Poor Taste Award Of the Year.

Hey, fellow bio job seekers. Looks like there's a job open in Chicago! And I bet your office will have a new computer!

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Columbia College professor charged with transporting child porn
BY NATASHA KORECKI
from the Sun Times

A Columbia College professor with a Ph.D in molecular biology was ordered held in a federal lockup Thursday after he was charged with transporting child pornography.

Kevin G. Fuller, 41, of Oak Park was arrested Thursday afternoon, and federal investigators searched his home, allegedly recovering images on his computer of infants and prepubescent children engaged in sexually explicit activity. Upon his arrest, Fuller allegedly confessed to sending sexually explicit images of children, according to charges.

Fuller is listed as a professor in the Science and Mathematics department at Columbia College in Chicago.

Full article.

Proffie's website.

"Sometimes a Pipe Is Not A Pipe." Wicked Witchy From Wichita Writes, and We're Just Dank With Dew About It.

As a good-looking, athletically built, meticulously dressed twenty-something, I feel both my (apparent) youth and my womanhood exposed whenever I step foot on campus. At this point, I don't even think twice before whipping out my faculty ID at the Registrar's for fear of being mistaken for a bubble-gum undergrad who thinks that she could submit a "Change of Grade" form without her professor's approval. And I am no longer surprised when asked by an awkward 18-year-old on the first day of class whether it be my first time teaching since, evidently, six years of slaving away at this college and seven years of grad school have not aged me at all, or given me the gravitas, fear, or just plain tact that my older, out-of-shape, color-blind, and shabbily-garbed male colleagues receive. Oh, and then there's the occasional flirtation, especially when this jock, the day after I had ripped him apart in an athletic report, finally realizes that his academic standing might affect his baseball scholarship and makes a feeble attempt at a joke, and we both smile and pretend that this might score him some extra credit.

Don't take me wrong; I don't mind the backhanded ego-stroking. I've read Dorian Gray enough times to have a visceral reaction at any mention of old age or ugliness. But it's not really consistent. I would not be so bitter if all three of my hard-earned hot-chili peppers had not been not'ed and replaced with acute observations about my being a torturer, who is so "really into the readings" that you must be "save[d]" and run for your life. I would much rather see a comment about the length of my skirt or the girth of my biceps or the flatness of my abs, because then I would know that at least someone is paying attention. One of my female students asked me how much I weighed. That's a start.

I cannot help wondering if, despite my out-of-campus dirty mind and despite all that rubbish about flattery and long legs and my campus sexuality, I am deep down very conservative...When I read the first batch of papers this semester about the Chinese Book of Songs, I was speechless. No; I laughed, cried, and only then did I hit aphasia. I couldn't even write about this to RYS at the time, but made copies of the most piquant of these specimens in case I ever felt the urge. Tonight, another student paper, this time on Catullus--who actually does deserve an erotic beating, I mean, reading--finally broke the silence. This one was in reference to an admittedly raunchy Catullan invective against his beloved and, specifically, to Charles Martin's (the translator's) wonderfully descriptive word "cocksmen" (all 300+ of whom were, post Catullus' break-up, supposedly banging Lesbia back in Rome): the student wrote, in a strike of pure analytical genius, that it "means something that is in the line of a man who is well endowed and is equally blessed with the sexual skills to accompany his impressive appendage." Who knew that the term needed a definition, let alone a whole paragraph.

Rousseau--in Starobinski's reading, I believe--connected writing with onanism, since both involve the summoning of an absent image whose contours, now made present through memory, one can etch out. And drool over. And otherwise get wet. No, no; I didn't immediately think of this particular student's summoning my image as he carefully weighed those family jewels (though that would be flattering, and I was, after all, the reason for his reading about cocksmen), but somehow the "appendage" turned into a dildo in my mind, and, all of a sudden, Rousseau's notion of writing as a complement gained a whole new meaning. I couldn't really do any more grading.

Once the ball got rolling, moreover, I couldn't stop imagining my students as creepy onanists thinking with the wrong part of their body because, really, that would be the only way to explain the crazy shit they manage to think up. "Many believe that modern associations with sex stem all the way back to ancient times," one young woman doth protest too much, and without any manifest evidence of any mechanism of censorship operated by her underdeveloped superego, I have no reason to assume that her paper is not, like myths were for the ancients in Freud's interpretation, key to her apparently unrepressed psyche. "There is proof in Poem 4 that sexuality was very 'out in the open' during Chou Dynasty. The narrator is a woman who speaks of a man lasciviously and explicitly talks about their sexual encounter out in the open. The line 'the dew makes wet as rain' symbolizes not only the place where the act is taking place, but the state of the sexual organs involved. The narrator also says that she met 'by chance' her lover, making it more than clear that she was having casual sex and enjoying it. The tone of the poem is both lustful and joyous, given the narrator seems pleased with her sexual encounter and ends the poem with the words 'mutual felicity'. Not shockingly both stanzas in the poem climax with a synonym for happiness, 'felicity' and 'joy'." Climax, right. Morning dew obviously symbolizes the ejaculation of a male sky-god all over an innocent female earth. It is, after all, as my burgeoning Sinologist points out, spoken about "explicitly." What's more, it paints a wonderful picture of ancient Chinese Woodstock: "This gives the idea that women during Chou Dynasty enjoyed a large amount of freedom in terms of sex."

I'm no specialist here, and, as someone who has spent both her entire undergrad and grad career studying Western classics, I feel immensely under-prepared to teach this stuff (though that is a matter for another submission altogether), but I am just not so sure that women during the Chou Dynasty were not only fucking strangers in a wet field all night long but also survived to write about it. Explicitly. Please, somebody, enlighten me! This student claims that she got her shit online. I'm speechless.

Still, maybe I am the close-minded idiot. Maybe I don't know history. Maybe, after years of interpreting texts and reading queer theory, I am still too dumb to see that a pipe is sometimes not just a pipe. Maybe my other student, a very quiet young man of Chinese origin might know better? (And yes, I know all about "native informants," and I am too smart to assume any prior knowledge among my students, though too naive not to expect them to care enough about the material to study it carefully on the off-chance that it might make them learn something about their own cultures.) "Throughout the entire poem, the poem stays consistent with happiness because of the speaker's spontaneous encounter with a man. It can be assumed that the speaker is female based on the imagery used to depict eroticism. The setting is in the middle of the night." So far so good, I guess. I even forgot that both of my classes thought "to court" meant "to have intercourse with." Everything is about sex, right? But why am I so bothered (baffled? hysterical?) when I read that "[t]he [female] speaker uses a metaphor to express the woman's vagina: 'Mid the bind-grass on the plain / that the dew makes wet as rain"; or, that " [e]rotically thinking, it is easy to imagine the plain as a woman's vagina. Bind-grass is a type of flower, and flowers are a sign for women. The speaker became happy when she met a keen men by chance. The 'wild grass dank with dew' can be metaphorically represented as wet pubic hair, hinting that the speaker and the man engaged in intercourse throughout the whole night." Poem 7, of the same pornographic Book of Songs, traditionally said to have been edited by horny old dude Confucius, is read in a similar light with yearning represented by the girl's gift--a red flute--which, obviously, represents an "erect penis," because the Chou Dynasty was so incredibly (un)repressed that every single word they uttered must have been a euphemism. Or, perhaps, it was Arthur Waley, translator and renowned Sinologist, who was so incredibly (un)repressed? Fuck. I am now extremely tempted to read his influential translation of the Monkey (also Journey to the West), since, having reread my students' comments and revaluated my theoretical blindness, I am sure this book must be a pretty saucy tale of beastiality; in fact, I might have to spank one myself when I finally get my hands on it.

And this is the crazy and inappropriate shit I think up while grading my students' work. Thank god I don't have to write a paper about it.

See? All We Wanted Was a Nice Dialogue About the VidShizzles! We Get a Thumbs Up (Our Asses!) from Thurston of the The Thunder Bay Thurstons.

Say what you want about them, but the videos are worthless.

I am confident that I know more about the website then you, because, correct me if I'm wrong, there's an almost new set of moderators working on the page and I've been reading it since the beginning.

I can assure you that there is better and more important stuff that the page should cover, and any reasonable person would say the same.

I send in excellent postings every week or so and only every once in a while does it get posted. Years ago I was posted much more often. The page is shit now - you do the math.

"Mismatch in Expectations." A New Book Sheds Light on Why Some Students Choose Not To Engage.

'The College Fear Factor'
by David Moltz
from InsideHigherEd.com

Despite best intentions, today’s first-generation college students and their professors “misunderstand and ultimately fail one another” in the classroom, according to a new scholarly work on community college pedagogy.

The College Fear Factor, published last month by Harvard University Press, is based upon five years of observations of community college courses and interviews with students and professors by Rebecca Cox, professor of education at Seton Hall University. In her work, she tries to show how “traditional college culture” is a barrier to student success, particularly for disadvantaged students.

Cox believes a mismatch exists between many students’ expectations and those of their professors, and that some of the current pedagogical norms used in the classroom may be furthering this learning gap.

“Students can easily arrive at college without understanding what is expected of them and how to meet the expectations,” Cox writes. “Being unprepared to meet certain expectations, however, is not the same as being unable to meet them. When students fail to follow, or even violate, rules that are taken for granted, instructors may easily interpret the source of the problem. If a student’s style of participation is different from the norm, for example, an instructor may believe that the student is not as capable as the other students. Similarly, when a student fails to take the initiative to ask questions or seek assistance, an instructor may simply assume that the student is not motivated to learn.”

Through her interviews with more than 120 community college students — typically first-generation — Cox notes that a “coherent picture emerged” of their professors.

“Students admitted to feeling intimidated by professors’ academic knowledge and by teachers’ power to assess students and assign grades,” Cox writes. “Essentially, students were afraid that the professor would irrevocably confirm their academic inadequacy.”

This nervousness was particularly concentrated among those students taking mathematics and composition courses, often the “portal to more exclusive classes.” Citing an “underlying fear” that they would be “exposed” in front of their peers and professors “as too stupid for college classes,” many of the students observed by Cox “exhibited very low tolerance for feeling confused or making mistakes” and often did not seek extra assistance to understand new skills or information. Others even deliberately skipped assignments, for fear that turning them in would earn them a poor grade and confirm their inadequacy.

Full article.

Student-Athletes and Grades. Some Quickies.

We got lots of email last night concerning Nervous Nina's thirsty on student athletes and grades, but most of them were one of these: "Of course grade changing goes on for student athletes. The horror!" Or "Of course grade changing doesn't happen for student athletes. Don't be so hysterical you namby pambys!" We've already posted a long piece, but here are a handful of interesting posts that also came in. And, we must tell you, there were more than a handful of posts like the last one in this list:

• Not only do athletes get special changes, but two schools I have worked for, Mxxxxxx University and the University of Cxxxxxxxx both changed grades for athletes and to keep non-athletes happy. I guess it was fair to all students that way. UC actually changed the grades right in front of me without reviewing any work. The only grades that did not change were the A's. UC is my horror story because one student threatened to kill another student and they changed his status to an independent study as a way to resolve the issue, but still allowed him to come to class. 5 years later he is still a student at UC despite multiple suicide attempts on campus. I kept track of everything since meeting him. I have never been able to shake the feeling he was going to hurt himself or someone else one day. I keep multiple copies of his threats and the school's official responses in case something does go terribly wrong to help make sure those administrators are held accountable. Nina, you are right to be nervous, but I would thank whoever you worship being god, a bottle, and a small hairless cat for the things we probably do not know.
  
  
• At almost EVERY BCS-level school, there's a whole system to assure that these necessary late grade changes are few. The original placement in jock-friendly classes with jock-friendly profs is key, with plenty of opportunities for independent studies later in the eligibility cycle. The academic "advisor/tutors" who help with homework, test prep and test-taking on the road is also important, not to mention the increasing number of online courses that star players seem to find and regularly ace.
  
  
• When no other alternate is available, a program chair or dean can always be found to legally override the mere instructor or adjunct and their little gradebook. Every year or so, some staffer blows the whistle somewhere and gets their ass fired. The lawsuit is settled w/o public details and the staffer retires/moves on and better not show their face in town again. This, of course is for football and basketball. You other "student/athletes" are on your own.
  
  
• Mostly the Athletic Dept. finds easy courses with friendly faculty for the football and male basketball players. (Most other student athletes are actually petty good students.) I know of a couple of cases where T.A.'s were directly pressured to pass a student athlete by a coach. The Athletic Dept. is quick to pull players out of a class that they are failing. The worst thing I have witnessed was on the admissions side. The Athletic Dept. had made scholarships offers to several students who had been denied admission. A committee to review appeals from rejected students was confronted by the Athletic Dept. and voted to admit all these students.This was especially disheartening because I had fought hard to get Faculty Senate representation on this committee a few years before. But its members still caved in unanimously.
  
  
• Never, but I teach an advanced science course. The athletes I get are all from nerd-sports, like swimming, track, and tennis. In other words they expect to have to live in the real world.
  
  
• Although I don't recall teaching any student athletes, I do know that some of my students were passed in courses I know they failed. Normally, if a student's grade was between 40 and 50%, he or she could qualify for a supplemental exam, but a request to write it had to be submitted to the instructor. Usually, that request was granted and the student had a certain amount of time to prepare.
  
  
• That was the case for two of my students in a certain course. I allowed them to study over the summer and, when they returned the following term, I would have made arrangements for them to write the exam. Imagine my surprise when both of them, whose grades were below 45%, came to my office beaming with joy that they had passed. Some jerk had raised their marks to 50% and I suspect it was my department head. Unfortunately, that wasn't the only course where I suspect something like that happened. So much for academic standards.
  
  
• Yes, it's completely true that grades are changed for athletes. Thankfully, athletics at my school are not great, and we're never asked to change grades. However, I went to college at a big basketball school, and one of the star players was in an Intro to Theatre class with me. He almost never came to class. The prof, who was a new, naive adjunct, told the rest of us in disbelief one day that the Dean had called her and told her "just pass him." This was theatre class! All he had to do was show up, and then go see a few plays and write reviews. NOT rocket science!
  
  
• Altering athletes' grades is very dangerous for a school given NCAA oversight, but it happens all the time (sometimes it gets caught, sometimes not). Even in high-profile schools, there's at least an institutional memory of the times when rules were more regularly bent. A TA colleague once asked one of his student athletes (a football player at a very elite football school and now an NFL player) for a signed ball for me as a gift (I'm a big fan of this team). The athlete was held to normal standards in the course, showed up at office hours, was followed to class by a team staff member to ensure attendance, etc.), but when my friend stopped by the football office to pick the signed ball up, the secretary winked at him and said, "Thanks for the help."
  
  
• College and universities all use computer systems to maintain their records. Many are now also encouraging/requiring instructors to enter their own grades through online gradebook interfaces. I would be surprised, shocked, and dismayed if a system was in use today that did NOT track who made what change and when to a student's record. Every system I have experience with date-stamps each and every change to a data field with the "changers" user ID. Unless someone deeply imbedded is hacking in (IT person, maybe), anyone using an "authorized" account with or without that user's knowledge could easily be caught. Some schools also archive electronically imaged signed hard copies of an instructor grade books as a double-checked back-up. Not to say the story Nervous Nina was told is false. Unless every instructor checks the transcript of every student they ever have (which they most likely don't have access to) ad infinitum the culprit(s) can only be exposed when someone comes clean. That someone could be an individual benefiting from the change and they probably wouldn't know who the actual grade-changer is/was. The beneficiary of the grade change would need to tell the instructor who would then have to confront the registrar with evidence of the original grade. A quick investigation would reveal when the change occurred and by whom. What are the odds of that happening, though?
  
  
• Here's the problem. Most college faculty are a bunch of flaming faggots who never played team sports, don't understand what teamwork even is, and have such an unfair hatred of anything physical that student athletes get prejudiced against all of the time. I know because I'm a Division 1 athlete and I've seen it first hand. Luckily our coaches provide us with tutors who do most of our work and I don't feel guilty about it. I'm WORKING for the university, bringing in much TV ducats, and if my queer little history professor doesn't like it, then he can take his $80,000 salary and stick it. Tell him I'll see him on TV next year. Fucker.

Paul from Providence on Student Athletes and Cheating.

Forgive me if I tread a bit lightly on this subject, but I've had a bit of a history with yesterday's question, and that history ended up hurting some good people.

I was a second year English instructor at Football U when three senior football players registered and showed up for the first week of my freshman composition class. They sat in the back, were polite, and then disappeared. At the time the departmental policy was for instructor-initiated drops after students had missed 3 consecutive weeks of any course. When I didn't see the players again, I dropped them all.

Two weeks later a drop/add form (adding all three back into my section) came to me through the Dean's office, signed by someone I would later find out was the athletic department's liaison. I called my chair who turned me over to the liaison herself and I asked what was up. Shortly after our abbreviated phone call, she arrived in my office. She was pretty, well-spoken, but quite adamant that the students be let back in. "I can assure you," she said, "the boys are all doing their work. You know, of course, that they can't attend class like other students, right? They travel, they work out; they have responsibilities our other students couldn't possible handle." When I tried to interrupt, she said, "I can assure you that it's all above board. I supervise the tutors in our athletic department, and perhaps someone's been remiss about keeping you in the loop." She shook my hand pleasantly and by about the time I'd sat down my phone was ringing.

It was the Dean. He said, "I hope Miss BLANK has been to see you...ummmm...goood. Yes, then I'm sure she's explained everything. Mr. Frankie, or should I say Dr. Frankie, there is nothing to worry about. All of our athletes - especially the poor football guys in the fall! - are just run ragged. Miss BLANK and I have talked about things and she tells me that something fell through the cracks. Although the boys haven't been in class, I know that they've got their work and you'll have it soon. I hope you'll understand."

And I didn't. But the work did show up the next morning, 6 essays, two for each student, all at a reasonably competent level.

I was 27 years old, okay? I was a little intimidated in my first job. I was also, I have to admit, quite the football fan. Our team at the time was one of the absolute powerhouses in the country, Sports Illustrated covers, national network coverage of most games. And I liked that. I liked that someone in my class was mopping up quarterbacks on Saturday afternoons. I told everyone I knew about it.

My chair came by one day in October and closed the door. "Have you been getting material from the players in your class?"

"Yes," I said.

"Can I see some of it?"

I pulled a folder out of my cabinet and gave him the stack.

"I need these for the afternoon; would that be a problem?"

I shook my head dumbly and then sat down.

The chair didn't come back that afternoon. I didn't see him until the next day, and he simply came into my office, handed me the papers, and said, "Sorry to have taken these. I don't know what I was doing. Just forget it."

The semester ended, the football players showed up in my classroom on the last day - on their way to a New Year's Day bowl game - and turned in their final papers. They all smiled at me and shook my hands. The students in class were buzzing. And then they were gone.

In mid January, just before the spring semester started, the chair called me up at home, an unusual situation. He said, "I'm saying goodbye," he said. "I've got a nice opportunity to take a fellowship elsewhere." It was a short call, and I didn't understand why it was made until the spring classes started.

My next door neighbor, a senior colleague, someone who'd been at Football U for more than 20 years, came into my office amidst the normal early semester flurry and shut the door. "Hell of a thing," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"About [the chair]."

"What happened?" I asked.

And my colleague told the tale. The chair, who'd become convinced that the athletic department had been sanctioning wide spread cheating in a variety of departments without any interference by administration, had gathered evidence of the cheating, a series of identical papers that had been turned in for multiple years by multiple players within the English department.

When the chair went to the Dean's office, he got shuttled around a bit until he was in the VPAA's office with the vice president, the athletic department liaison, and Football U's coach. It was an unpleasant meeting, according to my colleague - whose allegiance I still couldn't guess. "They gave him the bum's rush," my colleague said. "He realized that they had a lot more ammunition for this kind of battle than just a few photocopies of some English 101 essays."

"They ran him off?"

"He found his own way off campus," my colleague said. "But they were willing to help him."

My colleague got to the door and then turned back. With a big smile he said, "Hey, did you see the boys beat the hell out of BLANK in the BLANK Bowl? Fucking 'eh!"

The next fall I faced the same situation. Four students, all kind to me, all professional. They appeared and then disappeared. When the three weeks had passed I sent in the drop/add slip. A week later the liaison was in my office. "I don't get it," she said. "I thought I'd explained the tremendous pressures our boys face."

When she left I turned another drop slip in and I waited.

Sometime in November I was walking across campus and my next door colleague saw me and waved me over to a bench where he was sitting.

"What's your deal?" he asked.

"What do you mean?"

"I've got your students, you know. They just transferred them to my class. What good do you think you're doing dropping them. I thought you understood it. [The chair] is not the first one they've run off, and he won't be the last. They're going to find a class for them somewhere, you know? If not yours, then mine, or someone else's."

I turned on my heel and went back to my office. I kept my head down for another year and then found a teaching gig at a decidedly un-football school in the northeast.

A year after that the former chair (with the aid of a half dozen faculty in different departments across the campus) took their grievances to local and regional media. Football U responded initially with a "sour grapes" defense, but then when it failed to gain traction, fired the liaison, a junior member of the athletic department, an assistant coach, and threw 9 current players off the football squad.

That was enough for Football U and Football town. The press died out and the story went away.

Every weekend in the fall I still watch football. I had an NFL game on a couple of weeks ago. There on the field was a familiar name and face, one of the first three football players I had in my class that day all those years ago. He's an All Pro. They interviewed him coming out of the tunnel for the second half. He smiled at the camera, said hi to his babies at home, and on the second play of the second half, he careened through the offensive line and dropped the quarterback to the turf like a rag doll.

Note: We want to note that, with Paul's assistance, some pertinent details of his story were anonymized.

Your GradFlakes Hate You. TA Trixie From Tulsa Opens a Can of Whup'Ass.

You may have tenure. You may control whether we can join your wonderful PhD club. But your grad flakes know who you're diddling, which of your collegues hate you, and that you only have two sport coats, both of which smell like cigarettes and fish. Please to enjoy.

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Dr. Smirkington: Every time you speak, whether in class, asking a question at a job talk, or during office hours, you’ve got this weird smirk that implies you’re smarter than who ever you’re talking to. You’re a actually a pretty nice person and the things you say aren’t mean, but one person giving a job talk almost had a breakdown after you asked a question, and all the grad students avoid your seminars because you treat everyone like morons. You don’t have any advisees because all the grad students think you’re a jerk.

Prof. Smackdown: You’re the biggest name in your field, and everyone in the department fears your wrath and lusts after your letters of recommendation. But all you talk about in class is how much better your book is than the one we’re reading, or the time you had lunch with the author, or how hard things were back when you were in grad school and how much better all of us young ingrates have it now. Your advisees look shell-shocked all the time, and often weep quietly in their offices after a meeting with you.

Dr. McSexist: You have packed seminars and a devoted clique of advisees who beat down any criticism of you when the grad students talk about you behind your back. You always get stuck with the required graduate intro seminar because the rest of the faculty hate you and how you treat women faculty--unfortunately, it’s the same as you treat the women grad students. You assigned only one book by a female scholar, and then spent the entire class mocking it and feminism. You also asked the two Japanese-American grad students about Chinese, Korean and Thai history and politics all semester--even though neither of them study China, Korea, Thailand, or even Japan. Your advisees are rabid, devoted, and just as racist and sexist as you.

Prof. Buddy: Also known as “Call-me-Buddy-we’re-really-just-peers.” We’re close to peers because you’re untenured and you’ll probably only be in the department as long as most of the grad students. You only have one advisee because most of us have been smart enough to listen to the rumors saying that you won’t get tenure and will be out of here before most of us defend. Your grades on research papers and seminars mean less because you come into class late and tell us about how hung over you are--and then ask the class out for beer on Tuesday nights. How'd you even get out of grad school, let alone graduate college?

Dr. Secrets: None of the grad students know what to think of you. You don’t return emails, you have office hours in the middle of the night, you make no comments during seminar and you never have a TA. The faculty has never seen you at a conference, no one has ever seen an article or book by you, and yet you have tenure. Sometimes we wonder if you actually work here, or if you’re just some random person the department hasn’t caught on to yet. You have a couple of advisees who don’t know what you think of them, and only hear through rumors from other grad students where you’ll be or if you’ve read their work.

Nervous Nina From Nashville Poses This Week's Big Thirsty on Student/Athletes And Their Grades.

So I recently became friends with a professional athlete and his agent, and we had an interesting discussion the other day about how college athletes magically earn passing grades in classes that they didn't pass. My athlete friend stated that he failed several courses throughout his college career, but on his transcripts, passing grades always appeared. His agent said this is not at all uncommon.

So my question is obvious: IS THIS REALLY HAPPENING????? ARE GRADES BEING CHANGED FOR ATHLETES??? Both these guys cited all the extra assistance athletes get - which I'm aware of, we always had athletic tutors who would hold extra sessions - and I'm fine with that; if I were in practice four hours a day I would need extra help too. But the tutors don't have any "special" insights - they don't give out my exam questions, as the agent suggested (I have full control over my exams from the minute I write them to the time they are administered; no one else has access to them without breaking into my house and getting onto my computer). The tutors can only repeat what I've said in lecture. And since I am also the only one with access to my gradebook throughout the semester, the implication is that after I submit my grades at the end of the semester, SOMEONE is going into the system and changing them for the athletes then.

CAN THAT BE POSSIBLE? I find the idea disturbing beyond all words. And if so, who is this person??

Q: So please, professors, deans, administrative personnel, weigh in. Is this something you have witnessed?

A: Send replies here.