All Posts Tagged With: "The Hour Hand"

Would you trust your cancer diagnosis to someone who had cheated on an exam?

This morning, the news broke that on Friday, Philip Baker, Dean of The Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry* at the University of Alberta, delivered a speech that was largely plagiarized from a speech given by Atwul Gawande last year at Stanford. Baker has issued an apology, but an apology is not good enough. He should resign immediately, and here’s why.

1. On principle. As Dean, Baker is responsible for the academic integrity of the programs he oversees. Deans are called upon every day to make decisions that impact students and faculty in the most basic ways: hirings, promotions, sabbaticals, grade appeals — it’s hard to think of an important university function that does not involve deans. Baker made a mistake, and he may feel bad about it, but he cannot now be trusted with the grades of students and the careers of faculty.

2. It sets an impossibly bad example. How can the university enforce its rules about plagiarism (for which students can be expelled according to U of  A policies) when one of its own deans has admitted to plagiarism himself? What could a faculty member say to an offending student who points out that what he has done is no different from what his own dean has done? Is a professor of obstetrics supposed to look a student in the eye and say that students have to be held to higher standards than university officials?

3. The scandal may hurt students, the integrity of whose degree might be called into question.

4. “What I stole was really good” is no excuse. According to the Edmonton Journal, Baker’s apology suggested that while he did lift the content of the Gawande speech, it was only because the original oration “inspired me and resonated with my experiences[...] The personal medical traumas which I detailed were wholly genuine and did indeed engender the sense of inadequacy I highlighted.”

Such an excuse, though, is no excuse at all. For one thing, there are well-established ways of using the words of another in an ethical way: paraphrasing and quoting with attribution. If the Gawande speech was so inspiring, all Dean Baker had to do was say, “In thinking about my address today, I recalled a wonderful speech delivered at Stanford last year, in which Dr. Atwul Gawande said…” and so on. Why didn’t Baker do that? Because according to witnesses who read compared the two addresses,  Baker lifted almost the whole thing, and to admit to that would be to look like you hadn’t written your own speech. Which, of course, he hadn’t. So he passed off a counterfeit.

But to do so at a university event, in his capacity as Dean, is to show a shocking disregard for a basic principle of academic integrity: you don’t knowingly take credit for someone else’s work.

Baker’s programs are in obstetrics and gynecology. Would you want your baby delivered by a doctor who hadn’t written her own papers? Ask yourself: would you want your cervical cancer diagnosed by someone who cheated on their oncology exam?

*This post originally referred to Dean Baker with an incorrect title. It has been corrected.

Writing exams is hard. But so is writing them.

I remember vividly the moment I was most nervous about an exam. As I walked to the exam room that sunny morning, I felt a tightening in my back as if someone had wrapped a heavy belt around me and had begun twisting.

I wasn’t on my way to take the exam, however. I was on my way to give it.

Sitting for an exam has, of course, its challenges. There are names and dates to recall, formulae to remember, essays to construct — but to my mind the difficulty in answering all those questions is less daunting than the difficulty in making them up in the first place.

For one thing, if a student does badly on the exam, he only hurts himself. But if the exam itself is not constructed fairly, then the whole class suffers. This was the idea that plagued me as I took that first long walk to hand out that first examination. Were the questions too hard? Were they clear enough?  Did I really cover everything in class that I think I did? What if everyone fails?

Over the years, as I’ve given more and more exams, I’ve relaxed a bit, but I still worry. Have I repeated questions twice? Did I accidentally leave out the right answer in a multiple choice question? Did I inadvertently introduce a trick somewhere? Is the hint I provided really helpful, or does it just confuse things?

The most disastrous exam I ever devised was one that students said they wanted. I asked what format they wanted for the exam; they replied “scavenger hunt.” So I obliged, and on exam day they went scampering off across campus looking for questions and writing answers. But I underestimated how physically taxing the whole thing would be, and when the marks came in I felt so guilty, I gave everyone a “fortitude bonus” for going enduring the grueling experience. The misadventure  still seems like a bad dream to me.

I once gave students an oral final exam which presented its own challenges. For one thing, I needed to have a record of the answers since, in theory, students are able to appeal their grades after the course is over (I think I still have the tape). For another, there was a matter of organizing the time. I ended up giving the question to the students, giving them twenty minutes to make notes and formulate their answers, then ten minutes each to present each response. I varied the order of the presentations, since there were both advantages and disadvantages to going first or last. Luckily for me, there were only three students in the class.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I know that sitting for an exam is no walk in the park. For some it is a downright nightmare. But if it makes you feel any better, as you are worrying about how well you are answering the questions, there is a good chance your prof is worrying about how well he asked them.