“As An Educator, It Is My Professional Responsibility to Contact Your Professor. I Appreciate Your Cooperation. Best of Luck in Your Studies.”

A professor receives an email from a student from a different school, asking questions about the professor's article that look suspiciously like they've been copied verbatim from an assignment. The professor does a web search to track down the student and their likely instructor, pressures the student to cough up the name of their instructor, and emails the entire exchange to them. Then blogs about it.

Is the professor upholding time-honored & sacrosanct standards of scientific rigor, or being a bully?

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2011/03/as-an-educator-it-is-my-professional-responsibility-to-contact-your-professor-i-appreciate-your-cooperation-best-of-luck-in-your-studies

I read this a couple of days ago. One of the most intriguing things to me is that the professor says the student in question is a "public figure," which gets everyone wondering about who it is. Shouldn't be that hard to figure out, I guess, if one was so inclined.

If the prof's blog didn't reveal the student's name, then I fail to see how it could be construed as bullying. If he did blog the name, then he has overstepped the bounds of proper, responsible conduct in order to brag about what a hard man he is. Shaming the student to his own prof, should have been enough shaming to satisfy the requirements of the situation. Shaming him to the world is far too much firepower for the offense, and dishonors the would-be shamer, not the shamed.

what a horrible blog

Checked the link. Student's name and personal info was redacted. I have no problem with that approach.

The professor's a she. My take was that the whole 'tell me your professor's name or I'll track them down anyway' approach [that's me paraphrasing] is bullying, regardless of posting a blog about it. If the Prof really wants to uphold academic standards my feeling is that they should choose a more suitable target, such as the researchers that conduct countless number of published studies that fail to be replicated or show a considerably diminished effect size. I thought the initial stern letter was fine, but the relentless following through struck me as needlessly aggressive.

No, I think that's balls. The professor named no names at all in the article, and provides an interesting point for debate as to what one should do in such a situation. From what I can gather the 'relentless following through' was more an attempt to get the student to display some proof that they had critical thinking faculties and that it wasn't just out and out cheating (for instance, had they copy & pasted the questions initially but when challenged asked some of their own the letter to their supervisor may have been less harsh).

It does seem fairly dimwitted of the student to persist in making lame excuses and not just spend an hour reading the Prof's article. But writing to someone asking for their help, even in such a ham fisted way, hardly constitutes cheating.

Student could have nipped this in the bud by cc'ing their prof into the email exchange.

if they weren't puling a fast one, that is

Professors don't like Wikipedia.

That's all I've got to say on that matter. I hear it enough.

For good reason. Wikipedia is fine in its place, but for any purpose involving academic standards, it is not a reliable source.

just hoping it's james franco

Wikipedia is as good as Google scholar or any other secondary information source, as long as it points you to something that's been peer reviewed.

I was thinking Emma Watson.

Wikipedia is as good as Google scholar or any other secondary information source, as long as it points you to something that's been peer reviewed.

― badg, Saturday, March 12, 2011 5:27 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

i've read plenty of factually wrong peer-reviewed stuff

and there's nothing necessarily wrong with wikipedia

i don't really completely grok what the student has done wrong other than show moxie

and this prof dude has too much time on his hands [via blogging]

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sanctimonious

just hoping it's james franco

― difficult listening hour, Saturday, March 12, 2011 3:58 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark

This is the partially redacted “stern letter” I originally sent to the student. I have removed the links the email originally contained to the student’s public FB page, which I cross-referenced with their email address in order to verify their identity:

as a student, it is my pre-professonal responsibility to ask you to use singular pronouns

this professor seems like a self-important retard

i don't really take issue with the prof's actions, but yes.

as a student, it is my pre-professonal responsibility to ask you to use singular pronouns

Let's not get into this argument again, but suffice it to say you are so ridiculously wrong on this issue.

k

english as second language + born/lived in the US their entire life = not franco or emma watson

surely this is natalie portman

(I'm guessing this is not a tier 1 famous person, how many are there who are currently in college?)

they say in the orig blog post that the person is a public figure "at least in their own state"

on this occasion double-k is otm

Maybe they were using "their" to protect the person's identity by not revealing gender? Also this is the most boring argt of all time?

^^^

I never thought of e-mailing the author of a paper I had to review for their thoughts on it. That could be useful. I guess I tend to forget that people who get published in journals are regular professors and stuff and (mostly) not GODS OF SCIENCE. Of course, asking them to answer the questions in your assignment's prompt is like... lolllz.

contacting authors of medical literature for clarification or additional data is fairly commonplace

the professor uses 'their' in that sentence but then there's this whole big paragraph down near the bottom where she uses 's/he' like 50 times in a row

I guess I was fine with this prof's actions up until the point when she blogged* about it

*from looking at her blog she refers to blogging as blegging? ugh I want to puke

Yeah what's with bleg? I don't get it

blogging in leggings

blegging = blogging to ask a question or present a problem to be answered/solved by commenters on the blogger's behalf

...more or less

they can do such wonderful things with words these days

can't really argue that she's wrong to do this, exactly, but the cold, hectoring tone of her emails is unpleasant and kind of infuriating.

^ i agree with this. if i were a prof, i'd want to contact the student's prof as well to let him/her know that cheating was afoot. but issuing ultimatums, deadlines, and threats that sound like they're themselves plagiarized from every copy movie ever (i'll just find out from your dean if you don't incriminate yourself - and trust me, that will be much worse for you) is pretty ridiculous.

yeah jd that's what i wanted to say but couldn't quite put into words