Close to 600 students at the University of Central Florida must retake their midterm exam due to cheating among the students. Professor Richard Quinn was tipped off by some of the students who told him some of his other students got a hold of the exam key and used it and passed it on. The class was students in a senior level business course, all of which have to retake the midterm. I'm appalled not only that so many students took the risk but, it was a class of senior college students.
I think that this sort of thing proves that there's no direct border where cheating stops among students. It doesn't matter whether the students are in middle school or in college, its an unavoidable thing that happens. Sometimes I think its also hard not to resist when there's so much going on in your life. Two hundred students which is about 1/3 of the class of seniors were believed to have got their hands on advanced copies of the exam. Now why would so many students feel the need to cheat? It could be a couple different reasons but how did it get so bad? It could come down to where the students are just too lazy to study bit then again it could be because they didn't feel as if their professor prepared them enough. Some students will do anything for the grade I guess.
Students that admitted they cheated wouldn't run the risk of getting into major trouble. If they owned up to it they would get the chance for a clean slate if they attended a 4 hour ethic seminar. I believe this to be a very generous offer. I would have thought there would have been a worse punishment since there was so many students involved. Professor Quinn says that the students left him "physically ill and absolutely disgusted." The students who were proved not to have cheated also still have to retake the midterm but are able to keep the higher score of the two. It is said that this is the largest cheating scandal in the University's history.
In my opinion if your going into business you shouldn't run the risk of cheating. What does that say about what kind of business person you will be? You should want to learn the ropes of the job and or how to run a successful business, if that's what your planning on doing, and not just take the short cut just because you want the grade.
I completely agree with this. People are going to find the easy way out of things, no matter how old they get. Just think, if this had been one or two students, the punishment would have been far more severe I think because that just seems like the way it works. But in this situation they probably couldn't just fail the whole class. I think there is a double standard happening here.
ReplyDeleteMarissa, throughout my business classes, there is one thing that all of the teachers talk about and that is ethics. I find it hard to understand why these students would take the risk of getting a zero on their tests and put themselves under the risk of expulsion. One other thing, if these students went looking for a job if and when they graduate, and I was an employer looking into their scholastic records and found they had done this cheating, I would not hire them, because I couldn't trust them working for me!
ReplyDelete