joy and shadows

Settle down, children, for I have a Grad Student Story to tell, inspired by angstymcgoth's post about brazen students who call their TA to ask for answers on tests.

Many moons ago, I was a TA for orgo lab in my fifth year at Princeton. The class was being taught by Prof. Pascal, a tightassed perfectionist (no "toilet bowl" benzenes were to be drawn in his class.) When exam time came round, all the TAs would gather round to grade papers ASAP afterwards over pizza. Unlike Rutgers, the exams at Princeton are not multiple choice, and so there is some room for error in the grading.

If you, the student, felt that your test had been incorrectly graded, you had the option to resubmit your exam for a regrade. This was not without risk, as the TA might find something wrong that had gotten through the first round. However, in the majority of cases, the test either came back unchanged or slightly better. Needless to say, this presented a golden opportunity for the clever student to put one over on the TAs, mostly by writing the right answer out in the back of the workbook and saying "you guys missed this!"

Anyway. While Prof. Pascal was more than willing to accept that one of the other graders may have made a mistake, he himself (being who he is) was not willing to accept that he had made a mistake. So, unbeknownst to the orgo students, he photocopied the results of his grading before distributing the graded exams back to the students.

Not too long afterwards, one of the best students in the class came back with a misgrade request. Despite the incorrect problem, this fellow had already gotten an A on the exam. At the same time, another student's exam went missing. The two events seemed unrelated until Prof. Pascal went to the problem in question (it was an "assign the NMR spectrum" question) and compared it to his original copy - and found that the two didn't match.

This enterprising student had stolen an exam from another student who had gotten the question right. He erased all her answers, wrote in his own answers over Prof. Pascal's grading, and resubmitted it. Ten of ten for effort and cleverness, and only someone as anal as Pascal would have found it out. There was an ensuing whinefest about how the students should have been TOLD that their answers would be photocopied (what, so they'd know what question not to cheat on?) blah blah blah, but the facts remained.

The stupid part was that the cheater was an A student and hadn't submitted for a regrade previously, so no one could fathom why he would have wanted to polish his test results. The end result was that the cheater got a yearlong vacation from Princeton and failed the class. He should have been expelled, IMO, but that's what happens when your parents pay 40K a year for an Ivy Education.