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Just Because

Source Code Trailer

chtierna says...

Hahahahaa, you read my mind! Oh wait, did you go into the Source Code and run a Decompiler on the Dynamics Matrix so you could read my mind? Oh no! I have to invert my Internets now!

Seriously though, best comment on the sift!

>> ^solecist:

i was honestly surprised to see people in the comments saying they thought this was going to be good. this is about as nonsensical as a science fiction concept can get and the fact that they're throwing romance in there is the nail in the coffin. i especially like how he is experiencing something impossible and is just blurting out everything he is thinking. IM CAPTAIN COLTER STEVENS WHAT AM I DOING ON A TRAIN? I HAVE NO INTERNAL MONOLOGUE GUH UGH GUH WHY DO I LOOK DIFFERENT IN THE MIRROR, GIRLIDONTKNOW?
then he dies and pops into his own body and they explain the whole thing to him...they send him back to the train and the first thing he says is IM ON THE SAME TRAIN BUT NOT THE SAME TRAIN. HEY YOURE THAT GIRL I SAW THE FIRST TIME I DIED WHEN I WAS HERE EARLIER DID YOU KNOW YOURE GOING TO DIE????
"what is the source code?"
"it's a computer program, captain."
geez, i bet the captain was all like, "isn't source code actually the written language of a program before compilation? were you just looking for a confusing name or did you somehow create the most incredible technology ever without realizing what source code is?"
what a dummy!

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I hate Eharmony

dannym3141 (Member Profile)

chtierna says...

I agree exactly. The first 5 minutes inspired awe and many other feelings, the religion part just fell flat and then the end revived the magic a bit.

In reply to this comment by dannym3141:
The first 5 minutes were absolutely beautiful. Those 5 minutes express in words things that i never could, sat there staring up at the sky or looking through a telescope. It expresses completely my marvel when looking out at the universe and understanding the things i understand about it and then looking back down at myself and everyone on earth with me.

The rest of it i could take or leave. No need to argue for/against religion after that point. Just say those first 5 minutes, and the conclusions are your own.

berticus (Member Profile)

Science saved my Soul.

200 students admit cheating after professor's online rant

chtierna says...

Wasn't there any way you could tip the teachers off as to what was happening?

>> ^ShakyJake:

I just graduated recently with a Mechanical Engineering degree, and I have to say that I just WISH this had happened in some of my classes. There were communities in some of my classes that I was never part of that had copies of everything, each semester. All the homework problems out of the textbooks, old exams from previous semesters where the professor just used the same exam year after year, these guys had it all. And no matter how hard I studied, I could never match that kind of advantage. Even more frustrating was that in most cases the classes would be based on "the curve", and these people threw that off. I never actually stooped to cheating, but there were certainly times I wished I had been.

200 students admit cheating after professor's online rant

chtierna says...

@Porksandwich

Definitely. Whatever happend to apprenticeship? Me, as a programmer, I would have loved the chance to get involved in a real company as a part of my education and have some guidance from someone working inside the industry. Give the company a bit of money for the effort, in exchange the students get real-world experience and can build a net of contacts and the companies can pick out talents. Mix the work with studies in theory, maybe the companies would even pick up new processes and advancements from the academic world through the students.

>> ^Porksandwich:

@<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/chtierna" title="member since September 25th, 2008" class="profilelink">chtierna
I understand the stresses of it, but a lot of it is brought about by the attitude that you need 99% graduation and 99% job placement. and 99% this and that.
And I know university classes are about learning to think instead of learning subject matter or how to. But if this is the case then cheating is not helping. And allowing cheating is not helping. But their goals are now primarily "making money" instead of education. So that said, I wish they would venture a little and do the 4 year program but allow students who complete the 4 year do 6-12 months of "trade school" type projects where they learn to put their education into practical applications. Even allow businesses to give the school some hardware/money/whatever to let the students finish these projects in this period of time. And allow for people to apply themselves directly to work projects while being able to have access to the school faculty, that way they can find deficiencies in their teaching and fix them plus allow students to find their weaknesses and address them through a little research of their own and application.
It always frustrates me to see how much people embellish on their resumes and their job descriptions when you see what they actually do. But this comes from there being no baseline for comparison, some people get paid less and do much more difficult work but it's presented less........."colorfully" on their resume than the higher paid stuff.

I know they have professors help military bases with teaching programs and such and even consult with businesses. I don't see a problem with businesses working more closely with universities to get some cheap/free work out of it, find some potential hires and make both the school and the business more attractive to current and potential employees.
At least then it could potentially lead to another revenue source for the university that doesn't harm the students by allowing cheaters to ruin the program. Might even convince more undergrads to go into graduate programs if they do the work and find they really like portions of it and want to specialize.

200 students admit cheating after professor's online rant

chtierna says...

When I was teaching in Sweden we had problems with mostly foreign students cheating. It's possible that everyone was cheating equally much but the Swedish students didn't get caught as often. I got it explained to me that foreign students had a lot of pressure to do well and they always took as many courses as they could simultaneously which inevitably led to them "having" to cheat.

I also had it explained to me that the foreign students were the ones keeping the school afloat since every course they got through and every education they finished brought in money for the school. Some courses were a joke, they made them easy just to keep the throughput high.

The blame can be spread far and wide. Students were lazy etc (I was lazy too sometimes). Planning new courses could be a nightmare. The formula went like this: Out of 100 students applying to a course, only 50 would finish the course (or even show up) and only 25 would get a passing grade. Still you needed lecture rooms and equipment and everything else for the 50+ people. If you made the course too hard and not enough people passed, the school took a hit.

I taught a course in programming that was initially intended for around 30 people, but almost 200 people signed up and over 100 showed up. Panic. I was officially only a teaching assistant but the main teacher didn't really know programming (she was a doctorate and dumped the whole course in my lap) and now suddenly I was lecturing a class of 100+ students, mostly foreign, with little or no computer experience (they dont have the same amount of equipment abroad apparently), most of them studying 150% and studying for re-exams at the same time. I think in the end around 20 students passed (I wrote the exam and the course responsible cleared it without reading it and realizing I'd made it "too hard"). I know it sounds like I'm just making this stuff up. But it really happened. In Sweden (!).

I guess I don't have a moral of the story, I'm just venting Seeing things from the other side I realized what a mess education could be.

>> ^Porksandwich:

I was a computer science major in my 4th year...so I was in a lot of classes with graduate students. They had a few extra things on exams and projects they had to do for their graduate portion of the class. What was hilarious is that most of them were Indian and most of them came in to class with what looked like a xerox copy of each others work with their name signed to it, and this went on all quarter. On the last exam one of them sat next to me and was obviously trying to cheat off my exam, so I spent awhile writing down false answers and making them very easy to read because this whole Indian group of students seemed to ride on each others work and no one called them on it. While I saw undergraduate US citizens being busted for the same thing (I can only assume this was motivated by money and enrollment/scores).
So after I knew I wouldn't have enough time to keep up the false answers, I hurried up and changed all my work hunched over my test so he couldn't read it anymore and finished. Turned it in and told the professor that he was copying off me and the two Indians in front of us were sharing answers with him. I mean you'd have to be blind to not see the guys turn around during the test multiple times.

And on my exit interview for the school I ranked it down and told them that I was pissed that those Indian students were never punished, since them cheating off undergrads makes it appear that undergrads are the ones cheating if you just look at the data and assume graduate students should know the answers. Plus I marked off some things for other stuff. And the dean of my school changed my numbers scores to higher scores because he would question me on something and I'd say "Maybe, but I feel my personal experience warrants that score." He would say something like "But isn't that too harsh, so maybe we should......" and I'd disagree, but he'd still change the score.
It's kind of a shame when you like the subject you study but the people teaching it to you make a mockery of the university by having double standards for the various grads/undergrads and ethnic groups. They still call me up and want alumni donations, and I tell the people calling my story and why I won't ever donate to that university...and why they should transfer out ASAP. Assuming they don't have a heavy Indian accent....

kronosposeidon (Member Profile)

chtierna says...

Thanks for the promote and interesting story, although the last sentence was the one that really raised my eyebrows:

"The cheating scandal is the latest blow to the Academy, which suffered a sexual harassment scandal in 1990 after eight male midshipmen chained a female classmate to a urinal."

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
>> ^EmptyFriend:

interesting story.
side note: i hope it's not a math course...
"the midterm exam makeup will open at 7AM on Monday morning, Nov 8.... it will close at midnight on November the 10th... it will be open 51 hours."
Sorry professor, that's 41 hours!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If they're keeping office hours from 7:00 am to midnight just for the makeup exam, that's 17 hours per day. (I highly doubt they would stay open 24 hrs/day, even to administer the makeup exam. They ain't working in a factory with night shifts.) If they do this on November 8, November 9, and November 10, that's three days. That would be 51 hours in total.

>> ^Drachen_Jager:

He's bluffing. There's no way they could prove conclusively whether or not any one person was involved without searching their rooms/belongings for the cheat-sheet.
You're probably right. However they might compare each student's score on the cheat test with the scores they've gotten on previous tests in the course, and if their cheat test score is significantly higher than their previous test scores, then that could be a big red flag. Maybe that's just one of their lines of evidence against the 200 suspected cheaters.

However I was thinking the same thing @chtierna said: he's mainly bluffing the cheaters. The guilty parties are much better off simply retaking the exam (and even possibly doing badly) than not taking the exam and then risk being expelled for cheating.

Unfortunately this shit happens more often than many suspect, but most of the time it goes undetected. Anyone remember the cheating scandal at the US Naval Academy in the early '90s? Of course not; you're all a bunch of damn kids.

*promote

200 students admit cheating after professor's online rant

chtierna says...

metan
etan
propan
butan
pentan
hexan
heptan
octan
nonan
decan

Our whole class had to memorize the names (in Swedish) of the first 10 hydrocarbons. If anyone in the class missed a single one, the whole class had to do it again. To this day I remember the names, and to this day I've never used that knowledge. This would have been a good time to cheat.

>> ^deathcow:

I wrote the number of atoms in a mole (or somesuch fixed quantity like that) inside my calculator cover for a chemistry exam. Teacher said we had to remember it, screw that.



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