Archives for March 31st, 2005

The only question not on their exams is: "What’s the f***ing point of all this?"

I recently got this picture with the comment: Še en dokaz, da lahko študent FDV-ja pade samo po stopnicah!(Roughly: More evidence that the only thing students at the Faculty for Social Sciences can fail is to make it up the stairs.)

While I can’t vouch for its authenticity, I do know (from friends who are either students or professors) that cheating at Slovenian universities is epidemic. And I really don’t get it. What’s the point? Why force students to pretend to take an exam? Why not just give them all perfect scores the minute they enroll?

As it is now, if a student gets caught cheating the punishment is not explusion, not a failing grade, and not 100 lashes of the cat ‘o’ nine tails, but rather the minor inconvenience of having to take the exam again. I personally know a student who submitted a plagiarized paper, got caught, and was ordered to… (get ready) redo it. Getting expelled is apparently impossible.

I don’t know. How is cheating your way through university any different from buying a fake degree? And why do the universities tolerate it? And don’t people just get sick of it?

(Thanks Dejan!)