Grant Heston Sucks, Part II

From the Sentinel:

The university is still trying to figure out how students acquired the test questions. It appears they accessed them online somehow, said UCF spokesman Grant Heston.

Quinn, Heston acknowledged, did not write his own questions for the test. Citing an ongoing investigation, he could not say whether the questions were publicly accessible online.

Publishers often create exam questions from their textbooks that are made available to instructors and professors. And sometimes those questions end up on websites.

In this case, Quinn's test questions came from the publisher of the textbook used in his class, Heston said

Heston would not speculate if the incident could have been avoided had the instructor come up with his own questions.

"Let's be sure to keep the focus where it belongs," Heston said. "Not on the instructor who administered the test but on those students who chose to acquire the test beforehand and use it inappropriately."

The scandal, which ended up on Good Morning America this week, has been a public-relations nightmare for UCF and has sparked a lively debate online about who's to blame.

The coverage has drawn dozens of comments to orlandosentinel.com — some from readers who argue that students were not cheating if they did not steal any questions.

One Sentinel reader blamed both the students and the professor: "These students knew their professor well. They know he has been using the same resource for test questions for years. They took advantage of his shortcomings."

Heston insists that the professor was not the problem.

"I think it's really unfortunate that there seems to be an effort to cast blame on this instructor when he is blameless in this," Heston said.

Why is the instructor blameless, Grant, because you say he’s blameless? If you don’t know how the students obtained the questions then how can you be sure that they are cheaters? Is every fraternity and sorority that keeps files of past tests guilty of cheating? It is certainly a debatable point where it would be nice if you offered something besides circular reasoning.

More importantly, why is UCF so down on these students? The school doesn’t have a problem with cheating. An obvious example is the million dollar football coach who lied on his resume and along with other UCF employees engaged in a cover-up of the facts surrounding the death of a player.

But what about David Mealor? He was paid by UCF while he was serving in the state legislature. When this became public, he didn’t get fired. He didn’t have to attend an ethics seminar. All he had to do was pay the money back over several years with no interest and no penalties. And if you try to argue that it was an oversight, you are living in a fantasy land. Everyone talked about what a double-dipping bastard he was way before all this stuff became public. And, yes, Mealor is dumb but he is not so dumb as to not notice that he was getting paid when he wasn’t working.

These are the questions I would like to see someone answer, Grant.