Lame Academic Tricks

[icepixie]

Dude. This has to be one of the lamest things I've ever seen.

But at least now I've seen it, and will be able to bust anyone who tries the old "corrupted file" routine! (I'm not sure if the fact that this was an ad in my gmail account attached to an e-mail exchange about grading papers means that Google was thinking the same thing, or if it's actually targeting idiot students...)

Comments

[rowdycamels.livejournal.com]

I love your FAIL icon!

[icepixie]

Agent Booth DENIES your corrupted file!

[rowdycamels.livejournal.com]

Well, he'll let you send him a corrupted file, just because anyone has a right to send a corrupted file to the FBI.... but you won't get credit for it...

[icepixie]

Indeed, indeed. (DENIED!)

[sleepingcbw.livejournal.com]

Words fail me.

[icepixie]

I'm actually surprised we didn't get any of this for the conference sheets the e-mailed to us last week. Of course, the teacher told them not to send it in .docx format, and that's what half of them did. She failed those little jerks, I believe.

[alto2.livejournal.com]

I'm...damn. I'm honestly almost in awe, I mean, who ends up with a corrupted file and says, "Huzzah! I shall sell it over and over again for zillions of dollars on the intarwebs and retire early!"?? It's almost brilliant--the only cost of doing business is the price of the website. The product is infinitely replicable and totally free. It's twisted as hell, but shit, I have to give points for making lemons out of lemonade.

I can, however, tell you how to get around this "excuse." Files DO legitimately get corrupted--the power goes out before you've saved, the floppy disk (does anyone use those anymore at all?) or flash drive isn't ejected properly because the file was still open, etc. That said, Word can recover text from any file--in the Open window, you set the type to "Recover text from any file." That'll let you open the file, and while a corrupted file will be absolutely chock-full of crap and will probably be hundreds if not thousands of pages long as a result, the original text, even if it's only in fragments, should still be there. It'll be enough for you to be able to tell if a kid is faking with something he got for $4 online, or if her file really did bite the big one.

[icepixie]

It's twisted as hell, but shit, I have to give points for making lemons out of lemonade.

I know. I kind of wish I had thought of it.

Yep, I have my Word set to recover all files already. Comes in handy for old internet documents, actually. :D