but when there isn't... it was amazing-- it was like hearing a chord and knowing that it was the same chord you had just heard. I opened up a file and this person had put all kinds of different fonts surrounding the string of resized images to disguise it, but the sequence of images just struck me. I had seen that proportion before. So I simply clicked on one of the images, brought up the info palette which told me the exact dimensions of the image to ten thousands of an inch, opened my example, clicked on the same image and I'll be damned-- exactly the same. I went through all of the placed images and they were all the same dimensions down to ten thousands of an inch. So I marked a "see me" down, I was a a little disappointed and about 6 assignments later there it was again! The bells were ringing, the chord was playing.

So, in lab while people were working I called the students up one by one to go over their projects and grades while people were working on the new project and when I got to cheater number one I explained very quietly the fact that I have info in my files that serve as saferguards against anyone using the stuff I provide... then asked, do you know why I'm telling you this? "Because I used your file." "Because you used my file. You can't use my file for your assignment." To keep this short, he got a 0 but I told him that if he did the assignment over he could get half the alotted points for that assignment which was better than a 0 but still an F (50%). The second person came up and I got as far as "You know my images have measurements that are down to ten thousand of an inch.." and she just said bluntly "I cheated." "Yeah, you cheated." Same speech followed but man, I was shocked and dismayed that that is how we started the term off. What a bummer.

Just had to get that off my chest.

Peace, Tom out