So Where The Hell Are We?

I am now about to begin my first semester as a Mathematical Risk Management graduate student. This Friday, we will have our first orientation as doctoral students. It starts at 11:30 am and is destined to last possibly as much as seven hours, with lunch and dinner offered.

I think I could probably use the experience of the Right Minded Actuary to make small talk in an academic setting. I'm never comfortable during these occasions, and I always end up saying the wrong thing. Undoubtedly, it's best to say nothing -- or to find someone who likes talking about themselves and let them talk until the cows come home.

We have finally moved into our little house. And we've waited for contractors, for phone people, cable people, plumbers, electricians, yard workers, painters -- the list goes on, forever, not to mention the art of actually moving things out of the apartment to the new house.

(Incidentally: right now, I'm in Birmingham, AL. The wife wanted company on a business trip, and I was glad to oblige.)

So I didn't get much study done. I had hoped to read Axler's "Linear Algebra Done Right", but right now, I'm stuck in the middle of Chapter 6. And, as any student can tell you, I found time for a lot of other fun things that didn't forward my education. I'm going to have to get better at this planning business.

Other than that, no news except waiting for the hammer to fall. What I learned to pass Exam FM seems like ancient history -- if a subject isn't reinforced, it disappears. The Exam P stuff seems to be fading away as well. Then again, many of these students might have had a summer off. (So what is the academic schedule of overseas students? Do they come to the US just out of classes, still in the right frame of mind? This three-months off lay off didn't do me any good.)

If you have a subscription to the WSJ, you can read this article about a plagiarism scandal at Ohio State University. It seemed that a master's degree student in mechanical engineering was having trouble getting a thesis topic approved -- so he went rooting about in the old theses for some inspiration.

He found an interesting topic, and followed the tracks of the "literature review". Basically, when you're writing a thesis, you review the literature, providing your reader with a path of what has been done before. When this student went further backwards -- looking at the cited materials in the first thesis -- he found that entire paragraphs and pages were lifted from existing works without paraphrase or attribution.

So, what was the fallout?

* The chairman of the mechanical engineering department at OSU is stepping down.
* One thesis supervisor might be "fired" (his academic contract will not be renewed).
* A professor at Miami University might lose his job -- he was one of those who graduated after writing a partially-plagiarised work.
* Students accused of plagiarism are being contacted to either revise their theses, or have their degrees revoked.

The explanation being given is that these were foreign students who did not have a great command of English. Supposedly, they a) came from countries with looser definitions of plagiarism, or b) did not know how to paraphrase accurately in the English langauge. I don't know if that's an appropriate excuse -- their supervisors, furthermore, were also not from America, which complicates the matter.

All I can imagine is reading dusty risk management theses somewhere, and being confronted with such a thing happening at my own university. And I ask myself, "what would I do...?"

(P. S. No spellcheck at this computer. Pleaze ignor bad spelin.)