On March 08 2011 09:32 Southlight wrote:
Yes, he learned that when he's given directions that have been explained many times in much detail and with much effort, he better follow them.

Pretty much. It makes you wonder how old some of the people responding are

Horrde

Canada302 Posts

March 08 2011 14:18 GMT

#102

This rule is so, so, so standard. Times up, you stop writing. End of story. The exam begins by the professors clock, and ends the same way. Not by the clock on your wrist, or mine, or the sneaky hothead students to your right.

It's not the military like some of you think it to be, it's just a damn test. And if you can't follow simple rules that are emphasized and repeated to you, then take your test back and hit the road with your 0%.

DND_Enkil

Sweden598 Posts

March 08 2011 14:55 GMT

#103

On March 05 2011 09:17 Hynda wrote:
What a complete asshat. If he had done that on any of the places I've studied at he would have been fired in an instant. Wanting to finish something you've really worked hard for to show ambition to get the absolute most out of your work, is not something that should be punished for. There is no line of work were you will ask to not round something up or take time to finish it, none. You're not going to leave work the moment the clock hits 5 if you are in the middle of a meeting. You don't see articles in papers that just end mid word. It doesn't happen.

This guy is a bully and c**t, he actually wants people to fail, he sets up traps for people to fail so that he can bully them some more. As a teacher you want your students to succed ALWAYS, you never ever want them to fail. If you have a system where you end it on a specific time without letting your students round of their awnsers then you are the problem. The fact that you can fail someone for trying his best is beyond me.

The only bad judgement in this thread is yours for thinking that the professor had any right to act the way he did, and the schools for letting the bastard keep his job.

Not sure where you have been studying then, i studied at Chalmers in Gothenburg and there are some teachers who could have pulled a thing like this. The teacher sets the rules, as a student you follow them, if it was explained in detail beforehand i do not think any school would think twice about a teacher enforcing a rule like this on a Uni level in sweden.

But more common for us was pencils on the desk at the end of time while TA's begin collecting them, in some engineering classes they took away the sheet with the questions on and let the students keep working on thier answers.

Locking the class room the second a test starts is another hardcore rule like that, and while most tests/teachers where fine with you coming a few min late i had one teacher who was a stickler for time and always locked the classroom the second class/test starts or a break is over. People getting all thier stuff, clothes and even cellphones and wallets locked in the classroom for 45 minutes because they came back one minute late from a break meant nothing to this teacher.

Some of the best teachers i have had was really hard with thier rules, the "time-nazi" in particular. His classes was always the calmest ones and he always stayed after class to answer questions and held extra help-classes for thoose having trouble keeping up.

So yeah, the student knew the risk and should have followed the rule really. It is not really a strange rule either, classes is not only about teaching a subject it is also about preparing for work. Working with a deadline is actually quite common and many newly graduated students have trouble keeping the pace and dealing with the time pressure when they start working (strictly from my own experiences/observations), so i can understand a teacher wanting to enforce a rule like this.

And at least in sweden retaking a test is not a huge a deal...

QuanticHawk

United States32025 Posts

March 08 2011 15:06 GMT

#104

I'm just curious, would the people that bitch about the time frame violations being unfair do the same if they got caught cheating in the same fashion on the SAT, LSAT, MCATs or whatever

MoreFaSho

United States1427 Posts

March 08 2011 15:42 GMT

#105

On March 08 2011 04:54 JeeJee wrote:

Show nested quote +

On March 08 2011 02:08 MoreFaSho wrote:

On March 05 2011 10:21 JeeJee wrote:

On March 05 2011 10:03 MoreFaSho wrote:
I was just talking about this exact situation with a friend the other day. I have no problem with a rule like this, I just think the rule is overly punitive with the way many classes are graded*. Why not instead reduce the student's score by 20%, enough for it to be guaranteed punishment, but not enough to ruin someone's grade for the entire class for one (in the grand scheme of things small) lapse in judgement. Even 30, 40, or 50% would be bigger, more reasonable, but still a large punishment.

I had a guy sitting next to me in high school ask me for an eraser during an exam and the teacher assumed he was cheating and instantly ripped up the test without figuring out the situation.

*In high school most of my classes were 90+ some for of A, 80-89 some form of B, etc. which makes getting a 0 on a large part of your grade irrecoverable no matter how well you do on everything else. In college, classes were actually impossibly hard sometimes where 60% was a very good score, getting 0 obviously would still be devastating, but it wasn't actually impossible to recover from such a result.

eh i disagree with this example
the OP's is a little silly, but this one's completely the student's fault. you need an eraser, you raise your hand for a proctor to come and talk to you. you don't speak to fellow exam writers, that's just suicide. there's so many ways to cheat if you allow this in any form. i 100% agree on no-tolerance there.

Why not at least investigate whether or not cheating took place. We don't take a zero tolerance policy on anything else. School allow children to eat candy even though many elicit drugs look quite similar to certain types of candy.
Why would this seem unreasonable:
A kid gets expelled for possessing loose pez candy.
Is it unreasonable for me to say:
"There are so many ways to traffic drugs in middle schools if you allow this in any form. I 100% agree on no-tolerance there."

how are you going to investigate whether cheating took place? you film everyone? get a proctor for every few students? or are you going to take the word of a student who talks to another person taking the test that 'no, i just wanted the eraser'?
this is also why the pez example is irrelevant.

Depends on the test I guess. At my college when they suspected a student of cheating they interviewed them about their though process for a bunch of questions. This is actually remarkably accurate, cheaters don't know how they got to an answer whereas the people who did work tend to know how they got an answer. This is also why it's useful to collect scrap work from an exam so you can see what they wrote down in case this comes up.

I'm not saying in every case you can after the fact do something, but it doesn't mean you can't prepare to deal with things in a reasonable way. Just because we have laws and rules that people are aware of doesn't mean any punishment is justified.