Read the short case study below carefully.
Then rank each character in order of their responsibility for Reggie’s failing grade.
Give a different score to each character.
Most responsible <– 1 2 3 4 –>Least responsible
[Most responsible is #1 and least responsible is #4]
___ Professor Harrison, the teacher
___ Sally, the academic counselor
___ Reggie, the student-athlete
___ Arnie, the other student
Explain your choices.
Reggie is a student athlete. He must attend practice every day and often travels out of town for meets.
He was really upset. It was Friday and he hadn’t started a paper that was due the following Thursday. In fact he had only read about 25 pages out of the 300 he needed to read before beginning the paper. Making matters worse, he had missed class discussions because of games. The first thing Reggie did was call Sally, his academic support counselor, to see if he could work with a tutor on his paper. Sally met with him, but she told him tutoring wouldn’t help until he read more of the book. He asked her if she had read the book, and she said no. Reggie tried to read more on the weekend, but he didn’t have much time because of a game. Besides he had to prepare for exams in other classes.
By Sunday night Reggie was really stressed out and started searching the Internet to see what he could find out about the book. Finally, he found an essay on the Internet and used it to write his paper. The next day he ran into Arnie, another student in his class. Arnie said he hadn’t started on the essay and was still trying to finish the book. Reggie told Arnie about the Internet essay, but warned him against using much of it since he was already using it for his essay. On Tuesday, Reggie took his essay to Sally to have her read it over. Sally told him the essay didn’t make much sense and asked him to explain to her what he was trying to say. She soon realized he hadn’t read much more of the book and told him she really couldn’t help him. She warned him about turning in someone else’s ideas as his own. Reggie went away discouraged. On Wednesday he tried to revise the essay some more before turning it in on Thursday morning.
Meanwhile, Arnie kept trying to read the book. However, he was really upset because the book was difficult and he couldn’t read it quickly. Wednesday night in a panic, he took the Internet essay, added his own introduction and conclusion and turned it in during class on Friday.
On Sunday night when Reggie returned from his meet, he had a voice mail message from Professor Harrison asking him to come to her office on Monday morning. At the meeting, she explained that she knew he and Arnie had not written their own papers. Not only were the papers almost exactly alike, but she had found the original essay on the Internet. On top of that their papers were not about the assigned topic. She told him that they would both receive an F for their final grade in the course.
