Livid

Some words just don't get enough time in the limelight, so it's time to give a shout out to livid.

Actually, it's just wonderfully appropriate for the student who felt seriously offended the other night when I asked her a too-hard question after her paper presentation.

The course I teach is called a "presentations" course, but the course description says it's a research opportunity. That's not quite accurate, either; the students are required to complete a summer internship of some sort before the senior year, and most of them do some sort of "independent project" that becomes the subject of their presentations at our student paper contest. Most of them don't need a semester of "research" to develop a contest presentation, so my job is to teach them to write a paper about the topic. I decided this year to make them "practice" their presentations in a session with me to earn credit for the course.

The downturn in the economy in the past few years has has the twin effects of increasing our student population and decreasing internship opportunities, so a pretty big percentage of our students haven't had internships when they get to my class. The first of the semester this year was a scramble as they looked for topics for papers, but most of them came up with some idea or another.

I started listening to presentations early in the month, and earlier this week I was feeling pretty smug about how well things were going. 

I had felt guilty for a while after I told one of the girls that I thought she needed to make some significant changes to her presentation. I tried to help her understand that my biggest problem was that she didn't appear to recognize what good work she had done, and the changes I was suggesting were an attempt to play up that fine work. Her reaction didn't suggest that she really thought I was trying to help her, but she was at least receptive enough to be willing to try to satisfy me.

Before many sessions had taken place, the joke among the students was pretty much that one student would present; the others would have a civilized, somewhat professional question-and-answer session; and then I would tear into them about things they needed to do to get the presentation up to snuff. Some of them seemed really attentive to my suggestions because they really want to do well at our contest, some were somewhat cynical about it, and for some, I just didn't see much point in saying anything.

And then we get to Miss Livid. This self-confident young woman started her presentation with a slide that had both her name and the name of a graduate student on it, which she explained by saying, "He did the work." Since the "rules" clearly say that the student is supposed to do an "independent" project, I jumped the gun at the end of the presentation and said,"I'm concerned about you. I need you to answer this question: What did you do?"

"I did the research."

That didn't satisfy me, so I asked again, this time with a little different emphasis: "What did you do?"

"I did the research," she repeated, stepping out from behind the monitor.

I asked again, and this time she said, "I don't understand what you mean. I did the research." At each question, she came closer to me.

By this time, I was pretty sure she hadn't done enough of the project to know what "research" means, so I pressed again: "What exactly did you do?"

She had come down the length of our long conference table to where her pack was sitting in a chair, reached inside it, and pulled out a stack of papers. "There. That's what I did," she said.

"So you downloaded and printed some papers?"

"No I read them. I read some of them. I mentioned the one by ------."

"Reading the literature is not 'doing' the research," I said. "It's an important part of the project, but it comes before the research. The question you have to answer is what you did in the project."


I've seen a dozen presentations since then, so I don't remember how she extracted herself from the situation, but she plopped down in a chair on the opposite side of the table from her bag and sulked there through several more presentations. In fact, I think it was close to an hour before I took a short break, and she stomped out of the room with me. I didn't have to ask how she felt about my questions.

"You had no reason to call me out like that and embarrass me in front of my friends," she spat out.

"You're right; I'm sorry," I answered.

"You haven't done that to anybody else," she almost hissed.

"Yes, I have—just not in your group," I said.

She stormed at me for several more minutes before she finally realized that I was not willing to believe that she had actually done the research, especially not after she let slip that the grad student had done all of the work during the summer before she ever talked to him and that she had "at least talked to him enough to know pretty much what it was about." I figured that "least" was about the size of it.

She had good reason to be afraid: as the course instructor, I have the privilege, if I choose to exercise it, of failing her in the course because of her academic dishonesty. Furthermore, if she can't make the project seem to be her own at the paper contest, she could be stopped from graduating. Except that that's never happened in my 20 years in the department, and I don't see it happening in the future.

I did what I could to assure her that I would not flunk her now (tempting as that is....) because I have accepted the work she has done so far. Besides, if she can cobble together an answer to the question that will fly at the paper contest, she'll be home free. I tried to be as reassuring as I could be, but she stomped out as angry as she had been from the time I first challenged her.

Livid.