Cheating is now endorsed by universities, or so it would appear
10 February, 2003 :: 7:54 a.m.
So I spend a good part of Saturday and a good chunk of Sunday morning studying for my intro to art exam. Finally I say fuck it, I'll get what I get, and hop online. I discover that the test is broken into three parts that you take separately, that there is no time limit, that you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want. So I take the first part and get 30 out of 33, a respectable start. I start playing around on the site (it's 10:30, test deadline is 12:00) and Sonofabitch! There are study guides that you can print out--anyone who's had a college course where they diligently filled in the study guide only to take the test and find that 60% of the information wasn't stuff included on the study guide is thinking, "Sooooo?" Okay, so these things say they are study guides, but perhaps study guide is the wrong word...perhaps they should say, in big block letters, CHEAT HERE!!! The "study guides" are the tests...that's right, anyone with any intelligence at all can print out the study guide, look through the book filling in answers, then hop back online and in about 2 minutes have an A+... I've been killing myself for the better part of a day (I slept ONE HOUR Saturday and stayed up studying for the test when I got home...) and all I had to do was answer the fucking cheat sheets and take the test! Motherfucker! But still, I got a B+ and I know this for the next three tests, which I can take and be done with by tonight if I was that ambitious (I'm not--huge surprise) or I can do this right before the deadline for each test (much more likely). SO now I can focus on Wednesday when I have a test on the Romantics in Brit Lit and my first philosophy of law test...and also do a damn Emerson essay on one of four essays we are reading this week...oh happy day.
All online courses cannot be this easy...if they were, I would have heard about it and there would be a lot of Dr. So and so's at work...just biding their time until they find a use for that PhD in physics that they earned from good ol' Mansfield University. Yes, this is just a gen ed requirement, but I feel sorry for the suckers that are actually sitting through the classroom version of this same course...
You know what the scariest part of this whole thing is? (Who the fuck am I asking?) The book is actually easy to read and really interesting. Had I known how easy the test was, I wouldn't have learned jack shit, but I actually got something out of this book and I may just continue reading the thing.