There's no fun in cheating on lab reports and exams, but this is only my opinion - as far as I know, my lab reports were being rewritten and resubmitted years after I completed the course.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
My first 1-hour FORTRAN course, I was getting 10s on every assignment, then I got a 0. I asked the prof why, he said that there were several identical programs handed in (any one of them would have gotten a 10). I showed him that the variable naming style and statement numbering style were very similar to my earlier 10s. I also showed him the table in the hallway where the grad students put our card decks and output listings after they had been run, and where anyone could pick up a '10" package and dupe the cards on the cardpunch machine.
I got my 10, and the grad students moved the table into their office.
Something like that happened to me too, but I caught it earlier. On an assembly language assignment, we were to drop them in our lecturer's pigeon-hole (more of a drop-box really, but it was possible to see in and even get things out). I had mine handed in a few days early, but the next day I glanced in the dropbox as I walked past because out of the corner of my eye I recognised my commenting style on a printout there. A closer look confirmed it was a copy of my code, so I removed it and took it straight to the lecturer and pointed out the attempted fraud. Even identified several errors in the program that had been fixed in my submitted version (which he already had). He'd done nothing but change my name... idiot.
On PDP-11 RS/TS, you could open a file (in the command-line BASIC interpreter) having a specified size, and the new file wouldn't be zeroed. I wrote a small program to examine the free disk space then create a file that used almost all of it, and found multiple copies of that program inside the file, dropped by the editor. Sufficient demonstration... Also made a bogus login program, but that was too boring to use.
The cheat was a student politician who was a weasel with no taste for study, and only lasted six more months before being escorted from the premises for cheating again.
I have a co-worker who tells a story of a power electronics lab where they were supposed to design a feedback network around an amplifier (provided) to meet certain overshoot & recovery time limits for a motor speed control. Said co-worker couldn't get the lab to work -- as none of his fellow lab-mates could but, instead of dry-labing the results like everyone else did (and apparently had done for a number of _years_), he sat around, characterizied the amplifier itself (which had been build by some long-gone graduate student), and demonstrated that it was impossible to met the lab specs with the amplifier provided.
He said the next day he was walking by the lab and found his professor and several others all playing with the amplifiers and motors, seeing for themselves that it couldn't be made to work... and realizing that every student of theirs for years had faked it.
:-)
I like the story!
Ha! thats hilarious!
Cheers Terry
-- Dunno, don\'t care.
...or OLD enough. Worked for me :-) Regards, Terry King ...On The Mediterranean in Carthage (Back ...In The Woods In Vermont for the Summer)
And here (USA) the LibDems claim to be all for The American Worker (witness their total captivation of the Unions, specifically the United Auto Workers) yet their demigod, George Soros, is in the process of helping a Chinese auto manufacturer (Chery) finish killing off their American counterparts by investing heavily in Chery and operating behind the scenes to break import restrictions on foreign-built autos.
And Soros complains loudly and often that _Bush_ is destroying the dollar... and LibDems believe Soros...
Sigh.
Mark L. Fergerson
Yes, for Medicine, Houndsfield (sp?), the guy who came up with the CAT scan. They had a real problem what to call him in the speeches, as he didn't have a doctorate, so they used Engineer instead of Doctor.
Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)
The bulk B+ supply in the EE lab, wired to all the benches, had about
100 volts p-p ripple on it, and I was the only person who realized it. So I faked all my circuit responses, and I was the only one who got consistant A's on my lab reports. Of course, since I knew enough to fake the responses, there was no point in my doing the experiments.In subsequent semisters, my lab partner and I cut all the labs (as did the lab instructor) and we faked an entire semister's lab reports the night before they were due... we got beautiful graphs.
John
But the ultimate secret to thick lab reports was to use thick paper.
-- Many thanks, Don Lancaster voice phone: (928)428-4073 Synergetics 3860 West First Street Box 809 Thatcher, AZ 85552 rss: http://www.tinaja.com/whtnu.xml email: don@tinaja.com Please visit my GURU\'s LAIR web site at http://www.tinaja.com
Hmm... and here I thought it was only on resumes or business solicitations people used that trick... :-)
I would expect any former tinaja quest invitation from you to be on at least
28lb. paper, Don. :-)
Used for documentation submitted to the FAA as well. Also, we did all of the analysis in long hand. It made it a b*cth to scan the data and do anything serious with it.
-- Paul Hovnanian mailto:Paul@Hovnanian.com ------------------------------------------------------------------ Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my pants!
My secrets were Mathcad and Macintosh! I could use Mathcad to do all the grunt work on the equations, and then use a Mac to make really nice reports, with graphs, drawings, nice typefaces, etc. Since desktop publishing was pretty new back in those dark ages, my lab reports LOOKED good, even if the results inside were totally fabricated... 8-)
Charlie
Some of us were clever (and talented) enough to "dry-lab" BEFORE there were computers or PC's ;-)
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Does "dry-lab" mean the same as "pencil-whip", i.e., cheat?
Thanks, Rich
The only real dry-lab I remember was in Chemistry. We were supposed to figure out the molecular weight of oxygen (or something like that) by heating sulfur in a crucible and weighing the results. One had to repeatedly heat the sulfur and then weigh the results until the results stabilized, then crunch the numbers. THe difference was so minute that a fingerprint on the crucible was enough to destroy the results, so one had to carry the crucible with tongs. The Metler balances were down the hall from the lab. Needless to say, many crucibles were dropped along the way. After the three-hour lab (and a couple more) I had to leave. The correct answer was pretty obvious, so I left a generous ~20% "error". It was one of the "better" results in the class, but till believable. ;-)
In most of my EE labs we had to design, build, and test something; too fun to dry-lab.
-- Keith
Ah, yes, Chemistry :-(
My fingers were forever contaminating the unknown ;-)
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Dry-labbing is writing up a lab report without doing the actual "experiment."
It is a bit of a grey area... just as lectures prepare you to take a graded exam, but in general you can feel free to skip the lectures and no one cares, labs are supposed to teach you something that you're then supposed to expound upon in a graded lab report, so arguably if you already have the knowledge to write a good lab report, no one should care that you didn't attend the lab itself.
I always felt that grading policies that *required* the attendence of lectures were a clear indication that those who implemented the policy didn't respect their students. (At least in engineering classes... I had one speech/debate class where attendence was required, and there one can realistically how it really wouldn't work if everyone skipped class except the person giving a speech that day. :-) There's a scene in some moive about this... as time goes on, the students' desks become filled with tape recorders, and finally the professor himself just leaves a tape recorder on the lectern!)
I never had any trouble with chemistry - except when the experiments were wrong.
Having a father with a degree in Chemistry (physical/analytical) and a mother with a degree in Chemistry/Biochemistry didn't hurt. It took a while before I woke up that I was even better at electronics (but I got the Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry anyway before I did anything about moving into electronics).
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
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