In which I am blown away.

In a comment below, I defended my position as a speciesist by appealing to the awe-inspiring extent of human potential. After I hit the "publish" key, the irony struck me: I use this blog as a place to complain about my students and the general stupidity around me. While I am able to wax poetic about the potential of a child, when children turn into the big galoots that sleep through my lectures, their potential seems significantly diminished.

Therefore I feel compelled to write about an experience I had when I was a faculty member at Ivy League University (ILU). I had just taught my first large lecture class at ILU. By "large," I really mean large: there were 200 students in this lecture. The undergraduate student body at ILU numbers around 4000. I learned that despite the practically impossible admission standards at ILU, a large subset of ILU students are just as lazy and stupid as the laziest and stupidest here at LSU. The difference between ILU and LSU students is the feeling of entitlement. ILU students are Paying Customers and they Expect Something In Return. LSU students slack off honestly, and generally do not expect special treatment when their behaviors result in poor grades.

It was with some trepidation that I agreed to serve on ILU's Ethics Committee. This committee is composed of and chaired by undergraduates. Two faculty members are placed on the committee as observers. The committee is only convened when an accusation of academic misconduct is leveled against a student. I thought that what I was going to see on this committee would be similar to what I experienced in the classroom. I thought there would be an us-versus-them mentality on the part of the committee members. The faculty member's accusations would be treated lightly and an attitude of "the customer is always right" would result in no action at all.

This particular case involved a pre-med student. At this time, the competition among pre-med students was so fierce that some students resorted to felonious behavior to insure their place at the top of the curve. Cheating was rampant and some students were injured. One of my students had to drop out of my course because of injuries he sustained in chemistry lab: a classmate had poured acid in his equipment locker and on his lab notebook, resulting in serious burns to his hands. At the time I left, ILU had hired a special dean whose job was to attempt to change the culture among the pre-meds. I don't know if the attempt was successful.

The accused pre-med student was enrolled in biochemistry, a required course in the pre-med program. This course was very large by ILU standards, with hundreds of enrollees. In a class this large, with three or four TAs, it's easy to get lost in the crowd, which was an advantage for this student. He had devised a system wherein he changed his answers on homeworks and exams after they had been returned to him, increased the assigned points, and then he complained that his points had been added up incorrectly. Over the semester, this student had submitted at least three separate pieces of work for grade recomputations. It was the last one, the last midterm exam, that did him in.

All the exams in this class were xeroxed by a single person on a single machine in a locked room, all at one time, and then numbered. (Did I mention cheating was rampant?) One page on this particular exam had question that used a band pattern from a gel electrophoresis. The student got this question right but, apparently, not the question immediately proceeding it. He carefully removed this page from his exam, used whiteout or some other masking agent to erase his original answer, wrote in the correct answer, and then xeroxed the corrected page. He then copied back the graders' marks with higher point values, using the same colored pens, replaced the page in his exam and submitted it for a grade recomputation.

Were it not for the gel electrophoresis it would have been difficult to detect cheating. The bands on the gel were reproduced in varying gray levels, visible after the first xeroxing, but after the second all shades of gray were just black and white. There was no way the electrophoresis question could have been answered correctly given the figure that resulted after the second xeroxing.

The student offered no defense. He said that he was being persecuted, that he was honorable, that he would never cheat, etc. etc. He was asked why he had xeroxed the page. He could only insist that he had not. His demeanor was such that everyone in the room was reluctant to believe that he could have so deliberately, and with such premeditation, cheated so blatantly. This was not the hurried and sloppy behavior of the panicked; this took a lot of time to accomplish, and he had over a week to do it and turn it back in to his TA.

The students on the committee were not what I had expected. Two of them had been students in my own classes. They were the good ones, not Paying Customers. I had given one of them his only B ever at ILU. (In retrospect, I feel quite badly about that.) As committee members they were sober, serious and mature. They asked questions of the accused and accuser, not to choose sides, but to get as much information as possible. They were distressed by, not dismissive of, what they were hearing. They took their jobs very, very seriously, and as I watched them, I knew I would not hesitate to have any one of them as my own physician some day. I also knew that I probably would not be given that opportunity, because these people were going to be too busy running the world. I was astonished.

Both sides of the case heard, the accusing faculty member left, not to return. The accused was also asked to leave while the committee discussed the situation and decided on a course of action. As the doors closed, the committee members stared at each other. Guilt or innocence was not a question here. The only issue to be determined was the punishment to be meted out. Once again, I was astonished. These students were appalled at their classmate's behavior. The premeditation of the act loomed large in their minds. They were all pre-med students themselves. They knew the pressure to cheat was nearly irresistible, and though none of them had ever bent under that pressure, they were willing to be sympathetic to a classmate who had a momentary lapse. This was not such a case and they were angry.

They were angry that an ILU student could devalue an ILU diploma in this way. They were angry that a person like this might someday become a physician. They were ready to pronounce the harshest sentence they could: permanent expulsion from the university. To my surprise, it was I and the other faculty who argued for leniency. What do we want to achieve? we asked. Can we prevent this person from ever becoming a physician? Would that be sufficient? Expulsion had other serious consequences, which in this particular case included deportation. Did we want that?

The students were swayed by our arguments. The student was not expelled. He was given an F in the course, placed on academic probation, and a notation was made on his transcript indicating that the failure and the probation was for academic misconduct. This, we thought, would be enough to keep him out of any reputable medical school. It also gave him a chance to reform. By working hard he could, we thought, overcome this black mark and turn ignominy into success. I don't know if I would argue for leniency if I were faced with the same situation today, but I still believe the punishment was fair.

I think back on this experience at certain moments. I was so proud of these kids - kids who are probably finishing their residencies now. When I look out over the sea of faces in my lectures, I find myself doubting that there are any students like them here at LSU. There was something about them, something more than genius and hard work. They had a sense of citizenship, of duty and responsibility; an unspoken agreement that they were going to use their talents to make the world a better place.

The number of students at LSU is an order of magnitude larger than the number at ILU. Statistically speaking, I know there are more students like them out there somewhere. I hope I find them, or they find me, eventually.