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So from time to time, I'll end up assisting other faculties at the university. Part of this also includes me acting as minute-taker for a couple of the faculty meetings, where student cases are discussed and acted upon accordingly. There have been...some interesting cases.
Note: courses and faculties have been kept deliberately vague. There will also be some US-style terms in here for that reason.
Well at least YOU were honest...
Like most places, plagiarism is taken seriously. We do however, handle each case of plagiarism on a case-by-case basis.
So enter this particular student. They'd submitted an essay for one of their topics, then shortly after proceeded to email their tutor, openly admitting that they had plagiarised a good portion of their essay from another student and wanting to withdraw from their entire course, as they were very embarassed and wanted to leave with their dignity while they still could. That wish was promptly granted.
(And to clarify, the two students involved had been helping one another, but the other student hadn't been aware that entire portions of their work were being copied. We're not treating it as collusion in this instance)
On the other hand...
This student however, was not honest about their behaviour.
They were re-attempting a core subject that they had received a Fail grade on about 2-3 years ago. Between then and now, the assignments had changed slightly. More specifically, one of the assignments had gone from a long-ass essay to two smaller essays, with a 2-3 week break in between the first essay and the second.
This student clearly missed that and figured that they could get away with submitting their long-ass essay from 2 years ago when the first of the smaller essays was due, rather than writing a brand new piece. Aside from the fact that our plagiarism software picked THAT up, the other giveaway was that their submission was twice as long as the maximum word count.
Paranoid Much?
So it's a fact that some websites will work better on certain browsers than others. Ours is one of those. I can also understand privacy concerns. But this call took the cake.
One of my colleagues in the admissions department relayed this story. They'd received a call from someone who was trying to apply to one of our courses, but wanted to talk to our webmaster (who happened to be on leave)
.
Turns out that they were wanting to apply for our course, but refused to use the browsers that we were recommending? Why? Because apparently filling in our online application form through either of the browsers we DID recommend would result in Google farming their details somehow and coming to their house.
This also seemingly extended to not wanting to use our "Contact Us" form on the website...even though that doesn't require a home address.
This is NOT high school
Back in the faculty I usually work for, we had a new intake of students recently for our conversion program. All of our students in this group bar one are students who received their qualification overseas and are needing to be brought up to Australian standards, while the other student is one who's been out of the loop for some time and needed to be brought up to speed.
Out of the Loop student (OL) seems to feel that this course is a waste of time however. That unfortunately has resulted in them developing a bit of an attitude and said attitude is now influencing one of the other students (OS) to act up in class along with them.
So, when you have two students who are acting like high schoolers, naturally, the best solution is a high school one: separate them.
Since we put our students into groups for group work in advance, I figured now would be the perfect time to try them in groups based on where they're going for field placement, rather than simply going in alphabetical order. As OL and OS are going to different facilities, this was an easy one.
(Part of the reason is that from time to time, our mentors will come in and work with those groups.)
Reality Check On Aisle Three!
Another one from the conversion course - we currently have a crop of students out on placement. We do keep in regular contact with them via the mentors (Who send regular feedback to us), but sometimes the students are contacted directly if they need support and the students can do the same.
One such student opted to contact us about a week ago, shortly after a visit from their mentor. Judging from what I heard, the visit had not gone well.
The student then wound up giving a litany of excuses to the coordinator over the phone, while the coordinator was trying to talk them through reflecting and how to improve from their mistakes. It then ended with them asking us if we could arrange for their visits to take place earlier in the week since they were "tired" by the end of the week!
Coordinator prompted to give the student a decent reality check, reminding them that once they were practicing in healthcare, they would be working a litany of different shifts and the excuse of them being exhausted by the end of the week would not fly.
And since I handle the scheduling for the mentors, I checked - by pure coincidence (mentor visits are scheduled well in advance), they were in fact having the rest of their visits earlier in the week for the next 4 weeks...up until about 2 days ago, when the mentor responsible for that student requested a date swap for one of those weeks
Note: courses and faculties have been kept deliberately vague. There will also be some US-style terms in here for that reason.
Well at least YOU were honest...
Like most places, plagiarism is taken seriously. We do however, handle each case of plagiarism on a case-by-case basis.
So enter this particular student. They'd submitted an essay for one of their topics, then shortly after proceeded to email their tutor, openly admitting that they had plagiarised a good portion of their essay from another student and wanting to withdraw from their entire course, as they were very embarassed and wanted to leave with their dignity while they still could. That wish was promptly granted.
(And to clarify, the two students involved had been helping one another, but the other student hadn't been aware that entire portions of their work were being copied. We're not treating it as collusion in this instance)
On the other hand...
This student however, was not honest about their behaviour.
They were re-attempting a core subject that they had received a Fail grade on about 2-3 years ago. Between then and now, the assignments had changed slightly. More specifically, one of the assignments had gone from a long-ass essay to two smaller essays, with a 2-3 week break in between the first essay and the second.
This student clearly missed that and figured that they could get away with submitting their long-ass essay from 2 years ago when the first of the smaller essays was due, rather than writing a brand new piece. Aside from the fact that our plagiarism software picked THAT up, the other giveaway was that their submission was twice as long as the maximum word count.
Paranoid Much?
So it's a fact that some websites will work better on certain browsers than others. Ours is one of those. I can also understand privacy concerns. But this call took the cake.
One of my colleagues in the admissions department relayed this story. They'd received a call from someone who was trying to apply to one of our courses, but wanted to talk to our webmaster (who happened to be on leave)
. Turns out that they were wanting to apply for our course, but refused to use the browsers that we were recommending? Why? Because apparently filling in our online application form through either of the browsers we DID recommend would result in Google farming their details somehow and coming to their house.
This also seemingly extended to not wanting to use our "Contact Us" form on the website...even though that doesn't require a home address
. This is NOT high school
Back in the faculty I usually work for, we had a new intake of students recently for our conversion program. All of our students in this group bar one are students who received their qualification overseas and are needing to be brought up to Australian standards, while the other student is one who's been out of the loop for some time and needed to be brought up to speed.
Out of the Loop student (OL) seems to feel that this course is a waste of time however. That unfortunately has resulted in them developing a bit of an attitude and said attitude is now influencing one of the other students (OS) to act up in class along with them.
So, when you have two students who are acting like high schoolers, naturally, the best solution is a high school one: separate them.
Since we put our students into groups for group work in advance, I figured now would be the perfect time to try them in groups based on where they're going for field placement, rather than simply going in alphabetical order. As OL and OS are going to different facilities, this was an easy one.
(Part of the reason is that from time to time, our mentors will come in and work with those groups.) Reality Check On Aisle Three!
Another one from the conversion course - we currently have a crop of students out on placement. We do keep in regular contact with them via the mentors (Who send regular feedback to us), but sometimes the students are contacted directly if they need support and the students can do the same.
One such student opted to contact us about a week ago, shortly after a visit from their mentor. Judging from what I heard, the visit had not gone well.
The student then wound up giving a litany of excuses to the coordinator over the phone, while the coordinator was trying to talk them through reflecting and how to improve from their mistakes. It then ended with them asking us if we could arrange for their visits to take place earlier in the week since they were "tired" by the end of the week!
Coordinator prompted to give the student a decent reality check, reminding them that once they were practicing in healthcare, they would be working a litany of different shifts and the excuse of them being exhausted by the end of the week would not fly.
And since I handle the scheduling for the mentors, I checked - by pure coincidence (mentor visits are scheduled well in advance), they were in fact having the rest of their visits earlier in the week for the next 4 weeks...up until about 2 days ago, when the mentor responsible for that student requested a date swap for one of those weeks
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