Looking at previous entries will show I didn’t make any notes for economics today. That’s because we didn’t cover any new material; rather, we did some group work and then went to the computer lab to work on our Peachtree projects.
That was all simple enough. The groupwork had been mostly finished last week, so my group finished it up in about twenty minutes. The project I had mostly done in previous weeks, so I got it done in another fifteen or twenty minutes. That’s not the subject of this post. This post is about events immediately after I finished, when I was helping another sudent with some questions she had about her project.
I had already printed out my results, and handed them in, but I left the results up on my computer screen. I really didn’t give it any thought, to tell the truth. While I was across the room, I noticed another student near the terminal I’d been using, and looking at the two printouts I’d made to turn in. He hit a few buttons, went and got a paper from the printer, and went back to his terminal a couple rows over. Didn’t say a word. It was fairly obvious that he’d just made a printout of my final results for his own personal use. When I finished what I was doing and moseyed back to my terminal, there was even the standard printer queue messages detailing exactly what pages he’d printed.
I am not particularly bothered by this. Actually, I’m shaking my head at how silly that was. Understand; this project was fundamentally a data entry assignment. We all had a sheet of paper detailing less than two dozen transactions, which we were supposed to enter into a program called Peachtree. The program would then transform all that data into well-ordered trial balances and ledger sheets. Every one of us had identical transactions to enter. If it was all done correctly, we’d all have the same final results. Furthermore, the assignment sheet had written on it, right in the same section where it told you what to turn in, what the final results should be.
So, the skills being developed by this project are navigating Peachtree, entering data, and figuring out what accounts are affected by the various transactions. I suppose having my ledger entries would eliminate the need to do the third part, which is the least time-consuming part of the whole operation. It wouldn’t help with either of the first two parts, because he had no way of directly importing the data back into Peachtree. He just had a printout. He couldn’t turn that printout in, because it has my name printed in big letters on every page.
So, instead of entering data from his instruction packet, he can type that same data from my ledger sheet. That might have saved him some time, except he wouldn’t just pull it out and start copying from it in front of me and the instructor, so he was sitting around twiddling his thumbs for a good twenty minutes, which combined with time spent sneaking up on my data is probably longer than it would have taken to do it normally.
But the data on my ledger sheet was wrong. When I turned it in, the professor found some mistakes, showed them to me, and sent me back to correct them. She didn’t take any points off, or anything of that nature, you understand. This is typical behavior for her, and behavior I approve of. I fixed my errors, gave it back, shut down my terminal, and went about my business. If the cheating student uses my ledger sheet for his work, he’ll have the same mistake, and she’ll send him back to correct it. Which she would do for any mistakes he made on his own, too. This assignment isn’t graded for correctness; she’ll make you keep doing it until it’s correct, and gave you the correct answers up front anyhow. For that matter, had the cheater asked me for help on an entry, I would have helped him; the professor would also have. He was able to get access to my data because I was off helping another student with her questions on the same project, so it doesn’t seem a huge stretch to think I would have aided him.
This is what I call “cheating for no benefit”. He worked harded to get something illicitly than he would have had to work in order to get it honestly. And he gained flawed goods, to boot.
This sort of thing falls into the category I refer to as “cleverness”. Not in a complimentary fashion, either. Being clever is like being smart, except you try to cut corners, or claw tiny advantages, in liu of actually working. Sometimes cleverness is effective. But a lot of times, it’s exactly like this. It’s easy to be so clever you end up working more and getting less.
Now,