One person explained that for religious reasons he could not do late Friday afternoons. We are happy to comply with such requests where possible, and I was able to arrange for him to sit the test separately the following Monday. Please note under no circumstances will anyone be allowed to sit a test early. The reason for this is that it opens the risk of the contents of the test being revealed to the rest of the class before it is sat. Obviously, someone sitting a test late could also obtain a copy beforehand. This is less of a problem if it is a case of just one or two people. However, for this reason, late sitting of tests will only be permitted if there are serious reasons for not being able to attend the set date, and students who ask for a late sitting will be asked to do it as soon as possible.
College regulations, which you can see here state that students may not be absent from college during term-time without the agreement in advance of the Head of Department. Therefore it is not acceptable for someone simply to say "sorry, I can't sit the test at the time given, can I do it another time?". There has to be serious unavoidable reasons. As the regulations suggest, if you feel you have such reasons you should get the Head of Department to agree - it is not the responsibility of the lecturer who set the test to agree, and you should not ask him or her. However, because of the large numbers of students in the Computer Science department, it has been agreed that a student's academic adviser can agree to permit absence in lieu of the Head of Department.
A number of students, for different religious reasons than the one above, said they could not sit a test on Friday 14th March. However, they left it until the Monday before the test, i.e. 10th March, before they raised this issue. This shows quite incredible stupidity. Since the test was announced over a month in advance and I asked then whether there was any problems with the date and they didn't mention it then, why leave it LESS THAN A WEEK BEFORE before suddenly saying the date is unacceptable? It might have been possible a month before to try and find a new date, and I would have been willing to do so had a large group of students told me then of religious reasons why the original date was unacceptable. It would certainly not have been possible to change things less than week before the test, even if I was here. As it was, I was out of the country, as I had advised I would be in advance. I had even made a note to that effect on the course web site. So obviously I could not change it then - as the students concerned should have realised.
As you keep being told, you should treat being a student as a full time job. You should expect to be available whenever requested during normal working hours every weekday. You should only be away from college during normal working hours if you are quite sure you have no commitments at that time, and you should not make any outside commitments that mean you couldn't make it if there was a change on college timetabling and you were requested to be present at a time different than in previous weeks. You should treat a set term-time test in the same way as you would if you were in a job and your boss asked you to attend an important assessment meeting. In those circumstances, you wouldn't turn round to your boss and say "sorry, can't make it then, please set another time at my convenience" would you? You would only cancel if you had very serious personal reasons. Well, please treat term-time tests with the same degree of seriousness.
Members of staff in the college, who I had asked to administer the test, found out about this, checked and found the email to be a forgery, and sent a second email stating the test was still on. Given the serious nature of what had happened, this was done following consultation with the Head of Department who agreed it as the best course of action. Unfortunately, it seems many students believed the first email, and made themselves absent from college the following day which was the test day, so did not see the second email until it was too late. Please do not blame college staff for this. ALL the blame for the disruption should fall on whoever it was decided to send that forged email.
Obviously, sending an email purporting to come from someone else is always a serious issue. Quite immense damage could be caused to a person's reputation by this. ANYONE who would do such a thing - even as a "joke" is, in my opinion, someone so lacking in ethics and the professional decency that is expected of a graduate that they have no place at university. However, this particular forged email has caused very substantial damage to the Algorithms and Data Structures course. The test was meant to be an integral part of the assessment of the course. Because of this forger's activities, we have been left in an unsatisfactory situation where some people have sat the test and some people haven't. At this point it is useful to note the college's code of discipline which can be found here. It is quite obvious that sending a fraudulent email pretending to be a member of academic staff, which causes serious disruption to the academic activity of the college, is a serious case of misconduct. I would be grateful if anyone has any information on who might have done this to inform me, and any information will be treated in confidence. As the code of discipline states, it will be up to the Principal of the college to decide how to handle it. The most severe penalty is expulsion from the college.
By the way, I have seen reports circulating that talk of someone "hacking into" my account. That is not what happened. It is unfortunately possible to send emails from one account that have the name and source address altered to make them appear as if they came from another account. That is actually what happened. The forged email was not sent from my account, and, contrary to the suggestions that have been circulating, there has been no breach of security.
I have also seen reports circulating which complain that students would have done badly in the test because "they did not revise the night before". This is precisely the sort of attitude I have warned against. Material in this course, particularly programming skills which is what much of the test was about, is not something you can learn by last minute revision the night before. If you could not program the day before the test because you haven't been working steadily on the lab exercises and programming practice throughout term you would NEVER be able to pick it the night before. This is the same sort of stupid attitude that someone might take if they thought the way to pass their driving test was not to bother taking any driving lessons, but to spend the night before reading books on driving theory. Please grow out of that way of thinking.
Since so many people genuinely believed the test was cancelled, and since the correcting email was sent so late it is reasonable for someone not to have seen it before the test. I have to conclude that it would be unfair for someone to lose the substantial proportion of marks that were allocated to this test because they did not attend the test as they really believed it was not taking place. I did think of taking this option, in the hope that it might smoke out some information on who it was that did this forgery that has so damaged how this course was intended to be assessed. If the person who did it was made to see that s/he had wrecked many other people's chances of a fair assessment, perhaps it would bring home to him or her what a bad thing it was to do. However, I have decided to relent so as not to punish the innocent alongside the guilty. On the other hand, it would be unfair to those who did take the test (around half the class) to entirely ignore it. So here is the compromise I will use to assign a mark in June for the end-of-year assessment:
Those students who took the test will also be given a mark out of 100 based on 70% of the mark in the May exam and 30% of the mark in the March test.
Those students with two separate marks, one based on the May exam only, the other based on the May exam and the March test, will be given as their final mark whichever of those two is highest.
Those students who did not take the test will be given as their final mark the one based only on the May exam.