@Faultystart Wikipedia, for a start… Oh god this sounds geeky, but in order to keep myself from going on social networking on my phone, I occasionally open up Wikipedia pages on any topics of interest, and for a while this included quantum physics… I came across a page that had a really simple but good explanation of the particle-wave thing, for example. I was also studying for Science Bowl tryouts at the time (tear didn’t make it in; but I did get second place in Astro), and the astronomy textbook I was reading explained it pretty well in some parts (the properties of light are really important in astronomy/astrophysics).
@Faultystart ahh thank goodness. People tend to look at me strangely when they find that I learn about astrophysics and geology and whatnot… for fun… and stuff.
The person who sits in front of me in math was cheating on our final today. After I turned mine in, I saw him glancing surreptitiously at a formula sheet that lay on the ground next to him (by the way, if you remember like four formulas, you can derive every single other one). He also attempted to glance back at my paper several times.
@faultystart Ohh. I think I learned about Archimedes Principle in 8th grade physics and just happened to forget and suddenly remember it again lol. We do do gas laws though, with Charles’s Law, pv=nrt and fun stuff like that. Seriously, the border between physics and chemistry is kind of blurred.
idk also I read a lot about biochemistry, compsci and meteorology (random crap like that) for fun. It’s not weird at all. WELCOME TO THE FAMILY!!!
@Cornbread1999 nope. Our teacher didn’t notice (he was sitting down the entire time). But it really, really pissed me off. I studied my [insert expletive here] for this final and he’s cheating. And almost no one gets caught cheating at my school because of the culture here–not unless it’s a really big scandal (like last year, there was a huge thing in Honors Precalc because someone stole the final or something).
@topaz1116 aw that sucks. If he continues this way though, he will eventually get caught.
Reminds me of a cheating scandal on a CompSci midterm last semester. A few students were out the day of the midterm, and so they took it on a later date. They got all the answers from another student, but then they were given a different version of the midterm. They didn’t even bother checking to see if their answers made sense. lol, thankfully everybody involved turned themselves in, otherwise, all of our CompSci midterm scores would have had to been invalidated.
Like seriously, they didn’t even check to see if the midterm questions and answers lined up… -.-
@Cornbread1999 I forgot the details of the precalc scandal from last year, but it involved half the junior class… It was a really, really big thing.
And yeah. The guy in front of me is nice, but cheating really, really pisses me off. Especially on tests. Homework is eh… There are times when I’ve copied homework, although that was a long time ago. I don’t anymore–ever.
So much homework!! I’ll be lucky to get to 4 hours of sleep at this rate.
@topaz1116 The biggest cheating scandal at my school was last year during a history exam where a guy was hiding his phone and looking up answers. He got caught in the first half hour though.
I have witnessed cheating around my campus…once I saw some kid writing all of his math formulas on his had in English class the period before he supposedly had a math test. It’s bound to happen at competitive schools like ours.
I see cheating all the time, for example, the person who sits next to me in Spanish takes out his phone to use during the test, and I’ve seen someone do that in AP World History too. I see people cheat off phones pretty frequently.
Last year in Spanish someone wrote the answers all over their arm for a speaking test in front of the whole class, when we the students and the teachers realized he was cheating we pretty much just laughed because it was so ridiculous how he kept looking down at his arm and didn’t expect anyone else to notice.
That type of cheating doesn’t really matter to me that much since those people probably weren’t going to do very well anyways, but it irks me when people cheat in more “competitive” classes like AP World and AP Chem. (By that I mean that there are more kids in those classes with high class ranks and such who are taking many APs.)
The type of cheating that gets me really mad is when people cheat in PE. The teacher might tell us to run one lap around the track to warm up, but some people just run completely across the football field and then run the rest of the lap before the teacher can see. And when we do bleachers some people just cut across them. Or when we are supposed to run a mile which is 4 laps but people just run three. But I guess it benefits me to do the full workout, so oh well. And some of the instigators of the cheating are not in my class period anymore which is very nice.
@Faultystart hahaha phones are an average occurrence at my school. Last year, I swear half our Spanish class used Google Translate during tests.
@dsi411 That is one kind of cheating I admit too; there are 230 people in Marching Band, and 80% of them do only three laps (or less). Your times don’t really matter, either–as long as you write down a time, you’ll get an A- in the class. It’s more of a I-don’t-want-to-spend-more-time-on-the-track-than-I-have-to thing. I always did 4 laps (and actually ran) when I actually took PE (even though I was super-slow, my PE teacher loved me for that), but in Marching Band it’s honestly too much of a pain. Occasionally I will do four, but I have breathing problems when I do four and actually try (it’s still hard for me to breathe from when I actually had to run a makeup mile as fast as possible on Tuesday) to go somewhat fast.
But Precalc is a very, very competitive class where your class rank determines your grade, which is why I’m really pissed. He’s been looking at my tests and quizzes all year–even asking me to explain how he got an answer at one time (he’s like, “I did it right but I don’t get how,” and I explain it to him). He’s the person above me grades-wise, yet he should be below me.
Are any of you starting to get TONS of college mail? I have gotten about 100 emails and about 20 letters (5 of which came today). The only problem is, the schools I want to go to aren’t getting in contact with me.
