Now, before the moralistic Daily Mail readers amongst you panic, this is not actually a guide on how to cheat in exams. It is more accurately a list of the top ten hints on how to cheat in exams, or really ways, over my career some students have been caught cheating in exams. How to Cheat in Exams 1: It’s just my Allergies! The carefully written notes on tissues is far from an original idea. Particularly on those well-known brands of ‘Pocket Tissues’, you know the ones 10 neatly folded paper tissues in a packet. The neat student is…
Christmas Exam Disaster Time
An exam disaster is not common, but when it happens, it is normally spectacular. It’s Christmas time and everyone is getting excited! Some of my more annoying colleagues have not only insisted on decorating their offices; their tasteful ‘peace and goodwill to all academics’ is spilling out and polluting the corridor as well. I didn’t see this exam disaster coming, and there was nothing I could do about it. It was very close to the end of term there were only a few staff drinks parties to attend and the horrendous ‘All-staff Christmas Lunch’ – that is unequivocally a different…
Ontology, Epistemology and Business Research
Oh why, oh why, oh why on earth are you wasting your time with ontology, epistemology and business research – there must be better things for you to do! Now, just for the avoidance of doubt there are. Especially if you are an undergraduate or masters (not doing an MRes or MPhil)… there are many, many, many better things. If you are unsure, think about all the things you enjoy doing, and go and do one of them! I am sorry, if you are PhD student, you really do need to get your head around this. Even if you…
Who Cares About Credit
The common tempestuous cry from students has become “Is this course credit bearing?” or “What credit do I get for doing it?” However, just as frequent is the faculty refrain, like Sirens on the rocks ready to wreck any new fangled management plan cruising past, “Is there workload credit for doing this?” Some fundamental shift has happened, especially in the contemporary, utilitarian, transactional Business School – neither staff nor students will engage, unless there is a credit or two attached to whatever they are being asked to do. Credit and Business School Certainly within a Business School, university education has…
How to Pass Your Final Exam
The Final Exam is Coming! The final exam can often make or break the overall result. I have worked in systems that, regardless of the overall grade, if the final exam is failed then the whole course is gone too. I have also worked places where the final exam pass mark is so low that even if they just write their name on the front of the answer paper, in the correct box, it would potentially account for being half way to a pass. However, please note, that in this type of institution, it is unlikely that the student can…
Plagiarism Police
Well today was really wasted, it was my first meeting with a member of the Plagiarism Police. It was never going to go well, as I had a pile of marking to do and no time to waste. Just as I was getting going, I hit a wall. It turns out one of my idiot undergrads had copied a chunk of one of my own articles and stuck it in the middle of their essay. Now, for me, the greatest surprise was not that they had done this, but that I had actually been paying close enough attention when marking…
Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc
Post hoc ergo propter hoc describes a causal fallacy. It was made popular by that erstwhile American political period drama called ‘The West Wing’! Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a logical misconception where someone argues that one event happens because another event happened before it, and the earlier event caused the second event. By means of an illustration: A happened before B. Therefore, A is the cause of B. Now, if you want a totally bonkers example of post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: After I sneezed, then suddenly my laptop exploded. Therefore, my sneezing caused my laptop to…
Rare Punctuation Marks Can Be Fun
Rare Punctuation Marks Before focusing on some rare punctuation marks, it is important to know that there are 14 commonly used punctuation marks in English grammar. They are the full stop, question mark, exclamation mark, comma, semicolon, colon, dash, hyphen, square brackets, brackets, curly brackets or braces, apostrophe, quotation marks, and ellipsis. However, the more interesting punctuation marks are the less commonly used ones. There are many excellent guides to punctuation marks, one of the best can be found of the Cambridge Dictionary site, I could not hope to improve on them here. However, I would much rather obsess over…
Building an Argument: Five Canons of Rhetoric
Before we explore how to build an effective argument using the five canons of rhetoric, we better deal with ‘canon’ and ‘rhetoric’. Canon: One of those annoying English words with multiple meanings: ‘a priest in a cathedral’; ‘regulation of a church council’; ‘most solemn part of the Mass’; ‘authoritative list of books’; ‘standard of judgement’, and ‘contrapuntal musical composition’ and that list is not even exhaustive or indeed, canonical. Canon in this sense means ‘a body of principles, rules, standards, or norms’. Rhetoric: Is the art of persuasion and the study of rhetoric explores the ability to inform, persuade, or…
Epistemology and Research
If you are wanting conduct epistemology research, please see my introduction to ontology. If, however, you are in the Social Sciences and your supervisor, colleague, co-author, reviewer or editor is suddenly wanting you to talk about epistemology or defend your epistemological position like some demented pseudo-philosopher who has just swallowed a dictionary: Welcome! What is Epistemology? It is the study the theory of knowledge. Don’t panic! take a breath and relax. It really is all very simple. However, before you explore epistemology, make sure you have your ontology nailed down! Your ontological position is central to your selection of…