Epic Fail

Was chatting with my mum and the topic turned to students and plagiarism, which reminded me of the following incident that occurred a year or two back.

I was sitting through the class presentations when I got a feeling of deja vu.  It finally hit me that the reason the presentation seemed so familiar was because I *had* sat through it before.  Just a few days back.  In another class.

So I dug up the presentations of the other class online and located the relevant one,  True enough, it was essentially the same presentation.  Complete with the problematic and illogical slide.  In fact, it was the worst presentation from that day and I had many issues with it.

So I asked the team to explain the slide.  Which they could not,

I then asked if the work was their own, and they assured me that it was.

I gave them another chance to come clean, and they were adamant that they had done the slides themselves.

So I projected the two presentations side by side, and went through them slide by slide.  This team had one extra slide that the original did not.  But all the other slides were identical.

I asked them what they had to say for themselves.

One of them had the gall to say that they did include a slide of their own, which only earned a withering look from me.  The rest were appropriately meek and apologetic.

Lesson to be learnt - if you want to cheat, you also have to 'cheat smart'.  Before you take someone else's work as your own,

• make sure you ask them who their facilitator is, and ensure that it is not the same as yours, and
• be sure to ask them how their presentation was received by their facilitator so that you know you did not get a dud.

Fail of epic proportions.