2021-05-18

done with grading

I'm a university lecturer, by trade, and today I finished grading for my semester.

Damn, this was rough.

I had so many cheating students this semester--I don't think I've ever seen it this bad before. In every single class (three in total), there were at least two students who thought that it would be a good idea to copy entire projects, exam questions, or lab assignments. In one class, I had six do this for homework submissions.

It's very draining on me to have to put up with this from people who are supposed to be adults. For those who I caught (and there are likely ones that I *didn't* catch this time around), the punishment will be severe for them. Our college has a pretty strict policy on cheating and plagiarism, and I plan to utilize it.

I'm sure that our COVID social-distancing is somewhat to blame here. Cheating is pretty tempting when your entire class is behind a computer screen and the big wide Internet is right there in front of you. But I also can't help that somewhere along the line these students have done this before, gotten away with it, and believe that it is okay to do.

The students who actually responded to my requests to discuss their submissions all seemed fairly entitled to a good grade in the class and most weren't apologetic about doing it. I hate to sound like an old man, but *back in my day* this was totally unacceptable behavior for university students to do at any level. But these are about-to-graduate seniors (and a category we have in CS we dub 'super seniors' for their 5th-year status). The most frequent plea I got from them was that they were about to graduate and could I please just pass them 'because that would throw off graduation date'.

No. No. No. I will not contribute to your shitty behavior. I don't care that your family was expecting to see you walk next week. I don't care that you had plans and a job lined up and blah, blah, blah.

And stop trying to make *me* feel bad because you decided to take a shortcut with your schoolwork and got caught. You fucked up, not me, and now you have to deal with the fallout of that.