Our Thursday night instructor does not trust her students a dime's worth. Have I already bitched mentioned? We've been with her for about 11 weeks now, but she still astounds me.
Part of our final will be essay questions. We will know these questions a week in advance so we may prepare awesome responses. But we will have to rewrite our essays from scratch during the exam. We may not turn in already-written essays - because she doesn't want work from us that we might have collaborated on with other students.
Please understand, every other prof in this program has simply told us not to collaborate on our take-home exams. So we're basically on the honor system. And believe it or not - we do as we're told. Even if we had written our essays together, I would think it would be obvious to any professor where collaboration had happened by the striking similarities.
Secondly, she announced that, for our final, we will need one or two large-sized blue books. That's fine, but here's the odd part: we must bring them to her a week ahead of time. She will initial and return them to us the evening of the final. This is (of course) so we cannot write out our essay answers (the ones we illegally collaborated on) and pretend like they were freshly-written on the day of the final.
(Imagine me hunched over an already-prepared blue book, shielding it with one arm, pretending to write for about an hour. I'm almost as old as the instructor. I do have some dignity.)
Given this level of paranoia oversight, you won't be surprised that the instructor has utterly balked at one student's request to bring her own laptop, so she can type instead of hand-write her essays. The student can't physically hold a pen for long, but can type. The two of them are locked in an intense e-mail exchange about accommodations right now. It's hard to say how it will all turn out.
Maybe Madame Instructor will also produce a blacklight the night of the exam so she can scan all you cheaters for answers written on your hands, arms, etc., in invisible ink. What a jerk vigilant upholder of educational ethics.
Posted by: Dan | November 30, 2006 at 10:20 AM
Good grief. There is one in every institution. (Mine was the theology professor. shudder) I'm holding good thoughts for the typist.
Posted by: Wende | November 30, 2006 at 10:48 AM
Paranoia like that usually is the result of cheaters at some traumatizing point in the professors past. This one goes to some bizarrely complex processes to avoid it though. And quite frankly, I really don't think she should be teaching at the Masters level. I can understand not trusting undergrads entirely, but you would hope that you can trust Masters students enough to deal with them on a case-by-case basis instead of inflicting these kind of restrictions on everyone.
Posted by: Kimberly | November 30, 2006 at 10:49 AM
... and I have only blogged the surface of this semester. Gotchas in every assignment!
Posted by: pam | November 30, 2006 at 10:59 AM
Good luck on your exam!
Posted by: Rebekah | December 01, 2006 at 12:56 AM
Has your school got a disabilities office? It's actually illegal to refuse to accomodate such a disability. But, it has to be documented, doctor's note, etc.
Posted by: Katherine | December 01, 2006 at 03:18 PM
It looks like the student will be able to check out a laptop from the media dept. on the day of the exam. It's all cleared with the instructor.
Posted by: pam | December 01, 2006 at 03:22 PM