Friday, May 26, 2006

How to cheat good

Alex Halavais has done an excellent job of providing useful advice on
how to cheat effectively. As a lecturer at a university, I can understand all too well his lament about students turning in work that is strangely not of their own making. Thankfully the small number of students I have had to work with make this a minor issue for me, but my colleagues with larger student groups do have a heck of a time with it.

8. Edit > Paste Special > Unformatted Text

This is my Number 1 piece of advice, even if it is numbered eight. When you copy things from the web into Word, ignoring #3 above, don’t just “Edit > Paste” it into your document. When I am reading a document in black, Times New Roman, 12pt, and it suddenly changes to blue, Helvetica, 10pt (yes, really), I’m going to guess that something odd may be going on. This seems to happen in about 1% of student work turned in, and periodically makes me feel like becoming a hermit.

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