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I am taking a biochem lab. My lab partner and I are required to turn in a joint manuscript for the project we worked on all semester. He never came to class prepared, so I ended up doing 95% of the work. I read him off data as I collected it, CLEARLY, and he says "ok" and acts like he is writing it down. So halfway through the semester, the professor asked me to come see him. Apparently my lab partner was turning in data on postlabs that didn't match mine and wanted my take (the prof saw I was doing the work and knew I had the right data- plus I got 108% on my midterm and my partner failed it.) So I kind of tried to scout it out, and apparently my partner was taking data from his friends in the class (who he spends most of the time talking to and not paying attention), and then altering the numbers randomly to make it not look like he was cheating.
So then he realized our lab notebooks were going to be collected. So he wanted to borrow mine overnight to get data he missed. I said no, but offered that he could look at it during a 30min period we had to wait for a gel to run to get the points he missed. He choose to go get dinner with his friends instead. And now wants me to email him all the data. Then another day he "couldn't do the calculations on the postlab because he missed some data" and wanted to copy mine one minute before class started. I said I needed to turn it in so it wasn't late, and put it on the professor's desk. The professor stepped out and my lab partner went up to the desk and COPIED MY DATA, right there in the front of the classroom.
So for the manuscript, I told him to do the abstract and the introduction, and I would do the rest. So he emails me his work last night. The abstract is one sentence long. The introduction is about four. Then he "wrote" the entire methods and results sections to "help me out". First of all, its almost publishable quality, better than I could have done, and he doesn't have any idea what is going on in class. And then its funny how we never ran an SDS-PAGE with two sets of dilutions and 12 lanes... or how we never used a 0.2M NaCl solution for an IEX... but its all in there. Plus there are absorbance ranges, pH results, extinction coefficients in it that certainly were not our data.
So obviously its plagerized from somewhere. I'm going to have to do the whole thing myself, because I can't risk my acceptance over some idiot's work who clearly doesn't understand ethics. So am I nice and put his name on my work too, or am I a female dog and tell the professor the situation and turn in my own copy? Oh yeah, and its due tomorrow.
Hate *%$#%^%$# group projects.
I had a group project in Entomology where we had one team member never show up to our site to collect samples or help us with the lab report. We ended up putting her name on the paper, but email the professor to inform him of the situation. We all agreed that it wasn't fair for her to get credit for work she didn't do, but we didn't feel comfortable taking her name off the paper entirely (she showed up like once), so we decided our professor should deal with it in a way that he felt was appropriate.