Which is more likely, that an American high school student can write formally and effectively or that he got someone else to write it for him? =)
In my experience, the students that would lead or fight something like this would be writing it on their own. It's the unique student that stands up to the school in a mature manner, and when they do, all bets are off as to their capabilities.
Students do not get to make that choice. Furthermore, should we really be making it a requirement that in order to attend a public school one must surrender their rights under the law for even the most basic of freedoms? The issue here is not so much the fact that teachers are checking for cheating, this is to be expected, but the fact that teachers are doing this by paying a for profit company which is then using the student's work in it's for profit venture.
Students are required by law to attend highschool, they have no chance to reject the terms of "employment" they are not compensated. Elsewise slaves were compensated too, they got a roof over their heads. No here in america we have very specific laws regarding what constitutes employment and compensation and schools are not governed by those laws.
Proof: If the student tried to make using the work to grade him conditional on the grade being a good one, otherwise he'll sue you for a copyright violation by using the work in an unapproved manner, they'd be laughed out of court. Copyright law has no provisions for that sort of "value".
Not at all, he'd be laughed out of court because the purpose of submting for grade is to be evaluated. Making the right to evaluate contingant on the outcome of the evaluation is not possible. By contrast a student can (and should) have every right to dictate that by submitting his paper his is granted the right to copy and distribute ONLY within the context of evaluating the paper for HIS grade. And if the school copied and distributed beyond that, any good lawyer should be able to make it an easy win for the student.
Use of the anti-cheating service does nothing to affect the value of the student essays, which was $0 before being submitted, and $0 after being submitted.
Again wrong. The work does have value. Why? Because teachers are PAYING to use this service. The entire business of turnitin.com revolves around the use of MY copyrighted material, therefore there is very much a value to my work (currently priced at 80/student). What right does my school have to grant turnitin.com the right to use and distribute my work in their for profit venture?
Again, these are highschool students. They are required by law to attend, and while not coded in law directly the schools are almost required to pass them the grades are almost meaningless but that is irellevant to the initial point which is they are required to attend school. These students do not recieve consideration and are not given a chance to reject their terms of "employment". If students are employed by the schools, then every student in the world should be suing for 12 years+ of back pay and overtime.
Diploma, degree, high school, college. Sounds like an SAT question, but I don't think you can expand it into an actual criticism of the post's reasoning. A high school diploma is certainly compensation for their work.
hardly. Students are mandated by law to attend school. There's no consideration there. They have no chance to reject the terms to which they are subjected.
You don't pay for your degree. Full stop. What you pay for is the opportunity to be educated, and the opportunity to have that education certified by an institution of higher learning, so long as you jump through the other hoops they put in front of you. For example, you have to turn in assignments, and these assignments have to be your own work, so that the school has some way of knowing that you're certifiable. Wait, that didn't come out right.
No, you pay for the degree. You can get education in hundreds of thousands of ways. The reason you pay to get your education at college (assuming you can call it an education these days) it to get the degree. All of the money you spend is for the degree. I can buy all the texts books without paying tuition. I can even attend the classes without paying tuition (provided I'm willing to risk being kicked off the premises). What I pay for is the certification, and that certification is a degree.
s far as I'm concerned, the students are only guessing, the administration is only guessing, Slashdot is only guessing, and while Turnitin's lawyers probably have a good idea of the landscape of the legal minefield their business treads, they're keeping mum.
That's an awful lot of trust to be putting into the businesses lawyers. I'm sure they think they're legal, but lots of people THINK they're legal. And remember that most things that are illegal happen without consequence until someone complains. These students have every right to complain as their personal property is being used without their explicit permission in a for profit venture.
I do hate the idea of treating the students as plagarists until some system clears them. But I also understand how badly plagarism can damage the educational process. Turnitin seems like a fair way to approach the problem, and I don't see that the students are being deprived of any rights to their work that they ought to have.
They ought to have a right to be treated as decent human beings before being subjected to scrutiny and highyl flawed systems which will then be used to prosecute them.
Allow me to relate to you a story of a run in I personaly had with a system like this. Back when I was taking programming courses, there was an intro course which was being taught by a teacher who, while brilliant, could not teach their way out of a paper bag, and thus was losing his students all the time. The end result was that those of us who knew how to do what needed to be done taught those that didn't. Now I have a rather unique (to the system that we were being taught) way of putting together code, and the people that I worked with picked up on those patterns and ways of thought so that they produced code in a similar manner. I never let any of the people I cheat see my original work, I always worked with them to think it through and see the problem in the way that I saw it. In the end though, there are only so many unique ways to write into programming projects. When the teacher ran my code through their anti cheating system, it flagged me and most of the students I worked with (it's also worth noting for the final project it flagged the whole class). It took me 3 months and much time out of my day to PROVE my INNOCENCE because of a buggy system. In the mean time, I suffered because my grades for the semester were reported as incomplete and I was unable to register for other courses.
These systems are not accurate enough to be worth the money spent on them. A little bit of effort by teachers to compare and cross reference would be better than such a system. Treating all of your students as cheaters will eventualy turn them into cheaters.
And guess what? Local law requires me to store every test and assignment from every student for three years
Boxes make excellent storage units. Furthermore, complying with law and giving my work to a for profit organization are two entirely different things.
No problem with that, since those databases are not used to steal your work. They are actually used to make sure no other student will cheat by stealing your work! Would you be happy if this happeend: You write a paper for a course 5 years later you try to publish it You are told you're not supposed to publish, because you copied the work from someone else And then you find out that another student, one year before, had copied your work -- and that's why you couldn't publish it
1) You assume that I'm letting other people have access to my work other than the teacher in the first place 2) You assume the database maintains a list of the original author 3) You assume the database is accurate. What happens when, because I never had to submit the work to the database (because some teachers trust their students to do work) someone else submits my paper as their own later. Since it's not in the database, they get attributed as the original author. What then? The database makes it HARDER for me to defend my rights.
Sure. And nobody said you don't own the copyright to that work. But the teacher needs to be able to compare papers, computer programs, etc. It's been like that since, well, ever, and I think it qualifies as fair use.
Then the teacher can do their own research using their own tools and NOT by violating my copyright and distributing my work to be used in a for profit organization. If you don't trust me to do my own work outright, then tell me that right off the bat so I can drop out of your class.
The difference is you were in a job. You were employed and recieving compensation for your work. These are highschool students, vastly different. Furthermore, this database does not protect me against future infringement because the database is not working for nor is it notifying me. If a paper I submit to the school becomes public it's because 1 of 2 things has happened:
1) I published it to a public site.
2) The turnitin database was cracked.
In situation 1 I chose to publish it, and it's my responsibility to protect my IP rights. turnitin will not contact me if there is a hit on my paper. The only thing that will happen is the student who turned in the paper will recieve punishment, something which can occur without turnitin violating my copyright.
In situation 2 the only reason it's public is because turnitin violated my copyright first.
In the end the inherrent problem is turnitin violates copyright to catch people violating copyright. You can not comit a crime in order to catch a criminal.
It protects my rights. What if I don't want my works in the database because I am opposed to having my works in an electronic form? I wrote plenty of papers for school over my time there, some of which I later rehashed and even considered publishing, whether it was written for profit or not, I own the copyright on that paper. I can choose who has the right to copy that paper and use it for commercial purposes.
Clearly there is value here because the school is paying for the service and they're bothering in the first place. Since they're looking to find cheaters, they're assigning a value to the original work, this anti cheating service affects that value.
Invariably it's irellevant as every cheating policy I've ever seen (highschool or otherwise) has explicitly stated that using your own work would be considered plagerism. A very stupid policy in my opinion as I've been in many situations where the same basic paper with a few tweaks and rewrites for focus would serve the same assignment.
Eh, any kid on a debate or poli sci club could have written that. In fact I recall writing similar pieces as a highschool student. It's not that hard to write properly, it just takes thought and word choice, something which any highschool student with half a brain could do.
It is my work though. I have never in my life had a teacher or professor who used my work for furture examples without my explicit permission. Furthermore, my property rights may not allow me to restrict who will "see" my paper, but it most certainly allows me to restrict who can and will make COPIES of my paper. And since the database maintains a copy, without my explicit permission, and outside the bounds of fair use, they have violated my IP.
See here's the thing, I don't care if someone else is turning in my paper. Why? Because if they are, it's because I gave them my paper to turn in. Besides, it's not protecting my IP rights as a student as I'm not the one who gets to use the database, nor will the school (or anyone else for that matter) sue for damages on my behalf (as most students can't sue on their own). Furthermore, if you've ever read a school cheating policy you will note that instead of protecting me, this will merely give the school reason to harrass me as they will claim (and I have no proof to the contrary) that I was allowing someone to cheat and copy my work.
To a degree yes. You, nor anyone else in the world is willing to pay what it costs for a fully secure system. It costs money, but more than that it costs time, and people don't want to wait. It is possible to design perfect and bug free software with no defects or attack vectors, but the costs and time associated with it would put it out of the price range of even the most succesful of corporations. And in the end, it would be worthless because it would be outdated by the time you released it. So people want it now, which means not testing for some of the more fringe cases. They also want it cheaper which means leaving out more testing. Witness the computers of today vs the ones of yesteryear. Many computers years ago were built to last, in part because they were expensive enough that a company needed to make them a good investment. These days no one has the stomach to pay for a $5,000 personal computer, even if it means better build quality. They want the latest, the greatest, and they want it now. Software is the same way. We want the latest and the greatest and we want it now, to hell with perfection we can iron the bugs out later.
I don't know how long it's been since you were in college, but from the time when I was in college, there wasn't much chance to branch out anymore. In fact, to be honest, my time at college was spent fufiling requirements rather than branching out. Sure I needed 21 hours of electives, but each elective had to come from a different subject area (Art, Religion, History, Literature, Politics etc) and even then I could only choose from a small subset of those courses (and forget about cognitive thought or perception, you need the first two levels of psych to do that and there's only one Philosophy course you're allowed to take. Personaly, I think that he's better off now, doing what I eventualy did. Get a job to pay the bills and build up work experience, and take your time learning and branching at a comunity college where they actualy care about your education and not "molding" you into a well rounded individual.
But inevitably you're treating the symptom here. It's just like click through agreements and passwords, if you ask for it all the time and make it a common thing, then the user will think nothing of it. If the only difference between being a regular user and an admin is that you have to type a username as well, it still won't solve the underlying problem of users giving their passwords to untrusted programs and of programs (many of which shouldn't need passwords) asking for them.
So instead of having to type their password to destroy their machine, they have to type a username and password. How does this solve the problem at hand?
I don't know about the GP but I knew a few professors who very much gave lectures that were verbatim from the book. In fact, one class I took (the professors was soon after "dismissed" because 100% of his students complained) made all his slides and notes from photocopies of the text book, and for his lecture, read the slides back to us. When I took into programming (yay for basic courses) the professor was clearly capable of programming but could not for the life of her teach her way out of a paper bag. So her lectures were again almost verbatim of the text book and she could not answer the questions asked. This is actualy a more common occurance in college than you would think.
it's been a while since college for you hasn't it? These days a lot of professors expect and indeed assign work enough to fill the 3:1 outside hours you're supposed to work for every hour in class. The average recomended course load at NCSU to graduate in 4 years is about 18 hours a week. X4 (3 hours for every one you spend in class) and that's 72 hours a week. 8 hours a night for sleeping is another 56 hours a week. Leaving 40 hours left for anything else. Assume about 2 hours combined for meals now we're down to 26 waking hours a week that's not supposed to be spent studying or sleeping. Personaly, I worked an additional 8 hours a week just to have some money to spend (like on food) so now we're down to 18 hours a week.
Now I know that not all or even most college students spend all that much time studying, but that doesn't neccsarily make things any better because not all professors seem to realize you might have other work to do. I knew professors who assigned lab assignments once a week and told the students if they were spending less than 6 hours on the lab report alone then they weren't spending enough time. Any student at NCSU can tell you about the horrors of the "webassign" system in which a 3 times a week 20 question homework assignment can turn into a 3 hour ordeal 3 times a week because you spend 1.5 hours doing the work and the next 1.5 playing "guess the answer the computer really wants" as according to webassign 0.213 and.213 are two different answers and depending on the day and professor and how the assignment was set up either could be the right answer but the other is wrong.
These days I work 40 hours a week, attend school 6 hours a week as well as do my own cooking and home maitenence (no more dinning halls for me) and actualy spend about 12 hours a day at work and yet I still have more free time availible to me than I ever did as a full time student. Unfortunately it has been my experience that too many college professors these days are substituting education with homework. Homework is great for reenforcement but if it was never taught in the first place, then it can't be reenforced. Worse are the professors who don't teach anyting but seem to expect you to learn it all from reading the text book. If I wanted to learn from a text book, I would have bought the book and saved myself the thousands in tuition and saved myself the trouble of wasting time in class.
In the end, yes time management is a great skill, but no one is superman and no one should be expected to not need or even want to take some real down time.
If the company is just looking at the credit score, then they're not running a very good credit check and I for one would not want to work there in the first place. A full credit report is quite detailed and a few mistakes here and there would show as anomolies. Most companies are I'm sure looking for trends. If every 6 months you're running up debt and not paying off bills though, that's seems a sign of some sort of financial mismangement and iresponsibility, especialy if it doesn't coincide with say periods of unemployment on your resume. Yes, if the company only looks at your credit score, it's easy to draw wrong conclusions, but so is it if they only look at your education in the resume or only look at your employment history. In short, taking one piece of information to judge a person is stupid, but that's been known for years.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is more likely, that an American high school student can write formally and effectively or that he got someone else to write it for him? =)
In my experience, the students that would lead or fight something like this would be writing it on their own. It's the unique student that stands up to the school in a mature manner, and when they do, all bets are off as to their capabilities.
Students do not get to make that choice. Furthermore, should we really be making it a requirement that in order to attend a public school one must surrender their rights under the law for even the most basic of freedoms? The issue here is not so much the fact that teachers are checking for cheating, this is to be expected, but the fact that teachers are doing this by paying a for profit company which is then using the student's work in it's for profit venture.
Students are required by law to attend highschool, they have no chance to reject the terms of "employment" they are not compensated. Elsewise slaves were compensated too, they got a roof over their heads. No here in america we have very specific laws regarding what constitutes employment and compensation and schools are not governed by those laws.
Proof: If the student tried to make using the work to grade him conditional on the grade being a good one, otherwise he'll sue you for a copyright violation by using the work in an unapproved manner, they'd be laughed out of court. Copyright law has no provisions for that sort of "value".
Not at all, he'd be laughed out of court because the purpose of submting for grade is to be evaluated. Making the right to evaluate contingant on the outcome of the evaluation is not possible. By contrast a student can (and should) have every right to dictate that by submitting his paper his is granted the right to copy and distribute ONLY within the context of evaluating the paper for HIS grade. And if the school copied and distributed beyond that, any good lawyer should be able to make it an easy win for the student.
Use of the anti-cheating service does nothing to affect the value of the student essays, which was $0 before being submitted, and $0 after being submitted.
Again wrong. The work does have value. Why? Because teachers are PAYING to use this service. The entire business of turnitin.com revolves around the use of MY copyrighted material, therefore there is very much a value to my work (currently priced at 80/student). What right does my school have to grant turnitin.com the right to use and distribute my work in their for profit venture?
Again, these are highschool students. They are required by law to attend, and while not coded in law directly the schools are almost required to pass them the grades are almost meaningless but that is irellevant to the initial point which is they are required to attend school. These students do not recieve consideration and are not given a chance to reject their terms of "employment". If students are employed by the schools, then every student in the world should be suing for 12 years+ of back pay and overtime.
Diploma, degree, high school, college. Sounds like an SAT question, but I don't think you can expand it into an actual criticism of the post's reasoning. A high school diploma is certainly compensation for their work.
hardly. Students are mandated by law to attend school. There's no consideration there. They have no chance to reject the terms to which they are subjected.
You don't pay for your degree. Full stop. What you pay for is the opportunity to be educated, and the opportunity to have that education certified by an institution of higher learning, so long as you jump through the other hoops they put in front of you. For example, you have to turn in assignments, and these assignments have to be your own work, so that the school has some way of knowing that you're certifiable. Wait, that didn't come out right.
No, you pay for the degree. You can get education in hundreds of thousands of ways. The reason you pay to get your education at college (assuming you can call it an education these days) it to get the degree. All of the money you spend is for the degree. I can buy all the texts books without paying tuition. I can even attend the classes without paying tuition (provided I'm willing to risk being kicked off the premises). What I pay for is the certification, and that certification is a degree.
s far as I'm concerned, the students are only guessing, the administration is only guessing, Slashdot is only guessing, and while Turnitin's lawyers probably have a good idea of the landscape of the legal minefield their business treads, they're keeping mum.
That's an awful lot of trust to be putting into the businesses lawyers. I'm sure they think they're legal, but lots of people THINK they're legal. And remember that most things that are illegal happen without consequence until someone complains. These students have every right to complain as their personal property is being used without their explicit permission in a for profit venture.
I do hate the idea of treating the students as plagarists until some system clears them. But I also understand how badly plagarism can damage the educational process. Turnitin seems like a fair way to approach the problem, and I don't see that the students are being deprived of any rights to their work that they ought to have.
They ought to have a right to be treated as decent human beings before being subjected to scrutiny and highyl flawed systems which will then be used to prosecute them.
Allow me to relate to you a story of a run in I personaly had with a system like this. Back when I was taking programming courses, there was an intro course which was being taught by a teacher who, while brilliant, could not teach their way out of a paper bag, and thus was losing his students all the time. The end result was that those of us who knew how to do what needed to be done taught those that didn't. Now I have a rather unique (to the system that we were being taught) way of putting together code, and the people that I worked with picked up on those patterns and ways of thought so that they produced code in a similar manner. I never let any of the people I cheat see my original work, I always worked with them to think it through and see the problem in the way that I saw it. In the end though, there are only so many unique ways to write into programming projects. When the teacher ran my code through their anti cheating system, it flagged me and most of the students I worked with (it's also worth noting for the final project it flagged the whole class). It took me 3 months and much time out of my day to PROVE my INNOCENCE because of a buggy system. In the mean time, I suffered because my grades for the semester were reported as incomplete and I was unable to register for other courses.
These systems are not accurate enough to be worth the money spent on them. A little bit of effort by teachers to compare and cross reference would be better than such a system. Treating all of your students as cheaters will eventualy turn them into cheaters.
And guess what? Local law requires me to store every test and assignment from every student for three years
Boxes make excellent storage units. Furthermore, complying with law and giving my work to a for profit organization are two entirely different things.
No problem with that, since those databases are not used to steal your work. They are actually used to make sure no other student will cheat by stealing your work! Would you be happy if this happeend:
You write a paper for a course
5 years later you try to publish it
You are told you're not supposed to publish, because you copied the work from someone else
And then you find out that another student, one year before, had copied your work -- and that's why you couldn't publish it
1) You assume that I'm letting other people have access to my work other than the teacher in the first place
2) You assume the database maintains a list of the original author
3) You assume the database is accurate. What happens when, because I never had to submit the work to the database (because some teachers trust their students to do work) someone else submits my paper as their own later. Since it's not in the database, they get attributed as the original author. What then? The database makes it HARDER for me to defend my rights.
Sure. And nobody said you don't own the copyright to that work. But the teacher needs to be able to compare papers, computer programs, etc. It's been like that since, well, ever, and I think it qualifies as fair use.
Then the teacher can do their own research using their own tools and NOT by violating my copyright and distributing my work to be used in a for profit organization. If you don't trust me to do my own work outright, then tell me that right off the bat so I can drop out of your class.
The difference is you were in a job. You were employed and recieving compensation for your work. These are highschool students, vastly different. Furthermore, this database does not protect me against future infringement because the database is not working for nor is it notifying me. If a paper I submit to the school becomes public it's because 1 of 2 things has happened:
1) I published it to a public site.
2) The turnitin database was cracked.
In situation 1 I chose to publish it, and it's my responsibility to protect my IP rights. turnitin will not contact me if there is a hit on my paper. The only thing that will happen is the student who turned in the paper will recieve punishment, something which can occur without turnitin violating my copyright.
In situation 2 the only reason it's public is because turnitin violated my copyright first.
In the end the inherrent problem is turnitin violates copyright to catch people violating copyright. You can not comit a crime in order to catch a criminal.
It protects my rights. What if I don't want my works in the database because I am opposed to having my works in an electronic form? I wrote plenty of papers for school over my time there, some of which I later rehashed and even considered publishing, whether it was written for profit or not, I own the copyright on that paper. I can choose who has the right to copy that paper and use it for commercial purposes.
1) These students are highschool students
2) I pay the university for my education and degree not the other way arround.
3) There was no explicit contract that my work at the university (note, not for the university) was work for hire.
Clearly there is value here because the school is paying for the service and they're bothering in the first place. Since they're looking to find cheaters, they're assigning a value to the original work, this anti cheating service affects that value.
Invariably it's irellevant as every cheating policy I've ever seen (highschool or otherwise) has explicitly stated that using your own work would be considered plagerism. A very stupid policy in my opinion as I've been in many situations where the same basic paper with a few tweaks and rewrites for focus would serve the same assignment.
Eh, any kid on a debate or poli sci club could have written that. In fact I recall writing similar pieces as a highschool student. It's not that hard to write properly, it just takes thought and word choice, something which any highschool student with half a brain could do.
It is my work though. I have never in my life had a teacher or professor who used my work for furture examples without my explicit permission. Furthermore, my property rights may not allow me to restrict who will "see" my paper, but it most certainly allows me to restrict who can and will make COPIES of my paper. And since the database maintains a copy, without my explicit permission, and outside the bounds of fair use, they have violated my IP.
See here's the thing, I don't care if someone else is turning in my paper. Why? Because if they are, it's because I gave them my paper to turn in. Besides, it's not protecting my IP rights as a student as I'm not the one who gets to use the database, nor will the school (or anyone else for that matter) sue for damages on my behalf (as most students can't sue on their own). Furthermore, if you've ever read a school cheating policy you will note that instead of protecting me, this will merely give the school reason to harrass me as they will claim (and I have no proof to the contrary) that I was allowing someone to cheat and copy my work.
The problem is, the students are not employed. They recieve no compensation for their work.
Am I crazy?
To a degree yes. You, nor anyone else in the world is willing to pay what it costs for a fully secure system. It costs money, but more than that it costs time, and people don't want to wait. It is possible to design perfect and bug free software with no defects or attack vectors, but the costs and time associated with it would put it out of the price range of even the most succesful of corporations. And in the end, it would be worthless because it would be outdated by the time you released it. So people want it now, which means not testing for some of the more fringe cases. They also want it cheaper which means leaving out more testing. Witness the computers of today vs the ones of yesteryear. Many computers years ago were built to last, in part because they were expensive enough that a company needed to make them a good investment. These days no one has the stomach to pay for a $5,000 personal computer, even if it means better build quality. They want the latest, the greatest, and they want it now. Software is the same way. We want the latest and the greatest and we want it now, to hell with perfection we can iron the bugs out later.
I don't know how long it's been since you were in college, but from the time when I was in college, there wasn't much chance to branch out anymore. In fact, to be honest, my time at college was spent fufiling requirements rather than branching out. Sure I needed 21 hours of electives, but each elective had to come from a different subject area (Art, Religion, History, Literature, Politics etc) and even then I could only choose from a small subset of those courses (and forget about cognitive thought or perception, you need the first two levels of psych to do that and there's only one Philosophy course you're allowed to take. Personaly, I think that he's better off now, doing what I eventualy did. Get a job to pay the bills and build up work experience, and take your time learning and branching at a comunity college where they actualy care about your education and not "molding" you into a well rounded individual.
But inevitably you're treating the symptom here. It's just like click through agreements and passwords, if you ask for it all the time and make it a common thing, then the user will think nothing of it. If the only difference between being a regular user and an admin is that you have to type a username as well, it still won't solve the underlying problem of users giving their passwords to untrusted programs and of programs (many of which shouldn't need passwords) asking for them.
So instead of having to type their password to destroy their machine, they have to type a username and password. How does this solve the problem at hand?
Why is it an issue? If you are on your personal machine, who else but you should be the administrator?
I don't know about the GP but I knew a few professors who very much gave lectures that were verbatim from the book. In fact, one class I took (the professors was soon after "dismissed" because 100% of his students complained) made all his slides and notes from photocopies of the text book, and for his lecture, read the slides back to us. When I took into programming (yay for basic courses) the professor was clearly capable of programming but could not for the life of her teach her way out of a paper bag. So her lectures were again almost verbatim of the text book and she could not answer the questions asked. This is actualy a more common occurance in college than you would think.
it's been a while since college for you hasn't it? These days a lot of professors expect and indeed assign work enough to fill the 3:1 outside hours you're supposed to work for every hour in class. The average recomended course load at NCSU to graduate in 4 years is about 18 hours a week. X4 (3 hours for every one you spend in class) and that's 72 hours a week. 8 hours a night for sleeping is another 56 hours a week. Leaving 40 hours left for anything else. Assume about 2 hours combined for meals now we're down to 26 waking hours a week that's not supposed to be spent studying or sleeping. Personaly, I worked an additional 8 hours a week just to have some money to spend (like on food) so now we're down to 18 hours a week.
.213 are two different answers and depending on the day and professor and how the assignment was set up either could be the right answer but the other is wrong.
Now I know that not all or even most college students spend all that much time studying, but that doesn't neccsarily make things any better because not all professors seem to realize you might have other work to do. I knew professors who assigned lab assignments once a week and told the students if they were spending less than 6 hours on the lab report alone then they weren't spending enough time. Any student at NCSU can tell you about the horrors of the "webassign" system in which a 3 times a week 20 question homework assignment can turn into a 3 hour ordeal 3 times a week because you spend 1.5 hours doing the work and the next 1.5 playing "guess the answer the computer really wants" as according to webassign 0.213 and
These days I work 40 hours a week, attend school 6 hours a week as well as do my own cooking and home maitenence (no more dinning halls for me) and actualy spend about 12 hours a day at work and yet I still have more free time availible to me than I ever did as a full time student. Unfortunately it has been my experience that too many college professors these days are substituting education with homework. Homework is great for reenforcement but if it was never taught in the first place, then it can't be reenforced. Worse are the professors who don't teach anyting but seem to expect you to learn it all from reading the text book. If I wanted to learn from a text book, I would have bought the book and saved myself the thousands in tuition and saved myself the trouble of wasting time in class.
In the end, yes time management is a great skill, but no one is superman and no one should be expected to not need or even want to take some real down time.
Well presumeably if you're using a weapon on someone your intent is to hurt or disable no?
If the company is just looking at the credit score, then they're not running a very good credit check and I for one would not want to work there in the first place. A full credit report is quite detailed and a few mistakes here and there would show as anomolies. Most companies are I'm sure looking for trends. If every 6 months you're running up debt and not paying off bills though, that's seems a sign of some sort of financial mismangement and iresponsibility, especialy if it doesn't coincide with say periods of unemployment on your resume. Yes, if the company only looks at your credit score, it's easy to draw wrong conclusions, but so is it if they only look at your education in the resume or only look at your employment history. In short, taking one piece of information to judge a person is stupid, but that's been known for years.