Author: Steve Cavers

Maybe it’s the dark, gloomy weather today. Maybe it was the surreal US state of the war union address last night. Maybe it was all the talk about coincidences and synchronicity. Maybe it was the sushi I ate at lunch. Maybe it’s all of these things all rolled together that gives me that dark, almost foreboding feeling that’s curled up deep inside my gut. Next to the sushi.

It’s not completely foreboding. I’m not, for example, completely and utterly convinced that something dire is about to happen. It’s more like threeboding, where I just wouldn’t be surprised if something unpleasant were about to happen, because it would fit the mood.

In a couple of hours, it might ease back to a mere twoboding, where if something bad happens, you look back and say, “I kinda thought that something like that might happen,” but you don’t expect anything unusual in advance.

Then there’s oneboding, where nothing bad happens, and you kind of expected that anyway.

But now? Definitely a melancholy threeboding feeling.

I’m shocked. And, come to think of it, I’m appalled too. I’m shocked and appalled. In these early stages of shocked-ness and appalled-ness, I’m not certain what the proportions are of each that I’m feeling, but I am convinced that both feelings are involved — simultaneously, too. In some cases, I might have been shocked for a moment, then taken a breather before moving on to being appalled, then returned to being shocked again, and continued to alternate between the two until I wore myself out. This time, however, it’s clearly a simultaneous attack of being shocked and appalled.

I just read this article on Canada.com: SFU professor insists an F is an F, But student can’t be failed for hiring a tutor to do her work, panel rules.

A disciplinary panel at Simon Fraser University has ordered an education professor to re-grade a student’s paper after she gave the student an F. Apparently, the student hired a “tutor” to rewrite the paper for an upper-level course in teaching English as a second language.

In my opinion, if you’re a university student, you shouldn’t be allowed to graduate unless you have a strong enough grasp of language to write clearly and effectively, especially in Arts and education. By the time you reach an upper-level course, you should know how to write competently. Hiring a service to rewrite your assignments is unethical — it’s cheating. Your grade on a paper reflects not only the ideas presented, but also the clarity and skill with which you presented them… in. Doh.

I understand why some students would turn to a tutor to check their grammatical and spellling. Everyone makes mistakes, and a good editor is worthless. Priceless, I mean. Yes. A good editor is priceless, but the service did much more than a bit of proofreading. Didn’t the service give the same paper to two students in the same class?

No, the student shouldn’t get an F. If it turns out that this student didn’t write the paper or if the paper was significantly rewritten, then he or she deserves a suspension… and a severe frowning, too.

Please read Pete McMartin’s opinion piece: Today’s lesson is: moral relativism at SFU. He makes the same point, but far more eloquently, and I’m probably correct in guessing that he even wrote it himself.