When I was a kid in school, our IT accounts had easy to figure out user names and by default were not password protected.
As one of the smarter kids in the class it didn’t take long for another kid to figure out they could wait for me to do some work (say write an essay) and then log in to my account to print a copy for themselves.
Cue a very disgruntled teacher accusing us both of cheating.
The closest I ever came to this (“academic dishonesty”) was during a computer test in high school where I was on a question I didn’t know and I opened the Help File…
The teacher was very confused. Obviously the concept that I wouldn’t know an answer and would try to look it up during the test seemed wrong to him, but I wasn’t using an outside source or textbook or whatever… he still stopped me from doing it.
The worst situation so far has been between two friends. One turned in a creative, but grammatically messy essay, and the other turned in the same essay, but with the errors corrected.
It turns out that bad grammar student shared his work to help his friend get started, and then the kid took the whole thing. When I called them out on it, there were real tears and looks of betrayal between two 17 year old boys. It was pretty awful.
I’m expecting more of the same as I work through the remaining essays today and tomorrow. In talking with the lower level teachers, it seems like this was a significant issue over the last two years with this glass of students, which double irritates me as the department head, since it was never brought up as an issue.
Arg.
We have two students being investigated for plagiarism on their compulsory resits to expunge plagiarism. Unless something dramatic turns up both are expelled with nothing for their trouble.
I’m just plain tired. Everything’s ramping up for the start of the academic year, but I’m still trying to deal with the aftermath of resits, so it’s a bit overwhelming. We have two new staff to train up (from scratch, because our uni doesn’t have ANY centralised training for ‘how to do X job’). My line manager, who has been a massive help in me being able to come back to work, unofficially plans to retire at Christmas and I’ve no idea what will happen then. We’re being dragged back to the office for two days a week, and that will put the kibosh on various ways I mitigate my erratic fatigue and mood issues. Just… nothing awful, but a lot of sigh.
But, I’ve managed to book next week off (turning down a lot of induction events to do it, a certain amount of disgruntlement manifested). Hopefully it’ll help. And tonight should be Whartson and that always helps. So does grumbling on here! 
In a bit of good news… after 3 weeks of work on the new project I am finally at the bottom of the first error stack. In non-IT terms this means that I have the tools set up and ready to actually take my first shot at doing some work on my own without looking over someone’s shoulder watching them work.
3 weeks is extremely slow to setup just the workbench so to speak. 1 week would have been fast, 2 would have been fine… 3 is stressful for everyone involved. But I got in the middle of some infrastructure mess and so apart from being “the new person” I also got to experience all the troubles that the team had because of those changes.
Next up: some plagiarism of my own because as everyone knows developers copy all their solutions from stackoverflow. The trick is to be “good” at copying and only pick the parts you need and modify them to suit the problem.
A friend of mine who teaches at A Certain University (not the one that I sort-of work for) was having the usual post-resit this-is-your-last-chance talk when the student casually offered him a large bribe. As he explained later, it would have had to be much larger: not only “my career is over” money but “and I can live with myself afterwards” money.
The kind of “I had no choice but to take it” amount of money, huh?
… to be 20 and that stupid again…
Unlike nearly everyone else apparently, I don’t work in IT!
But (via project management) I’ve kinda ended up running exams for Chartered Institutes. Previously accountants, now engineers. And BOY has there been some good cheating.
Also providing exams to International venues where the country doesn’t really do exam rules (“But I can’t tell them not to talk to each other during the exam, they’ll all want to talk”).
Today’s potential cheating was on a video call, where in response to a question the candidate said “Er… um…” for a straight 30 seconds while looking as though they were typing, and then came out with an A+ answer.
Googling is an essential skill… I think in many cases we need to switch from “it is all in my head” to “I know where to find it” and really if they can find an A+ answer in the mess that is the internet these days… that’s all that is needed in my field.
I did Chemistry at University. Apparently the exams back then really wanted to test whether you could memorise every single page of a textbook, not for fundamental principles but for details that you would simply look up if you needed them. Entire pages of reactions that no-one alive would hold in their brain on a daily basis. A perfect memory and no other talent would let you pass a lot of UK Uni exams.
And here I am straddling both camps by working in e-learning 
Yesterday and today was the fun of working with people at a college who’ve taken over managing their Moodle site after someone left. We deal with all the technical things, but he managed things like setting up courses, etc.
So suddenly we have people asking us how to set up courses and such, where we can tell them the mechanical steps, but are fuzzy on things like naming conventions and course organisation.
There’s a lot of that thinking still about…
I was chatting recently with an electrician who says that the current exam is open-book, and you need a copy of the regs. You get about 90-120 seconds per question, and most of them consist of finding the answer in the regs. But it’s a 560-page book…
I person capable of educating themself is worth more (in a professional position) than a person who was educated, in my book.
Hi ya’ all~
(I genuinely appreciate the support given here, to myself and others. I feel bad because I have like a million comments I would make on people’s posts about anxiety stress and what not but I know I emotionally can’t right now. So for what’s it’s worth, I see you,I read, I empathize and I wish you success)
Stressful events have continued on, to the point I recognized I might break if I continued on. A lot of events were choing childhood trauma.
I had my birthday, with the help of @Benkyo, (thank you so freaking much!) @COMaestro got me a DVD set of my favorite singers concert’s. It was an awesome gift.
Friends hosted a birthday party, board games and said concerts and when talking about stress, mentioned a spare room.
So Sunday I grocery shopped, cooked 4 days of meals and went to stay with friends. Yesterday tied up looseToday is my complete day off. I go home tomorrow evening.
My hosts have done everything they can to put me at ease at a time where I felt like a huge inconvenience on the world. I’ve given myself permission to inconvenience them.
Kinda starving my anxiety? Last night I could feel myself trying to worry about something and it couldn’t grab anything.
I miss the kids and hubs something fierce. First night way from @COMaestro since 2012. I haven’t slept at a friend’s or relatives since 2016. Little weirdness from that alone. Trying to remember how to be a good guest.
Also @Benkyo thank you for extras! I’m showing myself to write in one, the other for the collection.
Chemistry graduate (twice)
One of our external moderators apparently asked the moderatee if they could recall the first three lines of the periodic table.
Even 21 year old me was going WTF at that one.
I think this is a good way to do exams. Sure it’s there, but you at least need to know where to start.
My brother (then a chemistry undergrad, now a professor of chemistry) asked my father (a chemistry prof, now retired) to draw the periodic table from memory. He apparantly got mixed up in the lanthanides and actinides, but who doesn’t? I don’t think anyone ever made him memorize it, it was just useful to know for what he did.
In much of the US, the electrician licensing exam is similar. The US code book is pretty well organized, and if you know the general structure, you can find things very quickly. An ex cow-orkers husband took the Chicago exam a couple years ago, he said he knew half the answers off the bat, knew half the rest but needed to verify or look something up, and the rest were total curveballs. (there were a bunch of questions about a wiring method that no one uses anymore, at least in part because YOU CAN’T BUY THE WIRE.)
Samesies!
Although, lately I’ve had to spend more time glowering at a screen than I’d like, without getting that sweet IT money (which I assume is, on average, sweeter than Idaho Public School Teacher money, which can be quite bitter)
I’m sure nobody will believe me, based on my previous comments about my work, but I also don’t work in IT…
Typical case of Glass half empty. 
No joke, learning the periodic table by memory (at least the first 5ish rows) was something we had to do at Uni. I could still do it years later. Yes, it helped with ordering the elements into Alkali metals / Noble Gases etc, but other than that it’s the typical Uni “you will never use this in the real world” nonsense that I get mad about sometimes 
