Students Busted For Cheating

Normally a bunch of students getting caught cheating on an exam wouldn't be a big story. It's more of an occupational hazard. We professors take all sorts of precautions, but it's a move-countermove game (kind of like terrorism). One side does something and the other side reacts. I only wish the students would put as much effort and creativity into studying as they do in cheating.

What caught my eye about this, though, was two things. First, the Pollyanna-ish attitude of the professor. If he thinks this is the first and only time anyone has ever cheated in his class, well, I wonder what color the sky is in his world. Probably rosy pink.

The second item of interest is the unbelievable attitude of the second student interviewed. He's got some long, unpronounceable name with many consonants, so I didn't write it down, but you can't miss him.

Please bear with the advertisement at the beginning of the video. I couldn't find one without some sort of ad. But please sit through it and see if you're as dismayed as I am.

UPDATE: The video has been removed from the ABC News website, but a written story is available. Excerpts below.

Hundreds of students caught in a cheating scandal at the University of Central Florida in Orlando have been given a choice: Come clean or face the consequences.

Regardless of their decision, all the students must retake their midterm exam this week.

Professor Richard Quinn addressed his students in a videotaped lecture, explaining that the test scores "were a grade and a half higher than [they had] ever had run before."

Those elevated test results sent up a "red flag," so Quinn ran more complicated statistics on the exam results. He said he then received confirmation of his suspicions when a student, "either through a guilty conscience or as a head's up," anonymously tipped him off.

Two hundred students, approximately one-third of the class of seniors, were believed to have received advanced copies of the exam. It was the largest cheating scandal in the university's history.

Quinn, who called the scandal "a knife to my heart, calculated exactly who'd cheated, and then gave the entire class a dressing down.

"To say I'm disappointed is beyond comprehension," he said. "Physically ill, absolutely disgusted, disillusioned, trying to figure out what the last 20 years were all about."

Like I said, Pollyanna lives.

He offered the students an ultimatum: Come clean and take a four-hour ethics course, and your records would be wiped clean. If they chose not to come forward, they'd run a risk.

"If you want to take a high-risk gamble, take it. I challenge you to take it," he said. "Because we know who you are, we know where you are and when academic affairs is done, you'll know the outcome."

Aside from the ultimatum, Quinn is making all 600 students retake the exam, whether they cheated or not. He has given the cheating students until midnight Wednesday to come forward and take the ethics seminar to risk expulsion.

So far, he told ABC News, about half of the cheaters have confessed.

Student responses:

"If this is your major, you should be studying," Riordan continued. "You should want to learn and not to cheat."

Student Alan Blanchard agreed.

"It's horrible," he said. "We don't need unethical people going into the business world, obviously. I'm sure there's enough of them out there."

But student Konstantin Ravvin expressed a different opinion, accusing the university of "making a witch hunt out of absolutely nothing, as if they want to teach us some kind of moral lesson."

"This is college. Everyone cheats, everyone cheats in life in general," Ravvin said. "I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone in this testing lab who hasn't cheated on an exam."

I wish the video was still available, because that last knucklehead went on to say how adults cheat to get ahead all the time so why shouldn't students, and a bunch more tripe like that. Maybe the adults he knows are like that, but most of the ones I know are generally honest.

I wish the professor the best. I certainly hope the situation is resolved and all those involved get the outcome they deserve. However, I will be very, very surprised if at some point a gaggle of lawyers don't slither out from under a pile of rocks...