LOOKING BACK, LOOKING AHEAD

Hey folks--great issue!

I want to put in a vote for MORE photographs like "That Was Then, This Is Now" [fall 2000]. Photos like that are my favorite thing to see in the magazine. I also really appreciated the map and description of planned expansion ["Riding Tidal Wave II"]. That keeps all of us alums appreciating the past and feeling connected to the future!

Keep up the good work.

Francesca Bertone'85
B.S., Human Development
via e-mail  

STUPID CRIMINALS

All long-time instructors accumulate "Stupid Criminal Award (Student Category)" candidates (End Notes, fall 2000). Here are mine.

I used to teach the old Bio Sci 1 in 194 Chem. The class was huge, and there was no way one could recognize all those faces. One time, about one minute into the final, a male student stood up, threw his blue book on the floor, uttered an expletive and stalked out. Baffled, I picked up the blue book; it told the story. Apparently a real student had obtained a "ringer" to take the exam for him. The "ringer" absentmindedly wrote his own name on the blue book. Realizing what he had done, he rendered it illegible, writing his employer's name above it. Then he apparently decided that was too obvious. He rendered the second name equally illegible, gave up and left. Whoever the real student was, he was one of three no-shows who took a zero for the exam.

One of my upper-division courses requires a long term paper on interspecific interaction in ecological communities. The students pick their own topics, which are vetted by me. One student, who was doing poorly overall, chose to write on butterfly mimicry as a coevolutionary system. Since I work on butterflies, I was curious to see what kind of a job he would do. Apparently he was one of the few people at Davis who didn't know I work on butterflies. His paper was beautifully done--head and shoulders above the rest of his work in quality. As well it should have been, since it was plagiarized from a source I knew virtually by heart and had on the shelf a few feet from my desk when I read the paper. Having confirmed the theft, I called him at his apartment. After identifying myself, I merely asked, "Are you familiar with [the source]?" "You got me," quoth he.

My third tale comes from my former institution, the City University of New York. I had two nuns from the same convent in my ecology class. The exam was a take-home, and the nuns handed in virtually identical answers (though the sentence order had been changed). I called them into my office. "Sisters," I said, "Do you remember the story of King Solomon and the two women who both claimed the same baby? Well, I can cut the grade in half and give each of you half of it, or I can give one of you full credit and the other a zero. Your choice." They opted for the latter, and I let the one who volunteered to take the zero write an entirely new and different exam in its stead.

Arthur M. Shapiro, professor
Evolution and Ecology