Cell Biology lab has put me in a foul mood this afternoon. To be fair, it starts at a disadvantage thanks to the time: 2:30-5:30 on Friday afternoons. However, any remaining grace I may have felt for the class evaporated faster than isopropyl alcohol when my partner Amir and I began the activity. So much of this class, and, I venture to extrapolate, future classes, is absolute bullshit. Our instructor, Brian MacKay, has “unique” take on academic integrity that takes the values set forth by our university and other professors to a completely different level. To Brian, simply obtain a copy of one of his previous exams constitutes cheating. Copying the data your lab partner wrote down during the experiment? Plagiarism.
I suppose this means other renown professors at this institution should receive F’s on their transcripts for helping students to cheat when they not only provide old exams for practice, but encourage them to find additional exams on their own! Indeed, the world would be a better place if such dishonest organizations such as Kaplan and The Princeton Review were shut down—imagine, providing not just questions, but entire copies of old standardized tests to students to help them study. The audacity! Brian takes all of this and ratchets it up one more painful notch by announcing in his syllabus that he knows when somebody has been cheating or plagiarizing, “even if he cannot prove it.” What a way to kick off the semester!
Add to this ridiculous standard his commitment to ensuring that all labs take as much of the three hour time allotment as possible. Not because the labs are difficult, no, because he will make sure that your graph, crudely constructed on scrap paper, is appropriately titled with a complete sentence, among other things. It is this kind of busywork that so infuriates somebody who has a basic grasp on biological concepts. I mean, if you’ve come this far and you still don’t understand how to operate a micropipetter, where the hell have you been?!
This fellow’s exams are supposed to be hard, which is absolutely fitting given his personality. Here’s to getting through this semester with an A.