Journey to a PhD – Page 3 – The Renegade Coder

Awhile back, I wrote an article complaining about a student who made my life pretty difficult. Well, as it turns out, there are plenty of students like that one. Just three semesters later, I find myself once again dealing with difficult college students. What If a Student Is Late to an Exam? Let's consider a scenario where a student is late to an exam. That student shows up about 15 minutes into a 55-minute exam. When time expires, you ask the remaining students to submit their exams, but the student who was late refuses to turn their exam over. After all, they think they deserve those 15 minutes that everyone else got. What do you do? When this happened to me the first time, I did what most folks would do—nothing. After all, there's an agreed upon time for all students to take the exam. If you're late, you lose that time, plain and simple. When this happened to me the second time, it was on a final, and the same student was significantly more late. They had lost an hour of a 105-minute exam. Immediately, they pressed me for more time. When the exam was over, they continued to plead for help. Again, I offered nothing but a chance to work things out with my boss and me at another time. In both scenarios, I felt like I was doing the right thing in the moment, but somehow it still felt wrong after the fact. In the next section, I'll share some of the reasoning for my decision in both cases. Then, I'll talk about how things actually played out. Helping Students Is Tricky Business Normally, I'm pretty lax and give students the benefit of the doubt. In fact, I often give students extensions on their assignments, ignore attendance, and just generally let students make their own decisions. After all, they're adults, and they deserve to be treated as such—contrary to popular belief. That said, in certain scenarios, I don't always feel comfortable making arrangements. Specifically, I don't like giving students accommodations when I'm not sure if I'm violating a university policy. For example, if a student shows up to an exam late, I'm just not sure if I'm allowed to give them additional time. To me, it makes more sense to take a step back to get some help before making any mistakes. In addition, I don't like offering help to a student if it could be perceived as special treatment. After all, as an instructor, I need to appear fair even if I am providing help to students in need. If I choose to help a student, I have to anticipate that other students may see me as a pushover. After all, if I'm letting one student off the hook for being late, what's stopping me from letting others be late? As a result, I tend to make arrangements with students in private which can be hard to do during an exam. That last point is tough for me because it's a cultural problem. Obviously, I should be able to cut someone a break without fear of being taken advantage of, but I can't. People are obsessed with keeping things "fair"—whatever that means. Likewise, there are logistical concerns. After all, the time allotted for the exam lines up exactly with the time booked for the room. In other words, offering additional time could cut into another lecture or exam. Clearly, I can't impede on another class's time. Finally, I hesitated cutting the student a break because I had no witness. If I gave the student the extra time, they could still claim I didn't. No one would be around to take my side. In situations like this, I prefer to have a paper trail. Ironically, if the student just hadn't shown up, I would have gladly offered them a makeup. Sure, I'd have lost another 105 minutes of my life, but I wouldn't have had to worry about any of these issues above. How, if at all, did these concerns sway your opinion from before? Do you see my side, or do you still think I was out of line? In the next section, I'll share a few more details which could potentially muddy the water. Plagiarism, Tardiness, and Pleading Over the course of this semester, I met a lot of characters. Some students never said a word to me. Other students asked me for life advice. And, a few students even felt the need to take advantage of me. One student in particular was retaking the class, so they felt they deserved to do well. After all, the assignments were all the same. The only challenge was surviving the exams. Unfortunately, they didn't really do themselves any favors in that department. Showing Up Late to an Exam When I first ran into issues with this student, they were taking the second exam. More specifically, they showed up late to the second exam and expected me to cover for their lack of planning. When time expired, I requested they turn over their exam. They refused. At that moment, we ended up in a weird standoff where I told them I couldn't offer them additional time. After all, I held office hours right after class, and a few students were sticking around. If those students wanted to chat, they could affect the other student's exam score—for better or for worse. After a few exchanges, the student agreed to turn over their exam, and we went our separate ways. Obviously, they were upset with me, but I didn't feel like there was anything I could do in that moment. Plagiarizing an Assignment As time went on, I had sort of forgotten about this issue. Then, one of my graders alerted me that a few students had been cheating on their assignments: Hey Jeremy,I've come across possible instances of cheating, which is upsetting, but I need to let you know about it.Two students of ours, [Student A] and [Student B], have submitted very similar homework assignments recently. I didn't put too much attention toward it because they were just homework assignments, but I noticed that they turned in Project 9 within one minute of each other and I kept an eye out for similar solutions. It was while grading that I found out that both students appear to have found a solution on GitHub and copied it down nearly word-for-word for their solutions. Key indicators were using similar variable names, such as 'strFragment1' where the GitHub user used 'fragmentStr1', and using a return statement in a void method.I was grading these projects in the presence of a friend of mine that is also a 2221 grader, and one of his students also had the weird return statement, which makes me more confident that these students pulled the solution from GitHub.As if that wasn't bad enough, another one of our students, [Student C], cheated from a different GitHub user. Only this time, he literally included the GitHub file in his submission as 'StringReassembly2.java'. I was shocked to see this, and saw that the @author tag did not have [Student C]'s name, but [GitHub user]'s. The @author tag is how I found this out, of course.I also have a couple of other names written down, but these three have caught my eye the most. I'll look into the others when I have time, but if I remember, I only wrote them down for one homework assignment, which is less important overall than a project.I'm not really sure how these things are dealt with, whether it should just be a 0/10 in the gradebook, or a COAM-type deal, but I just felt it was only right to bring this up to you.Undergraduate Teaching Assistant, 11/17/19 @ 9:32 PM Can you guess which student was caught cheating? Yep, the same one that showed up late to the second exam. They got caught with a copy of someone else's solution alongside their submission. When I tried to pursue this, I was asked by my boss to set a meeting up with the three of us: my boss, the student, and me. As you can probably imagine, I was never able to get a hold of that student. They disappeared. Showing up Late to a Final When I finally saw that student again, I was halfway through administering a final. At the hour mark, that student came rushing in with some story about being locked in their room. Again, they begged me to give them more time. Since I was caught in a tough spot, I held my position from the previous exam. I gave them no additional time. Of course, this time around, I told the student that I wasn't comfortable giving them extra time, and that I would be happy to chat about possible options at a later time with my boss. At that point, their mind raced to the worst-case scenario: what if they were denied a retake? Again, I promised that we would work something out as long as they sent an email to my boss explaining the situation. Here's what they wrote: Today, I was unable to make it in time to the CSE 2221 Final Exam (Section 35160), which was scheduled for 4:00pm, December 11, due to unforeseen circumstances beyond my control. The door of my room at Taylor tower was stuck and wouldn't open. I had to call the reception and get help to extricate myself out. In the process I arrived at the exam room about 1 hour late. As I lost 1 hour out of 1 hour and 45 minutes, I couldn’t complete my final exam properly. This was a situation that happened so suddenly, that I couldn’t even send a message on time to my instructor, and I had to rush all the way to the exam room.I pleaded with my instructor, Mr Jeremy Grifski, to allow me more time, but he wouldn't. Instead he asked me to write to you.I had prepared well for this exam, but I was dealt a cruel hand. This is already a course retake for me, I had pinned my hopes on getting a good score in this exam. Without this chance, I would not be able to pursue a CIS Major per my CIS advisors, not to mention other grade implications.I am in desperate need of your intervention and help. I will be eternally grateful to you for any help that you can provide for a retake of the exam. Please help me out of this situation.I would like to meet with you tomorrow morning (I have a Mathematics Final Exam in the afternoon from 2:00pm-3:45pm) and discuss this further. I will be ready to even retake my exam tomorrow morning or after my Math Final Exam.Student, 12/11/19 @ 8:23 PM To no surprise, I was painted as the villain. Clearly, it was my fault they ended up in this situation, and it was my responsibility to get them out of it. Unfortunately, I didn't receive a very nice email from my boss either: I got the message below from one of my students. Assuming what the student says is true, I am not sure why you would send him my way. What am I supposed to do or say? I don’t know the student. Unless he has already had excuses during the semester and gave you reasons to doubt his efforts, do you really want to compromise his course grade for what seems a far fetched, yet plausible excuse? Without knowing the specific circumstances of this student, I would have tried to give him more time. Now I don’t know what to suggest. Is it possible to give him the additional time tomorrow? Unfortunately we don’t have a completely different exam that I could give you as a make up, so the only option I see is to let him finish the exam he started today. Students will be late and/or miss exams and I find that taking a hard line ends up being often too harsh a punishment for what may just be a simple mistake.Anyway, let me know what you think, but this is a situation that you have to handle as soon as possible. As I said, I have no idea what I could do about it given my attitude towards this kind of incident.Boss, 12/11/19 @ 9:41 PM Ultimately, I agreed to give them the extra time to finish their exam to which they were genuinely thankful. Oddly enough, they had a whole night to basically double check their answers, and they still got a C. That said, I'm still pretty frustrated with how this played out. Lesson Learned It seems every semester I run into some weird situation where I have no idea how to navigate it. For instance, in my first semester, I had a student ask for an extension, but they never adhered to it. That's when I learned to always put things in writing. Then, in my second semester, a student had lost their best friend. That's when I learned that it's okay to break a few class rules to ensure students still have a chance to succeed. In my third semester, I watched a student walk out of a classroom in frustration because they didn't understand something. That's when I learned that it's important to strike a balance between Socratic questioning and sharing the answer. Now, I've learned that it's okay to say "no" to a student. While I still think it's important to give students the benefit of the doubt, sometimes you have to play it safe. If you need more time to work through a situation, take it! Don't be pressured to resolve the situation on the spot. At any rate, that's all I've got for now. If you liked this article and you'd like to see more like it, let me know in the comments. I try to keep this sort of content to subscribers only since it is a bit more personal, so your friends might not be able to see it. Let them know they can unlock it with a subscription to The Renegade Coder. While you're here, check out some of my other academia related rants: Threats Don't Retain TalentManaging People Is HardThe Worst Professor Ever And with that, thanks! See you next time.