I had mentioned in an earlier post a paper I had to do in social psychology about a movie. The movie I chose was “American History X”; I had scanned the list of movies, saw the title on there, and decided that this is the movie I wanted to write about. Although, as I mentioned earlier, it’s a pretty difficult movie to watch, especially compared to the other movies listed, like “Shrek 2″ and “Mean Girls.” And again, I highly recommend seeing it.
Anyway, I typed about half of the paper last night before I looked at the prompt to make sure I was satisfying all of the requirements. I happened to glance at the movie list - and it was gone. “American History X” was not on there. I thought, what? and refreshed the page a couple of times (just in case, you know, the page hadn’t loaded one line of text :P). Nope. I didn’t know what to do at that point, so I figured I could just go into class and ask the prof if it was okay. It is a really good movie, and it’s pretty pertinent to the racial stereotyping part of the course, right?
I waited until this morning and asked her at the beginning of class. She responded by saying that the reason why she didn’t have “American History X” on the list was because it had been on a prompt for the previous semester’s class, and that she was worried about problems with cheating. She said she had been aware of internet sites to help people cheat, as well as the whole frat/sorority circle-jerk system of helping each other not actually learn anything in school (my words, not hers). Yikes. It hadn’t really occurred to me at this point that I could be suspected of cheating, and I swore up and down that I would never cheat on a paper. (Okay, maybe I did cheat -once- on a math exam, but the prof wasn’t even in the room during the exam and he never taught us anything anyways because he was too busy hitting blunts. But I’m innocent this time!)
She deliberated and said she would take the paper, but I left feeling - I don’t know. Guilty isn’t the right word, because I didn’t cheat (really! I’m not in a sorority and I value my education! Ask my English professors!). I felt crummy for most of the day, though, because it really does kind of look like I cheated. I mean, why would I have mistakenly done a paper on a prompt from a previous semester’s course? Isn’t that a little convenient? If I were the prof., I would be like, “yeah right. Uh, you fail at cheating, buddy. F+!”
I am supremely grateful that I have a nice, understanding professor.
What else happened today? I decided not to take the job - sheer laziness won out, although I’d like to think that the decision was motivated more by my need to concentrate on schoolwork next semester (ha. yeah right). This way, I can devote more time to the SUA, the ECM, the insert-acronym-here of other student groups I’ll be suckered into joining, as well as knitting, practicing the guitar, and all the other hobbies I have listed in my profile that I didn’t have time to do this semester. Oh, and last but not least, blogging.