Engaging in a one-on-one meeting with a professor at the front of Leacock 132 for more than five minutes is a fantasy envisioned by many McGill undergraduates. Professors have their own agenda to attend to (think: “publish or perish”) and often cannot provide personal attention to each of the hundreds of students in their classes. Consequently, these professors rely on the help of teaching assistants to grade papers, administer exams, lead conferences, labs and tutorials, and tutor students during office hours. As a medium between the students and instructors, TAs play a pivotal role in McGill’s educational system.

Most TAs have a positive experience. Not only do TAs gain valuable insight into the world of teaching, but they also build a connection with their professors, many of whom become valuable future resources. Farrah*, a TA in the Faculty of Arts, claims that “the professors are really such a wonderful resource for us. They put in so much work and effort on behalf of the students.”

Unfortunately, not every TA benefits from their position. Due to extremely long hours, low wages, and bad communication with their employers, a growing number of TAs are victimized by McGill’s “poorly funded” academic environment.

According to the constitution created by the Association of Graduate Students Employed at McGill, teaching assistants are legally allowed to work only 12 hours a week, a total of 180 hours a semester. Certified in 1993, AGSEM represents approximately 2,000 teaching assistants, roughly a third of McGill’s graduate student population. Twelve hours a week seems like a reasonable amount of time to attend classes, hold office hours and lead conferences and/or tutorials. But most TAs end up working more. “I usually put in over 25 hours a week,” says Leslie*, another TA in the Faculty of Arts. “That seems like an awful lot, but it’s probably average, at least with the other TAs I have spoken to,”

Because TAs spend so much time working with their undergraduate students, their own graduate studies are often neglected. Emily*, works as a TA in a humanities course, claims that “the work that we’re rewarded for, that we’re expected to do …in a timely fashion…often takes a back seat to our teaching.” Lilian Radovac, president of AGSEM and head of the TA union, asserts that “being a grad student is a full-time job. … At a certain point, a grad student can spend well over 40 hours a week preparing his or her work.” Holding what feels like two full-time jobs at once, many teaching assistants find the overall amount of time spent working to be unbearable. “The time-management aspect can be extremely challenging,” says Farrah. “I’m having a difficult time balancing my TA duties with my regular [graduate] schoolwork.” Even the professors agree. “It’s an extremely heavy workload,” admits a Faculty of Arts professor, who teaches a large entry-level freshman course. “Ideally, the TAs are psychologically and academically prepared to assume their resposibilities. But sometimes it doesn’t work out.”

A lot of these problems depend on the relationship between the TA and the professor that they work for. Emily admits that “some professors have been very respectful that kept track of the hours and shouldered most of the burden themselves. But I’ve also had some very frustrating working relationships. There were times when I felt totally overwhelmed, when I didn’t sleep, where I was grading an obscene amount of papers.” Alan*, a TA in the Faculty of Management, claims that “right now, the TAs are putting in a lot more time than the professors.”

Professors often take advantage of their TA’s position. “Occasionally, we get a complaint that a TA is asked to do some of the professors’ duties,” says Radovac. “There are a lot of situations where professors ask TAs to give guest lectures, or write manuals, in the case of science students. This can be a great opportunity for the TA, career-wise, but it is not technically part of their job description.” Professors claim that, generally, the work is divided up fairly. Nevertheless, “there were some instances of professors being approached by overworked TAs,” says another Faculty of Arts professor.

While teaching can be a full-time job, the majority of the TA’s work remains unpaid. Emily insists that TAs “have to prepare conferences, grading, reading materials, which [is time] we don’t get paid for, so if you really want to know the materials, inside and out-which most of us do, we want to be competent teachers-we’re spending a lot of time pouring over the text and making it digestible to students in the class.”

Radovac claims that graduate students are put into a very vulnerable financial situation. “Many TAs don’t just work as TAs, [they] will also work as research assistants and hold other off-campus jobs. … They need to find a way to support themselves.” Legally, TAs earn $21.52 per hour for their designated 12 hours a week. Radovac asserts that “McGill has one of the lower pay rates of TAs at major universities in Canada. Teaching assistants at York University make $40 per hour.”

TAs at McGill find themselves trapped within a system that aims to exploit them. But they’re not the only ones that are impacted. The plight of TAs at McGill also has a huge effect on the undergraduate student body. Radovac explains that “The biggest quality for good education is one-on-one attention. The bigger the classes become, the harder it is to provide a good quality of education. As negatively as the professor and the TA are affected, the person affected the most is the undergraduate…there would be no university without the undergraduate students.”

*Sources for this article have chosen to remain anonymous. Names have been changed accordingly.

As I sat down to write this article, I was feeling less than inspired. Plagiarism is a topic that has been covered excessively, and it is also a rather boring one. I’ve read the same warning paragraph on each of my course outlines this semester, as has everyone else. Needing a fresh new angle, I did what any self-respecting university student would do: I googled “articles on plagiarism” – just for encouragement, of course. I came up with a bunch of ways to avoid plagiarizing, instances of cheating in the corporate world and some guidelines for teachers to combat plagiarism in their classrooms. Unfortunately nothing I could…use. Damn it, I’d have to write this article all by myself.

Everyone plagiarizes, steals, and cheats just a little bit. People tell tiny white lies, recycle gossip from one friend to the next and repeat jokes from last night’s Family Guy in everyday conversation. When students are taught to write essays, they learn to emulate these habits: go to the library, take out five books on your topic, see what the experts have to say. Later, blend them into one long paper, putting everything in your “own” words. No original ideas required, just remember to cite whenever necessary. Every essay becomes reverent flattery of what all the “esteemed” writers have to say on the subject. It’s a flaw in our educational system, which values “academic integrity” without requiring genuine originality.

Academic integrity. It’s the part everyone skips on the syllabus in favour of checking how much participation counts for and whether the class includes a final exam. As soon as the professor begins the extremely vague but compulsory speech about the consequences of cheating in the university, our eyes glaze over. Thankfully, most professors finish discussing the subject within seconds, ending with the oft-heard “for further information, check the code of student conduct online.” Great. Except that no one ever does (except me of course, but that was only yesterday in the context of this article). The problem with plagiarism is not so much the deliberate offender, who lifts entire paragraphs out of textbooks or off the Internet and deserves their meetings with the Dean of Students. It’s the unintentional plagiarizers who need help discerning what is cheating and what’s legal, which is made more confusing by the copy-and-paste manner in which we are all taught to write.

Article 15(a) of McGill’s Code of Student Conduct and Disciplinary Procedures “No student shall, with intent to deceive, represent the work of another person as his or her own in any academic writing…” It is that intention that makes it such a prevalent issue, because most of the time, students get caught plagiarizing without even knowing they had committed the crime. Professor Monique Morgan of the English Department explains that plagiarism is a multi-faceted issue. When reading her students’ work, she is now forced to be more suspicious, which she would of course prefer not to have to be. More than that though, students are getting cheated out of the learning experience they deserve. In discussing McGill’s method for dealing with plagiarizing students, Morgan affirms that the crime is, “taken very seriously in the cases where it should be taken seriously.” She goes on to state though that more could be done to educate students early on about what the parameters are.

Students are not getting enough information about how to stay out of trouble with plagiarism and are receiving mixed messages about what formal essays should encompass. The disclaimer repeated year to year makes the offence sound like the kind of thing “that could never happen to me,” meaning most students never imagine the real consequences of such a debilitating and ugly transgression. Most McGill students are straight out of high school, where the speech on plagiarism runs along the lines of not copying off your neighbour during a test. The university needs to emphasize that the word plagiarism signifies more than wandering eyes and students need to educate themselves on what academic integrity really means.

Most people think that getting ahead in business requires brains, hard work or good connections and sometimes more than one of them. But if you’re not the sharpest tool in the shed or you’re just plain lazy, there are ways to cheat your way to the top.

The biggest advantage to cheating is that there is a lot of freedom in how you do it. This means that virtually anyone can engage in the fine art of deception, not to mention that it’s a perfect outlet for pent-up creativity.

If you like to write, make up parts of stories like Detroit Free Press sports columnist Mitch Albom, or if you’re really ambitious, imitate former New York Times writer Jayson Blair. After lying about his education to get himself hired, he filed dozens of articles containing false information. In some pieces, the fake details were small, but at other times he made up entire interviews or stories. After being fired, he wrote a book in which he accused the Times of racism.

If numbers are more your thing, fiddle the books a little bit. Accounting scandals have been all the rage in the last few years. Enron dazzled us for years with new and innovative ways to make money from the oil and gas industry before going bust when it turned out that it was all a sham, but even boring old telecom companies like Qwest and Worldcom have gotten in on the game.

Many people find accounting boring, but still like money. In that case, there’s nothing better than playing fast and loose with other people’s dough. Citigroup recently announced that it had fired a trader a few years ago after she cost the bank $20-million (all figures US), but that’s peanuts compared to Nick Leeson. Leeson is the man to beat in this area after spectacularly-and single-handedly-bringing down Barings Bank in 1995 by losing $1.4-billion speculating on the Singapore International Monetary exchange. Barings had been in business for nearly 250 years, so this was quite the feat.

If you would rather be spending other people’s money than losing it, there are a number of great role models out there. Take Dennis Kozlowski, former CEO of Tyco International. He treated the company like a piggy bank, using it to pay for things like $6,000 shower curtains and a $1-million birthday party for his wife. There’s also former newspaper baron Conrad Black, who is currently the target of a $200-million lawsuit from Hollinger International­­-one of his former companies-after allegedly taking millions of dollars to pay for things like his Florida mansion (currently on the market for over $30-million).

Unfortunately, there is a downside to all of this cheating. Should you happen to be caught, the consequences can be quite unpleasant: Former Enron CEOs Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling were recently convicted on several counts of fraud; Leeson spent six and a half years in jail in Singapore; Kozlowski was sentenced to eight years in prison; and Black is awaiting trial on over 20 criminal charges.

Going to prison does not exactly qualify as getting ahead, so if you plan to win by cheating the system, the trick is the same in the business world as it is elsewhere-don’t get caught.

As the so-called “Harvard of the north,” McGill is well known both within Canada and internationally for its high academic standards. Students of this lauded institution like to think that their diploma will grant them an edge over other recent grads in the Canadian job market and place them somewhere near the top of the graduate school application pile. But is the value of a degree from McGill being undermined by the ease with which one can pull off an “A” grade in so many intro-level and elective courses?

It doesn’t get any easier than this…

Understanding Planet Earth (EPSC 201)Fall and winterMeant to teach students about the origin of the Earth and its place within the solar system, this course has intro-level written all over it. Professor Anthony Williams-Jones says that while his intention is not to give out easy grades, “most people do very well,” with about 25 to 30 per cent of the class receiving an A or A- each semester. Jenny (last name withheld), U3 International Development, took the course last semester and received a grade of A-, despite her less-than-stellar attendance record. “I just took it as an elective because I heard it was an easy class,” she says. Indeed, the class is as straightforward as it gets – all PowerPoint slides are online and Williams-Jones does not even require that students read the textbook, which he designates as an optional purchase.

The Art of Listening (MUAR 211)Fall and winterOf all the arts, listening might just be the easiest to master. One of very few classes designed for students who have no musical experience whatsoever, this course introduces the sounds of classical music and their historical context to students through, well, listening. Instructor Liz Blackwood says that the class average is usually on the high end, at either a B+ or an A-, based on two midterms, two assignments and a final exam. Alex Kang, UO Management, is hoping to snag one of those high grades. “I heard it’s an easy course. … I want to boost my GPA,” he says. Blackwood tries to “keep the course atmosphere relaxed” and distributes handy course notes and review sheets before exams.

Natural Disasters (EPSC 250)Fall onlyThis course is offered through the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences to “examine the science behind different types of disasters,” such as hurricanes, volcanoes, tornadoes, meteorite impacts and tsunamis. For all closet science geeks out there, this is definitely the course for you. Professors John Gyakum and John Stix provide an extensive explanation of how to write the five-to-ten-page term paper, something few university profs take the time to spell out, and provide examples of possible exam questions in their syllabus. For Julia Barone, U3 Biology, Natural Disasters was an obvious elective choice since it is still scientifically focused, but her friends “said it was pretty simple compared to biology classes.”

Geography of the World Economy (GEOG 216)Fall onlyThis is an economics course for the non-economics major. If you are interested in how the global economy functions on a macro level, but would rather pull your hair out than take an economics course at McGill, this is a great alternative. Anna Neilson, U3 International Development, is excited about the course because it counts toward her major, but she admits, “at the same time, it’s so basic and the professors are really good.” Professors Breau and Akman teach using a variety of case studies to maintain student interest and use a simple evaluation system: three tests and a final exam.

NOT as easy as 1,2,3

Introduction to Psychology (PSYC 100)Don’t be deceived by the 100-level code that accompanies Dr. Donderi’s class, which focuses on complex human behaviour, including perception, psychopathology and human learning. The level of scientific knowledge necessary to pull off a high grade may be more than the science-illiterate student can handle.

Introduction to Philosophy (PHIL 200)Contemplating the complexities of life is not exactly child’s play. Professor Storrs McCall is as cute as a button, but his essay assignments (worth 60 per cent of your grade) can be killer. Does the existence of an omniscient God, who knows exactly what the future will bring, imply that free choice is an illusion? I don’t know, you tell me.

Sexual Ethics (RELG 271)Do not be fooled. This course, despite what it sounds like, is not a lesson in the ethics of freshman sexual escapades. More likely, students will be expected to debate the merits of social constructivism with relation to pornography in a six-page paper.

Some advice from the expertsSo, when it comes to choosing courses to fill those cherished elective slots in your schedule, should you be looking to boost your GPA with ease, or taking an academic hit for the sake of challenging yourself to reach unprecedented levels of knowledge? It depends on individual post-graduate goals and the strength of your record, according to Donald Sedgwick, senior advisor for the faculties of arts and science. “An employer is probably not looking closely at the individual courses … [but] admissions to graduate programs would look more closely,” he says. In any case, it is always beneficial to take a course that genuinely interests you. Deputy Provost Morton Mendelson explains that often, students take a course based on rumours that it is easy, but by the third or fourth class they have already lost interest. Mendelson believes these students are “cheating themselves out of an opportunity to learn,” not to mention wasting countless hours studying something they despise and probably will not retain anyway.