An Early Thirsty From the Grumpy_Sergeant.

I tutor college students, and I run into an odd response when I inform, well, many foreign students that they are plagiarizing. It's a different response than the usual crud. The response, way too often, is that they are taught in their home country to simply explain their professor's theories and ideas. Of course, there is little to no attribution or worse it really seems as though they are trying to take credit for ideas or statements that aren't their own.

I call BS on a lot of these responses because the questions asked by most professors I've ever known never ask to rehash someone else's theory without at least making an assessment. (My major is humanities.) A summary is one thing but not giving proper attribution is very different. But I am told I just am not from there so I wouldn't understand. Supposedly I don't understand the academic culture "over there."

Q: What are your experiences with this?

“I’m Down For Drinks, Laughs, Sex”: The Sexual Harassment Claims That Brought Down Toledo’s Running Coach. From Deadspin.com

It was a matter of rules and consequences, he said. On Jan. 24, Kevin Hadsell, the director of the University of Toledo's men's and women's cross country and women's track program, announced his resignation, a move that was as mysterious as it was abrupt. Hadsell had been at Toledo since 1998, and in the intervening years he had built the Rockets into a regional power, becoming an institution unto himself along the way.

And then, seemingly out of nowhere, he was gone. "I want to apologize to the University, the Toledo community and the student-athletes, past and present, for letting them down," he said in a statement. "I have always told my student-athletes that there are rules, and that they must follow the rules or face the consequences. I hold myself to the same standards; it would be hypocritical not to. Therefore, I have submitted my resignation today as the director of women's track & field and men's and women's cross country." The school made a point of saying Hadsell hadn't violated any NCAA rules.

What Hadsell and the university did not say is that the coach was forced to resign after a female runner had accused him of sexual harassment. The runner, whom we'll call Andrea to protect her identity, had also revealed to the school that Hadsell had been in a long-term physical relationship with her teammate and friend.

Deadspin has obtained text messages sent to Andrea over the past five months from Hadsell's phone. They range in tone from the flirty to the frankly sexual, growing obsessive and paranoid as he learns of the university's investigation; until the very end, it seems, he was unaware that it was Andrea who had turned him in.

"I'm too fucking selfish," Hadsell joked to Andrea on Oct. 22, denying a relationship with the other runner, whom we will refer to as Caitlin. "I'm down for drinks, laughs, sex. Other than that I value my free time." Earlier, he had told Andrea: "Not gonna lie. I would hook up with [Caitlin] (I havmt) but if she wasn't psycho I would." He added, "If I fuck her I'm fucked." And: "It may be a good ride. Just sayin."

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Vog3lfr3i Says: Relative Grading is Stupid. From InsideHigherEd.

Zack Budryk

Since he started teaching at Johns Hopkins University in 2005, Professor Peter Frölich has maintained a grading curve in which each class’s highest grade on the final counts as an A, with all other scores adjusted accordingly. So if a midterm is worth 40 points, and the highest actual score is 36 points, "that person gets 100 percent and everybody else gets a percentage relative to it,” said Frölich.

This approach, Frölich said, is the "most predictable and consistent way" of comparing students' work to their peers', and it worked well.

At least it did until the end of the fall term at Hopkins, that is.

As the semester ended in December, students in Frölich’s "Intermediate Programming", "Computer Science Fundamentals," and "Introduction to Programming for Scientists and Engineers" classes decided to test the limits of the policy, and collectively planned to boycott the final. Because they all did, a zero was the highest score in each of the three classes, which, by the rules of Frölich’s curve, meant every student received an A.

“The students refused to come into the room and take the exam, so we sat there for a while: me on the inside, they on the outside,” Frölich said. “After about 20-30 minutes I would give up.... Then we all left.” The students waited outside the rooms to make sure that others honored the boycott, and were poised to go in if someone had. No one did, though.

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