The suspicious scores aren't too hard to find, especially in light of the pseudonym of the anonymous posting dude. I won't assume that there has been cheating, but at least to consider the matter hypothetically, I'd like to take what will probably be an unpopular stance and urge leniency. I've taught English at a community college for some years now, and as you might expect, one of the things we're supposed to guard against like hungry Rottweilers is plagiarism. There's a whole host of dire official consequences, ranging from failure to expulsion to things nastier than expulsion. Personally, I've never sent a student through all that. I get plagiarized papers every semester, and it's usually glaringly easy to recognize (e.g. a marginally literate student who is suddenly using words like 'hermeneutic,' or my personal favourite, a student who uses terms like "G-d" without knowing how obvious it is that they've copied a book from the 1940s.) But they aren't really conscious of the severity of what they're doing -- they're in their opening couple of years of college, they're in a sort of ethical daze -- they just aren't really aware that what they're doing is so wrong. Naturally, I give them back the paper and make them rewrite it from scratch on a new topic, but I don't like it to go beyond that. True, you can't quite do that for a hypothetical quizbowl competition, and the analogy only goes so far anyway. But I have visions of endless philippics of varying degrees of acerbity and/or anality, plus endless calls for bans, fines, and various official sanctions, and I really hope that the latter part doesn't happen. If (either in this case or any other) it's just a kid who is an otherwise nice enough guy but is in that state of ... I don't know, temporary ethical suspension, then I hope the situation doesn't go to the level of "official sanctions." Certainly it wouldn't happen again from the same guy, and I think some simple taunting and perhaps glaring would suffice. And again, let me emphasize that I'm talking purely in hypotheticals -- I've got a teammate whose scores can shoot from 15ppg to 60+ppg if I'm not in the way, and any number of other factors could possibly lead to wide scoring variations. Even the avoidance of a long drive might do it, since the tournaments are supposedly at the student's home school. And as someone just noted, you can't discount Charlie's Question #6, the Ethanol Coefficient. Just offering what I suspect will be an opinion in the minority -- --Raj Dhuwalia
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