Link dumping...

1) What the aliens are watching right now. (Trust me--this one is interesting.)

2) Kate has drawn my attention to My Life is Average. This is one of those A) "it's funny 'cause it's true" and B) "it's funny 'cause I can relate" blogs that threatens (because of A and B) to become kind of sad.

3) This year's Bulwer-Lytton winners. A couple of my favorites:

"The wind dry-shaved the cracked earth like a dull razor--the double edge kind from the plastic bag that you shouldn't use more than twice, but you do; but Trevor Earp had to face it as he started the second morning of his hopeless search for Drover, the Irish Wolfhound he had found as a pup near death from a fight with a prairie dog and nursed back to health, stolen by a traveling circus so that the monkey would have something to ride."

"On a fine summer morning during the days of the Puritans, the prison door in the small New England town of B----n opened to release a convicted adulteress, the Scarlet Letter A embroidered on her dress, along with the Scarlet Letters B through J, a veritable McGuffey's Reader of Scarlet Letters, one for each little tyke waiting for her at the gate."

4) From insidehighered.com: "Dear Plagiarist..."

5) Also, there's this. The music is the best part.

Cheaters!

If I get lots of my "real work" done today, I will reward myself with some catch-up blogging. Since I am (so far) ahead of schedule (with 20 minutes to kill before class starts), I thought I'd link to some sites I've had sitting in my bookmark folder...this morning's theme: Plagiarism and Cheating!

1) Have you seen or heard about this story? It's pretty surprising, but this graphic is absolutely astounding. I don't see how this guy can get away with it.

2) Then there's this...I am really hoping it's a joke or something.

3) And then there's an article from Insidehighered.com about a website which offers to corrupt students' files for them so they can get extra time. Doesn't that seem like a lot of effort? Like effort a student can use to actually write a paper? (Such is the case with lots of plagiarism...) Incidentally, if a teacher tells a student the he/she won't accept online submissions, then this isn't a problem. If the teacher wants to accept them or has to accept them, can't that teacher say that a satisfactory online submission must include a file that works? This whole scheme seems pretty stupid.

Students, students, students...

Three links on students, grading, and attendance:

1) This article on essay mills astounded me. I knew, of course, that this stuff goes on, but I've never seen the details. Outsourcing paper writing to Manila? Really? And folks trying to purchase entire dissertations? Crazy.

2) Surprise, surprise: Grade inflation is still a problem.

3) And then, just to keep things light, a poem inspired by that annoying question: "Did I miss anything in class today?"