So it is the third day of my “vacation” before summer classes begin and as bad as finals week was, vacation is beginning to make me miss it! So far I have lost my three year old dryer and my cable/internet/phone for 4 hours yesterday. This makes me miss finals week with the full on plagiarizer and the two cheaters.

Now I know that technically plagiarism is of course cheating, and both count as academic dishonesty, but one was in a paper and the other two were with an exam. I was surprised at how angry I was at the three people who I had to fail and report, but of course I am always pissed when people think that they can get away with anything. Like in a class of 26 I will somehow miss that two students have the exact same, in many places word for word, wrong answer on the essay part of an exam. That really just trips my trigger is that I have no idea how they did this. They either had this down before they came to class, which is hard to believe, how did they get the question, or one of them passed their answer to the other one to copy. Either way, they fail. And then there is my plagiarizer. Not only were whole portions of the paper lifted from websites, but she was missing half of her portfolio. And the worst part of this is that no one in the department is surprised or as angry as I am. It’s all taken with some blasé attitude. Even academic affairs could care less. Which leads me to a question that has been burning in the back of my head for awhile, have we as academics just given up? Have we been beaten by the constant and ever present cheating? Was the internet the straw that broke the camels back? Have we thrown in the towel? It feels like we have, we have accepted what the world is now and moved on. The Phantom Prof, a few weeks ago, pointed out an article from the Chronicle about the high tech ways that students have begun to cheat, and the steps that colleges are taking to stop them. This depresses me, but it also makes me wonder how far we should go to stop people who obviously don’t really want to learn. Even if someone cheats their way through college and somehow graduates, won’t their lack of knowledge catch up to them somewhere in the real world? I would like to think so, but I have seen far too many people succeed when they should have failed.