Hallelujah

I'm totally with this RYS post:

Not all students act horribly...and it's those students I worry most about. When Paula Plagiarist gets a C because she whined to a faculty-hating administrator about her F, what does that do to Marvin Mediocre who actually earned his C by performing with a basic level of competency? When Big-Mouth Barry bombs a class, bitches his way through a grade grievance and is awarded a C just to go away, what does that do to Sally the C-Student, who had some health problems and earned a C because she came to the final exam with a sinus infection?

I love (platonically, you understand!) the student that works and deserves the grade they get, even if they're not the most academically gifted (there's a real thrill in working with the student who suddenly "gets it" after some hard graft). I do my damnedest, & consider it my job, to make sure that they all get the grade they deserve, including

• Whining William and his endless set of excuses,
• Cheating Charlene and her group of plagiarists who paid "some bloke off the internet" to do their project,
• Loophole Larry who thinks that exerting effort getting around the regulations is academically-equivalent to doing the work,
• Mike the Muppet whose idea of catching-up after a prolonged (genuine, mit. circ. style) absence is to copy a pile of work off the internet etc.

If you're not one of these (or those listed on RYS) then make sure you take advantage of the opportunities we try to provide -- I hope I'll never turn away a deserving student (not permanently, anyway: we are all busy people, after all...)

Bare-faced cheek

Today was final assessment day for this year's Web Technologies module: A Questionmark Perception test and short JavaScript assignment. Sadly the start to the test malfunctioned and I was forced to remove the Blackboard setting that restricted students to one attempt at the test. Happily Perception gives easy access to all attempts by every student (something Blackboard does not, easily anyway); unhappily, in hindsight, I should have restricted them to a few attempts rather than unlimited...

Amusingly, one student assumed I wouldn't check and he used this lapse to attempt the assessment over-and-over until his time ran out, utilising the fact that the assessment showed the marks to gain an unfair advantage. Happily I did check and so we'll be enacting the relevant part of the "Cheating in Assessment" regulations on his behalf. What a waste of time!!

And the bare faced cheek? He had the chutzpah to complain at the end of the test (before I'd discovered his perfidy) that he'd arrived late & unfairly lost time. This fell on my unsympathetic ears -- no good excuse => no extra time. Tough monkeys! But cheeky, nonetheless...