Q: One of the instructors of a required freshman seminar gives out the exact content of the coursewide final exam in advance. A “study guide” rapidly spreads to hundreds of students, who use it to ace the exam — except for the one question subbed out at the last minute. This is:

A) Cheating

B) Cheating

C) Cheating

D) Cheating

E) Not Cheating 

Welcome to Columbia University, where students are circling (E). Or they are on Bwog, at least, where we should admit upfront we’re getting 90 percent of our information on this four-alarm Ivy cheating scandal. (Spec has some more details and confirmations here.) Let’s back up and let Dr. Deborah Martinsen, a dean of the Core Curriculum, explain:

There has been an unfortunate breach in Lit Hum final exam security.

Notes identifying the quotations and sketching out the essay questions circulated among students prior to the exam. (We have one copy of these notes.)

THE TELL-TALE SIGN: Crime and Punishment – the students did not know of the last-minute quotation substitution.

SO, if any of your students identified the passage from Crime and Punishment as occuring in the Epilogue, chances are they had access to these notes. If the student correctly identified all of the other passages, chances are even greater. If they identified the exact Canto in Dante, they are very high indeed.

… WE WILL REQUIRE THAT ALL INSTRUCTORS SUBMIT ALL BLUE BOOKS TO THE CORE OFFICE.

It is, to quote another email from department chair Patricia Grieve, a “complicated situation.” Namely, the situation that hundreds of students may have cheated on the single-most important exam at Columbia College. But in the raging id of the Bwog comments section, the few students pointing that out are being shouted down by students who blame the professor, Martinsen, the course itself — basically, anyone and anything but themselves.

Posted by sophomore: I think it’s more wrong of the professor to put her students in such a situation: on one hand, they might have realized (but we can’t be sure of that) that they had an unfair advantage, but on the other hand, what were they supposed to do? Speak up and get their teacher in trouble right before a final?

Martinsen, get your fucking act together. Blame the PROF not the students. Understand the precedent you’re setting here. If you put the blame on the students and not on the professor, you have created a system where the teachers can now “trick” students into cheating.

Posted by obviously: just to get it straight, i don’t view any of this as cheating on behalf of the students.Posted by fy who never saw it: NO WAY. NONE OF THIS IS CHEATING.

Posted by lit hum bullshit: this is such bullshit. just because some teacher is incompetent and gives out the answers doesn’t mean that the rest of us should suffer.

That’s selective, of course, but go read the desperate screeds (there are a few particularly nasty ones) and see if you come up with a different take. In closing, we’ll turn the mike over to one last commenter.

Posted by word: For those of you who want to deny it, let me clarify for you: IT WAS CHEATING. 

Even with every Ivy school on hair trigger for offenses against political correctness, Princeton has handily won this year’s Most Ridiculous Bias Sweepstakes, thanks to January’s “I So Good At Math and Science” op-ed and April’s Pictionary anti-Semitism. And with the orange and black, there’s always room for one more outrage. In today’s Princetonian, an editor’s note reads:

A letter published May 3 on this page used the word “beaners” in reference to Hispanic immigrants and comedian Carlos Mencia’s frequent use of the term. While we strive to allow our readers to represent their views freely in the letters section and generally edit only for grammar, length and clarity, this letter’s use of the term in question did not meet our standards for offensive language.

As a general policy, we only print coarse or offensive language that is directly relevant and necessary to the topic at hand. In this case, the term was not germane to the writer’s argument about University storage and we should have asked him to reconsider this language. We sincerely regret this oversight.

Anybody else not see that bolded part coming? We were expecting the unfortunate use of “beaners” (btw: like our tipster, we actually weren’t even aware that was a slur) to have come in one of those “edgy” essays on race that appear like clockwork in college periodicals. But no, the offensive language was this:

Are there no mini-storage places along U.S. Route 1? Are there no beaners (as Mencia would call them) with trucks for rent in the area? Or does the Student Agency monopoly prevent such trucks from driving anywhere near campus?

Jonathan Baker ’87

Also absurd: Are we really at a point as a society where we refer to Carlos Mencia by only his last name, like “Seinfeld” or “Goethe”? And why is an alum from the Class of 1987 writing to a college newspaper to do so?

It’s always irritating to hear people criticize college kids for “having too much time on their hands.” After all, it’s those kids — the ones with all that extra time — who end up starting little companies like, you know, Facebook, or Microsoft.

Case in point: this e-mail sent out to Harvard’s Adams House Sunday afternoon: 

From: [redacted]
Date: May 6, 2007 4:41 PM
Subject: [ADAMS] SAVE CLAVERLY!!
To: [redacted]

My fair Adamsians,

Right now, our beloved Claverly Hall is in grave danger.  The blue skies over Mt. Auburn stree are darked by a teeming horde of barbarians.
These foul creatures will stop at nothing to get their greasy hands on the jewel of gold coast housing.  I am, of course, referring to Winthrop house.  Right now, they have 64 armies poised on our border, ready to sweep in and occupy.  It is defended by only 35 valiant Adams knights. Brave and strong as they are, their numbers are too few.  As a resident of Claverly, I cannot bear to live ruled by the debaucherous Winthropians!  I beg you, my friends, to come to our aid!

We will fight them on Linden Street!  We will fight them in the pool! We will fight them in the tunnels!  WE WILL NEVER SURRENDER!  Sign up for Risk before 5 PM!

~Will

We haven’t seen Harvard kids so riled up since The Crimson tried to take away their maids!

The idea for a campus-wide game of game of Risk is nothing less than genius. For starters, it’s perfect for finals period: Unlike the squirtgun shootout Assassins, you never have to leave your dorm. Students form teams that must then conquer other dorms. Whoever conquers all of campus by May 20 wins. Between now and then, we expect many battle-cry emails like the one above. (Even if you didn’t get into Harvard, you can watch the game here.)

There’s just one problem: Yale had the idea first. Earlier this year, Gabe Smedresman, Yale ’06, designed a campus-wide game of RISK that ended up attracting over 350 students. (Check out the original Yale version here.) Do the Harvard biters give credit? Meh, sort of. If you look at the Harvard edition’s FAQ page, it says the site was created by the Harvard College Events Board. But then at the bottom, in tiny print: “Based on idea and source code by Gabe Smedresman.” Aha!

If there was ever a sign that Yale looms large in Harvard’s rearview mirror, this is it. Next thing you know, Harvard dorms will start calling themselves “colleges,” the Crimson will transmogrify into a navy blue, and Harvard students will suddenly become fulfilled human beings. Mmm, on second thought, unlikely.

A few of the Ivy dailies have a tradition — a combo of classy and self-indulgent — of giving departing columnists and reporters the opportunity to write one final column. In their minds, it’s the column by which they will be remembered for all time. (This is not always a good thing. Trust us on this.) Most of them put more time into these than they care to admit. But rarely do you get a chance to examine these good-byes as a whole. So we’ve rounded up some of this year’s batch. They’re not necessarily the best of the bunch, but they’re the ones we noticed. (Look for more as some of the other dailies close out for the summer.)

• Columbia: Copy editor loves her job; other editors find this incomprehensible, but dare not question it [Spec]
• Columbia: I have awesome, quirky friends and many ex-boyfriends. [Spec]
• Columbia: The Internet has changed everything! [Spec]
• Columbia: I actually went to class. [Spec]
• Cornell: U.S. News ranking is just a number. Right? [Sun]
• Cornell: I toiled away four years at a college daily, and all I got was this lousy column [Sun]
• Cornell: What we learned from reading this column: Cornell has a “Ho Plaza” [Sun]
• Cornell: New drinking game: take a shot for every tired socialist cliche [Sun]
• Yale: A 10-step guide to selling out [YDN]
• Yale: Idealist somehow emerges with ideals intact [YDN]
• Yale: There is no “bubble” [YDN]

Nowadays, thanks to the internets, the classic ritual of meeting your freshman roommate on the first day of college is long gone. We’d be shocked to find any pair from the class of ’10 that didn’t Facebook/MySpace/LiveJournal the shit out of each other months before move-in. No more sweet, agonizing anticipation over whether the other person will be messy or neat, early riser or night owl, punk rock or lame; you just show up, and say hi to a person you already know all about.

Sebastian Gallese, a freshman at Brown, thought his roommate sounded ideal on paper: standard-issue econ major, big sports fan, plays rugby — as a bonus, he even has a British accent, just like on Undeclared. But even with all that foreknowledge, there are things about a roommate you cannot know until you live with them, day in, day out, night after night, marathon session of online role-playing game after marathon session of online role-playing game.

Diffferent blogs chart progress in different ways. Some look at pageviews; some at Google rank; some at the number of times they place stories in established media outlets. At IvyGate, we prefer the yardstick of infamy. And by its inerrant measure there can be no topping the month of April.

On April 11 — thanks, we’re guessing, to two recent visits from the male nudity fairy (Justin Kan; balls) — we got our first-ever report that IvyGate is officially blocked at someone’s place of employment:

Access Denied (content_filter_denied)

[Redacted] has blocked access to this website as it has been categorized as Nudity;Personal Pages;Sexual Materials. Refer to [Redacted] Corporate Information Security Policy for additional information.

Believe us, we were some proud papas when the news arrived. But that just didn’t compare to the dispatch we got last week from a reader on the other side of the planet:

Thought you might like to know that your blog seems to be blocked in China–Keep up the good work! … I’m mostly in Beijing, though the site is unavailable everywhere in the country as far as I know.

Guess it was the all the class warfare!

If you didn’t catch last week’s Crimson article on abstinence, that’s OK. The only detail you really need to know, as Dana Goldstein of Campus Progress helpfully pointed out, is this one:

According to an online survey conducted by University Health Services (UHS) last spring that drew an undergraduate response rate of 40 percent, nearly half of all respondents (47 percent) reported that they had never engaged in vaginal intercourse. The national average for undergraduates at other colleges stood significantly lower at 31 to 32 percent.

Funny, we figured it was a piece about voluntary abstinence.

We didn’t mention this story when it ran because we didn’t really have much to add. But then we spotted this Harvard video, and suddenly everything just sort of made sense:

In honor of the cinematic triumph that is Grindhouse, we present not one but two films for your viewing pleasure. Both take place at Yale and both center on one theme: unalloyed stupidity. That’s not to say that this behavior is at all rare, or that we haven’t done equally dumb things ourselves. It’s just this time, for better or worse, there happened to be a camera present.

Part One: A Song

Part Two: 6 inches

Okay, so by Monday we meant today. Regardless! An anonymous prankster lulled us out of our stupor yesterday with a delightful stunt: emailing the entire student body with the names of the (alleged) recent inductees of the secret societies Skull & Bones, Scroll & Key, and Wolf’s Head. (Skulls above; full image after the jump.)

Yes, Rumpus prints this list each year — but that’s usually done at the end of the term, with the names of graduating seniors. While we’ve written before that outing secret societies usually just serves to validate the egos of those involved, this prank carries some undeniable juice: Tap Day was April 19, so these poor elites had just 10 days to savor the secrecy.

Also noteworthy: whoever was responsible appears to have hijacked the Yale College Council / Yale Student Activities Committee email system — again. Are all college stunts/pranks going digital? You can’t email a cow onto a rooftop, people.

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