Graduation day!

It's graduation day again at the Barbican Centre in London so I'd like to wish good luck to our graduates from 2004 :-)

Footnote: It was a shame our M.Sc. by Research success from last year could not make it ... good luck Andy!

Marking hell

OK, so marking is one of the most boring parts of my job. It's only fun when either entertaining solutions appear (thanks for the effort in week7RSVP, everyone!) or when entertainingly awful solutions are submitted.

The winner this week goes to the student who is already retaking the module (3^rd and final attempt, most likely.) Due to a possibly terminal case of laziness he simply took a copy of his week 7 exercise from last year, renamed the file and submitted it for this year. Using the correct filename suggests that he read at least the 1^st few lines of the assignment this time around. However since last year's and this year's exercises are completely different I guess he was fatigued by the effort of reading a few sentences and didn't go any further ...

Thanks for the laugh, whoever you are (I mark semi-anonymously with ID numbers only.) Needless to say you're failing again this year, but you're not surprised by that, are you?

Cretins

Here's an example: A guy emails me his work saying he can't find the place to submit it online (despite it being clearly labeled on the module web site). He's apparently repeating the module, having failed it last year, and the work he's submitted this year is mostly incomplete apart from the final week's XML exercise (that topic happened to coincide with the same week last year) which is a complete copy of last year's work! (Big fat zero time!) His email is polite (but uses all lower-case letters) and I can't help but think that he's put in about zero effort this year and just assumes he has a chance to pass! To mis-quote Dawg Brown in Cutthroat Island: Stupidity ... who can explain it?

Academic standards are not falling (despite what students might think!)

(You can tell it's marking season...) At least one student obviously thinks that academic standards are falling and that his standard of work can drop too, so he's handed-in an essay that includes a reference to that well-known peer-reviewed journal Nuts! Now writing funny comments in written work can be funny (within reason) but your reference list says a lot about how you researched your work ... we think it's taking honesty a bit to far to admit that whilst doing your work you were reading a tabloid men's magazine and that you thought that some of the content was of such obvious scientific value you just had to reference it! Probaby not "dumbass of the week" material (see the previous post!) but it's in the top 10 for this week :-)

Stupidest copying ever?

You couldn't make this stuff up: A colleague was telling me that a student on her module handed-in an essay that was made up of large chunks of text that were copied verbatim from two research papers. Not unusual, I thought (plagiarism is a problem and we try to be vigilant), until she said that one of the papers was one of hers! Now I appreciate that it's an unwritten rule that you should make sure you look for and reference any relevant papers by your examiners in postgraduate research but it's quite stupidly insulting to copy the text from your supervisor's own papers. <grin> at least it's easy to identify!

Stupid question of the week

Happy 2005! The new year starts by following-on from last year: Santa did not bring this student any more intelligence for christmas! Asking "When does term start?" really does indicate a lack of effort (it's not hard to find out!) or memory (it's in the student handbook, it's not a long document, you did read it like you were asked, didn't you?)