The end of a semester always brings on a lot of crazy times – students studying everywhere, faculty writing and grading finals frantically, and everything seems to reach sort of a fever pitch before dissipating for the summer. Another phenomenon we see as teachers is general student desperation on the rise. Whether in the form of round-the-clock studying, begging for extra credit opportunities, or your basic psychotic break, the students are freaking out. Unfortunately, I recently saw this take the form of cheating.

Now, I’m very, very solidly anti-cheating. I am, however, even more solidly against stupid cheating. I won’t go into details, as I don’t think I’m allowed to, but seriously, kids, give us instructors a little bit of credit – we do actually read your assignments and papers, and we absolutely will notice if you copy and paste another person’s work and hand it in as your own.

In addition to the frustration/irritation of the whole ordeal, we now have to 1. decide what to do with the students (fail them from the lab? give them zeros on the assignments in question? and 2. report them. As graduate students, however, we’re apparently not allowed to report these ourselves, even though we’re the teachers of record for the lab (I have no idea how this makes any sense). So now we have to work through the instructor for the lecture course that goes with the lab course, and the whole thing is turning into a giant time-suck (which is leading me closer and closer to the psychotic break option listed above).

Sigh. At least this round’s almost over.