S/O PD Student Darwinism

[nuit93]

Back when I was in high school, we still had Grade 13.  The students in that grade would be 18, 19.  One of my English teachers was a young guy right out of teacher's college.  He was 23, 24.  Apparently, he was dating one of the Grade 13 girls, not a student he had ever had or would ever have in his class.  He was told that either he broke it off or lose his job.  He broke it off.

I don't know what happened after she graduated.

When I was in high school (mid-late 90's), there were a couple teachers that were married to former students.  One had started seeing his girlfriend when she turned 18 but was still a student in his class 

[hermanne]

My best friend was dating our math teacher when we were in Grade 12.  She was 17, he was (I think) in his early 30's.    The faculty didn't know, of course, otherwise he probably would've been fired, and her parents didn't know, either.   That said - it seemed like everyone else knew.  At graduation time, one of the students giving a speech said "We all knew that the best way to pass Mr. Brown's math class was to be a cute girl - right, (Best Friend's Name)?"  Yikes.

Yikes is right.

Do you remember the fallout, if there was any?

[MissRose]

When I was in high school, there was a bully type girl who tried to often copy off my work in a social studies class but back then I had no back bone to tell her off like I have now.

Another bully type student stole a homework sheet of mine, erased my name off it, and put hers in place of mine.  She got caught thankfully.

[Elisabunny]

This class should have resulted in a whole epidemic of Student Darwinism, spanning years of students,  but did not.

A professor teaching a class in my Honors Program gave a multiple choice exam that was made from the same pool of questions every. single. year.  They might be in a different order, they might be one or two new questions, but other than that, they were the same questions pulled from the past exams.  The exam was also incredibly hard and impossible to do well on from just studying even with the "study guides" the professor gave the class (I looked at them and the exam, there was no way you could answer those questions with just that guide).  Over the years, each preceding class' kind students would bequeath the last year's exam to the new students.  Any students who couldn't find a willing upperclassman would get a horrific grade in that class.  There were students that did great from the start having already obtained the old exams, some that had bombed the first exam and then caved on their morals and used old exams to study for the rest of the semester, and then those poor clueless students who cried over receiving their first ever C's, D's & F's while unaware that everyone else's A's were from cheating. 

The professor either didn't know at all or knew and didn't care.  I suspect that it was the former because my roommate who did use old exams to study after getting a very bad grade on the first exam was consulted by the professor after class along with another student who was upset over two bad grades and unsure of what they were doing wrong and the professor asked roommate to share how she had studied to improve her score the second time around.  As roommate wasn't failed, I'm guessing he bought the "I read all the reading over again and memorized the study guides" line.

I'm afraid my sympathies are 100% with the students.  If the ONLY way to pass the test was to study from the old tests, then the professor was really bad at either teaching or test-writing.  And isn't studying old tests considered a legitimate strategy for various standardized tests?

I suppose I should confess here: there was a junior high school science teacher whose entire first semester revolved around figuring out the chemical composition of a substance she called "bluestone."  Except that everyone knew from previous classes what it was.  So since the experiments never really worked right, the students mostly became skilled at fudging test results.

[Stirling]

This happened to a college professor friend over twenty years ago.  The story still makes me laugh. 

Female student wearing a suggestive outfit enters his office.

Student: "I didn't have time to write my paper, but I will do ANYTHING to pass the course."
Prof: "What are you doing this Saturday"?
Student: "Nothing"
Prof: "Write your paper then."

[MrTango]

When I was taking Precalculus in High School, I caught the guy next to me looking over at my homework assignment at the beginning of class.

The next day, again before class, I went through my normal routine of checking over my homework assignment to make sure that I'd actually completed it, my name was on it, etc.  Meanwhile, my neighbor was again scribbling furiously all the while looking over at my desk.

When the teacher called for assignments to be turned in, I set my paper down on the desk, reached down to my backpack, pulled out the actual assignment, and walked it to the front of the room, leaving the fake assignment sitting on my desk.

The copier, not satisfied with knowing that *I* was on to him, decided to make a very vocal protest, which resulted in his desk being moved to the front of the classroom for the rest of the year.

[NyaChan]

This class should have resulted in a whole epidemic of Student Darwinism, spanning years of students,  but did not.

A professor teaching a class in my Honors Program gave a multiple choice exam that was made from the same pool of questions every. single. year.  They might be in a different order, they might be one or two new questions, but other than that, they were the same questions pulled from the past exams.  The exam was also incredibly hard and impossible to do well on from just studying even with the "study guides" the professor gave the class (I looked at them and the exam, there was no way you could answer those questions with just that guide).  Over the years, each preceding class' kind students would bequeath the last year's exam to the new students.  Any students who couldn't find a willing upperclassman would get a horrific grade in that class.  There were students that did great from the start having already obtained the old exams, some that had bombed the first exam and then caved on their morals and used old exams to study for the rest of the semester, and then those poor clueless students who cried over receiving their first ever C's, D's & F's while unaware that everyone else's A's were from cheating. 

The professor either didn't know at all or knew and didn't care.  I suspect that it was the former because my roommate who did use old exams to study after getting a very bad grade on the first exam was consulted by the professor after class along with another student who was upset over two bad grades and unsure of what they were doing wrong and the professor asked roommate to share how she had studied to improve her score the second time around.  As roommate wasn't failed, I'm guessing he bought the "I read all the reading over again and memorized the study guides" line.

I'm afraid my sympathies are 100% with the students.  If the ONLY way to pass the test was to study from the old tests, then the professor was really bad at either teaching or test-writing.  And isn't studying old tests considered a legitimate strategy for various standardized tests?

I suppose I should confess here: there was a junior high school science teacher whose entire first semester revolved around figuring out the chemical composition of a substance she called "bluestone."  Except that everyone knew from previous classes what it was.  So since the experiments never really worked right, the students mostly became skilled at fudging test results.

People could and did pass without the exams, they just didn't do as well as they were used to doing in school unless they cheated.  It was one of the required courses to get a Honors degree, so a more advanced version of a general course requirement that is only open to people who are accepted into the program based on their scores from high school.  Students in the program were pretty much all straight A students in high school so getting a B was shock, let alone a C or D.  Student who were slated to fail classes like this were encouraged to drop the program or take the class later with a different professor.   

[Slartibartfast]

The main reason I didn't go on to a degree in mathematics (which I loved in high school, and still do to some extent) was my freshman year teacher at college.  I was actually repeating a class I had already taken (did some courses at the local community college when I was in high school) - same book, same homework assignments even!  But this teacher had a horribly hard-to-understand accent and I couldn't make heads or tails of the way he explained things.

The only reason I passed his class at all is because I made study friends with a guy who was Pakistani (as was the prof) and could ask questions in his native tongue.  Then halfway through the year my study friend's parents got wind of it and demanded he stop studying with me.  See, if we studied together we might start dating, and if we dated we'd probably get married, and I'm not Muslim and they couldn't conscience their dear boy marrying a Christian and a white girl at that    I squeaked out of there with a C+, but that pretty much shot my GPA for college and convinced me I didn't want to study math after all 

[Shalamar]

Do you remember the fallout, if there was any?

Funnily enough, there wasn't any that I recall.  I think that some of the students went "OOOoooh!", but that was about it.   Maybe the teachers weren't listening to the speeches. 

[magician5]

There were times I used to wish I could just vanish permanently from school for good reason (aside from the usual "high school is heck" stories.) I remember when just after Sputnik scared the country into a sudden emphasis on science, in what seemed like an instant we were studying "the new math", and our textbooks were made up of Xeroxed typed pages held together with bolts! We didn't know what we were suddenly seeing, our teachers didn't know how to teach it, and there was nobody who could effectively straighten any of us out!

That didn't stop my parents, or school officials, from making my life h*ll for getting lower grades.

[snowfire]

When my Mom was in college they had "Blue Book" exams, where you wrote all the answers to the questions in  bound notebooks with a blue cover.  There was a guy who persisted in copying off of her work, she tried moving seats and he would just move and follow her.  She finally decided that she had had enough.  She wrote the essay, let doofus copy off her notebook, and then dawdled around while he turned his in.  Then she went up to the professor and requested a new blank book.  She then proceeded to quickly write a new full essay and turn it in.  You see, the first one she had written had just enough wrong information for a bad grade, but the info sounded plausible, especially if you hadn't really studied the material.  I know that doofus flunked the course, I can't remember if he was expelled or not. 

[Outdoor Girl]

I suppose I should confess here: there was a junior high school science teacher whose entire first semester revolved around figuring out the chemical composition of a substance she called "bluestone."  Except that everyone knew from previous classes what it was.  So since the experiments never really worked right, the students mostly became skilled at fudging test results.

My high school chemistry teacher had no problem with us fudging lab test results.  He figured that if we learned enough to fudge the test results well, we knew the material.  My brother actually did this in university.  His lab partner threw away the wrong product at the end of their experiment.  My brother did some quick research, discovered that the melting point of their product was the same as sugar (melting point was how they determined whether or not the right product was produced in the experiment).  He figured out what the theoretical yield should have been, reduced it appropriately and measured out the amount of sugar to hand in as their 'product'.  They got 9 out of 10 on that lab.

[guihong]

This wasn't directly tied to my class, but it was an Ooops all the same  :

My eighth grade chemistry teacher was a bear of an instructor-strict, tough, and made us work.  In hindsight, he was probably one of the best teachers I'd ever had, but 8th grade me didn't think so.

I walked to and from school, and at one corner was a policeman who helped the kids cross the street (since there was elementary, middle school and high school all using that crosswalk).  One day, I must have looked grumpy because he asked if everything was OK.  I said "My chemistry teacher is the worst ever!  I can't wait to get out of that class, etc. etc."  I just let him have it.

 The policeman listened, then asked "Who do you have?" 

"Mr. J."

"Oh, he's my son!"  .

As I recall, I did put my pedal to the medal and aced that class despite my outburst.   Mr. J. may never have known.

[mmswm]

This wasn't directly tied to my class, but it was an Ooops all the same  :

My eighth grade chemistry teacher was a bear of an instructor-strict, tough, and made us work.  In hindsight, he was probably one of the best teachers I'd ever had, but 8th grade me didn't think so.

I walked to and from school, and at one corner was a policeman who helped the kids cross the street (since there was elementary, middle school and high school all using that crosswalk).  One day, I must have looked grumpy because he asked if everything was OK.  I said "My chemistry teacher is the worst ever!  I can't wait to get out of that class, etc. etc."  I just let him have it.

 The policeman listened, then asked "Who do you have?" 

"Mr. J."

"Oh, he's my son!"  .

As I recall, I did put my pedal to the medal and aced that class despite my outburst.   Mr. J. may never have known.

If it makes you feel better, Mr. J. probably did find out and was probably quite amused by it.  My old students called me "Sarge" behind my back.  I didn't mind because I knew that in spite of the fact that I was known for being tough, I was also known for being fair.  I also heard all the wailing and complaints when class rosters came out for the next year and there was much complaining by the students who got the other math teacher.

[Lady Snowdon]

A friend of mine and I almost committed Student Darwinism in college.  We were saved by a glib explanation and an almost too-nice professor!

We took a sociology class together, and much of the classroom discussion for a few weeks revolved around experiments in pushing boundaries, like the Milgram experiment.  We had a paper due around that time, and my friend and I were working on writing it.  We ended up writing the entire paper together.  When we were done, my friend said, "So, were you planning on changing any of this before you handed it in?" and I replied that I was probably going to change the conclusion and maybe a few sentences here and there - enough to make it different.  She suggested we print out two copies and put both our names on both papers. 

We turned it in to the professor with the explanation that we'd written the paper together, didn't want him to think we were plagiarizing, so were telling him outright.  We also mentioned we felt it was an experiment of sorts - to see how he reacted. 

I thought for sure we'd have to re-write it, or get a lower grade, or something!  When we got our papers back though, our papers were clipped together with a note that said, "Had I known in advance you were doing this, I would have held the paper to higher standards.  As it is, I graded you the same way as everyone else.  In the future, note that professors generally do not like to be used in experiments without first giving consent."  The grade was an A, of all things!

We did take his note to heart, and stopped writing papers together.  Which we thought was a shame, since I generally had the grammar, spelling, and editing part of it down pat, while she had the creativity and ideas!