ethix test 2010
I'm in favor of the ethics test, and I'll tell you why. The people of Illinois have consistently been voting against politicians who cheat, steal, lie, etc., and I think it's partly because a general campaign against cheating, stealing, and lying has been working.
Now of course it galls me, and I've said so repeatedly, that a state which has two ex-governors in jail, a state for which I teach twenty hours a week, and for whom plenty of administrators have plenty of time to sit around, noticing who hasn't taken their ethics test, and even how long it took those who took it, to take their ethics test, well, anyway, here's this state telling me what to do, when I not only don't really have time to do it, but also, some people have all the time in the world, and don't have any ethical qualms about that whatsoever. So we sit down by the computer and take this test, and it's all I can do, as I say, not to steal a picture of the Illinois state capitol onto my desktop where I can photoshop it or doctor it in some way just out of principle. But I don't, and the main reason is, I don't have time anymore. If they want me to take this test, I'll just take it, print out the certificate, and let everyone know they can cross me off their list.
Now this is a state where the present Senator was caught trying to buy his seat; he bought it, successfully, and, what was truly amazing was that after he got caught he went on acting like it was business as usual. Like, this is how we always decided who was senator. Like, you might as well spell it I-L-L-I-C-O-R-R-U-P-T-I-O-N-O-I-S. A guy finally comes forward and says he's written hundreds of thousands of term papers for college students all over the country, and says that education students are the worst...it's like, if you're going to be a teacher, you definitely want to buy that degree, because that's how it's done. Why should teachers know how to write?
Ah, but this is a national problem; back when I was looking for a job, and this was maybe twenty years ago or more, some school district was looking for a "principle" and I wondered if I would qualify. Actually, I decided that I had a few I could lend them, but I wasn't sure I myself wanted to work for them, if the person who wrote the ads had that much trouble spelling. Nevertheless I now find myself curious about some subjects which, when I enter them into Google, the competition is so fierce that I could pick from dozens of free term papers written on these topics, all of which have a reasonable degree of accuracy and are written with a standard, cookie-cutter kind of phraseology which might trip up a student if his/her teacher uses Google at all, but otherwise might not be suspected, because literally anyone could have written it. My own students of course could not produce a grammatical sentence themselves any other way besides googling it, thus I know for certainty, when something has the smoothness and confidence of perfect grammar, it was either bought or googled or both. And I consider it my job to know this, to know what they will do to avoid writing, and what it looks like when they avoid it successfully. But alas the system is stacked against me: their teachers are avoiding it; so are university presidents, and vice presidents of the U.S.A. Almost nobody writes unless they have to, so why am I even writing this? Not sure. It's kind of a private rant, I guess, meant to move some stuff off the bottom of the blog there so you won't see it every time you open it up. In fact, you'll never even know that, unless you've actually read this far, and that's highly unlikely, isn't it? Nobody actually reads this stuff, do they?
Now of course it galls me, and I've said so repeatedly, that a state which has two ex-governors in jail, a state for which I teach twenty hours a week, and for whom plenty of administrators have plenty of time to sit around, noticing who hasn't taken their ethics test, and even how long it took those who took it, to take their ethics test, well, anyway, here's this state telling me what to do, when I not only don't really have time to do it, but also, some people have all the time in the world, and don't have any ethical qualms about that whatsoever. So we sit down by the computer and take this test, and it's all I can do, as I say, not to steal a picture of the Illinois state capitol onto my desktop where I can photoshop it or doctor it in some way just out of principle. But I don't, and the main reason is, I don't have time anymore. If they want me to take this test, I'll just take it, print out the certificate, and let everyone know they can cross me off their list.
Now this is a state where the present Senator was caught trying to buy his seat; he bought it, successfully, and, what was truly amazing was that after he got caught he went on acting like it was business as usual. Like, this is how we always decided who was senator. Like, you might as well spell it I-L-L-I-C-O-R-R-U-P-T-I-O-N-O-I-S. A guy finally comes forward and says he's written hundreds of thousands of term papers for college students all over the country, and says that education students are the worst...it's like, if you're going to be a teacher, you definitely want to buy that degree, because that's how it's done. Why should teachers know how to write?
Ah, but this is a national problem; back when I was looking for a job, and this was maybe twenty years ago or more, some school district was looking for a "principle" and I wondered if I would qualify. Actually, I decided that I had a few I could lend them, but I wasn't sure I myself wanted to work for them, if the person who wrote the ads had that much trouble spelling. Nevertheless I now find myself curious about some subjects which, when I enter them into Google, the competition is so fierce that I could pick from dozens of free term papers written on these topics, all of which have a reasonable degree of accuracy and are written with a standard, cookie-cutter kind of phraseology which might trip up a student if his/her teacher uses Google at all, but otherwise might not be suspected, because literally anyone could have written it. My own students of course could not produce a grammatical sentence themselves any other way besides googling it, thus I know for certainty, when something has the smoothness and confidence of perfect grammar, it was either bought or googled or both. And I consider it my job to know this, to know what they will do to avoid writing, and what it looks like when they avoid it successfully. But alas the system is stacked against me: their teachers are avoiding it; so are university presidents, and vice presidents of the U.S.A. Almost nobody writes unless they have to, so why am I even writing this? Not sure. It's kind of a private rant, I guess, meant to move some stuff off the bottom of the blog there so you won't see it every time you open it up. In fact, you'll never even know that, unless you've actually read this far, and that's highly unlikely, isn't it? Nobody actually reads this stuff, do they?
posted by tom @ 8:02 PM
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This weblog is about my efforts, sometimes futile, to teach about plagiarism to international students. Deeper in the blog is a documented story (if the newspaper articles still are there) about how a really nice guy made a mistake...however, that's water under the bridge. My classes have always been full of nice people who made mistakes.
