I know a lot of my readers are students and are probably new to the credit card game, so I thought I’d contribute a little bit of information. The impetus is a letter I just received from my Shell Mastercard informing me that as of April 1 of this year the APR for purchases would be the U.S. Prime Rate + 12.99%, with a minimum of 18.99%. The current rate on my card is 11.24%, so this is a hefty increase. I probably shouldn’t even care about this because I don’t finance anything on that card — I only use it for gas and at stores that won’t take Discover, and I pay the balance off every month. But it’s the principle of the matter. First, I got the letter on May 26 and they’re imposing a retroactive rate increase effective April 1. Second, the letter lists 10 different rates and fees that are being increased. The only thing that has not been increased is my cash back for gas purchases. I used to receive 5% cash back for buying gas at Shell, which is why I got the card in the first place. Last fall, they dropped that to a few cents per gallon, reducing my rebate credit each month to about a third of what it used to be.

(Aside: Congress just passed and Obama signed a Credit Card Reform Act to prevent this kind of retroactive interest rate increase. I have a feeling a lot of credit card companies sent out letters like this in advance of the new legislation, trying to wring out every last dollar before the rules change.)

The letter tells me I can “opt out” by contacting them by July 31. If I do that, I can use my account at the old terms until my card expires, and then they will close my account. I like to reward good companies with my continued service and recommendations to my friends and family, and punish bad ones by doing the opposite. In the past, the Shell MC (run by Citibank) has been good to me. They overnighted me my initial card so that I would have it for my long road trip from St. Cloud to Los Angeles a few years ago, and saved me about $35 as a result. But I just can’t deal with something like this, so I’m going to send them a nice letter and opt out.

I’m hoping that it won’t affect my credit score negatively, because normally when you close an account it hurts your FICO score. (I hope the opt out option is treated differently, but it very well might not be.) See, if you have any outstanding debt, closing down one line of credit makes your debt/credit ratio increase, which is a bad thing in FICO’s books. This link shows you what they consider when giving you your score. Take a second and look at it – I think everybody should know this information. Outstanding debt and the debt/credit ratio is 30% of your score. Of course, the website also says that these are just averages and everyone’s situation is different — an action that might make your credit score go down might not have any effect on mine, and vice versa. There’s really no way of knowing how anything will affect your specific situation, which is just another frustrating aspect of the credit card industry.

If you look at the information, you’ll see that it seems the best way to increase your credit score is to not do anything new. Open up a new line of credit and they count it against you. Close that new line of credit and they count that against you too. Close a line of credit you’ve had for a long time and it hurts even more. It’s all very messed up if you ask me. But what it means is that you should not get a bunch of credit cards in college just because they’ll give you a free t-shirt (I’m pretty sure I did that at least twice), as closing those accounts five years later when you finally get smart about your finances is just going to drag down your credit score.

I’ve decided that I’m going to send Citibank a letter telling them that I will opt out and close my account unless they will change my terms back to the old ones. One thing I have learned is that when it comes to credit card companies, if you ask for things convincingly enough, often you will get them. I have probably had a half dozen different late fees removed by just asking nicely. I have rewarded those companies by using those credit cards more. They help me out, I’ll help them out.

Back in 2003, I had one company that wouldn’t remove a late fee no matter how much I begged them. I asked to talk to an account manager and I informed him that if they would not remove it, I would transfer the entire balance to another card and then cancel my account. The account manager wouldn’t budge. I hung up and immediately arranged a balance transfer to another card — this was back in the days when you could transfer balances for free; now they’ll charge you 3-5%. When the transfer finally went through a week later and I had a zero balance on the original card, I called to cancel the account. They transferred me to an account manager and he asked why I was leaving. I told him that I promised I would cancel my account if they didn’t take off the late fee, and I was just fulfilling my promise. He said he was sorry to hear that and asked if there was anything they could do to get me to stay. I told him to make me an offer. He said if I transferred the balance back, he’d give me a 0% APR for the first year and then 4% after that until I paid off the balance, and no transfer fee. The card I had moved it to was charging me 7%. I gladly accepted his offer and transferred the debt back.

Just a few months ago, I had a balance on a card that I was paying the minimum on, enjoying a very low introductory APR that is set to increase in September. With the holiday season, I got distracted and forgot to make the minimum payment. I got hit with a $39 late fee, and the low 3% APR was immediately bumped up to the full rate of 18%. I called customer service and begged them to bring the rate back down, but the rep said there was nothing he could do. Grrrr.

I called back the next day and spoke with someone different. She asked me for my personal information to verify it was me calling, and when I told her my birthdate she said, “That’s my fiance’s birthday!” Somehow magically she was able to get my APR back down to 3% when the previous rep had said it was impossible. Something as completely irrelevant as having the same birthday made her want to pull a few strings and work for me.

The moral of the story is this: politely ask for lower interest rates and fee reversals. You can yell and get mad, but in my experience that doesn’t work. If asking nicely doesn’t work, you can say that you will pay off the balance and then cancel the card — and then do just that (or at least try to bluff them). Or you can call back the next day and get someone different who might be a little more receptive to your request, or have a different birthday. I’ve noticed that calling late at night is usually less successful, as the people who have the power to make important decisions work the day shift. All these actions might be a little less successful in today’s tighter credit environment, but there’s no harm in trying.

Or you can just not get into credit card debt in the first place. Yeah, that’s probably your best option.

No posting from me until after the long weekend. I leave Thursday for my annual trip to Tucson to golf with my father and brother, both of whom I haven’t seen since last summer. Seven rounds of golf in four days at Tucson National, and dad picks up the tab. It doesn’t get much better than that.

I’m leaving my laptop at home for the first time in I can’t even remember how long. I’ve got my iPhone to stay in touch with people, and I’ve used 123Movies2Portable to burn a bunch of DVDs into a format that I can watch on the plane. I tried a bunch of free software out there to rip DVDs but nothing seemed to work, or wouldn’t convert copyrighted material. This program is a gem, and I recommend it highly.You can try it for one day for free to test drive it; if you like it, enter 15OFF in the coupon code at the software manufacturer’s website and save 15% when you decide to purchase. No, they haven’t paid me for their endorsement — I just think it’s a great product and worth every penny.

The goal is to try to forget about work and politics and economics for four days, and that means leaving my laptop at home. If you know me, you know that’s not an easy thing for me to do, so please wish me luck. I wish you all a great weekend with family and friends, however you end up spending it.

- Dave

I should be in bed right now but I just finished watching a disturbing episode of Real Sports on HBO and now I can’t sleep. It was a second look at a story they did a year ago about what happens to racehorses when they can’t perform as well as they used to. The rest of this post, until the asterisks you’ll see further down the page, includes some descriptions of what happens — if you love animals and would rather not read it, consider this your warning and jump to the asterisks. But I think that without knowing what’s actually done, the whole issue just is not as real. The details are gruesome but relevant.

The original story showed how some horses are sold for meat, taken to horse slaughterhouses here in America. They are first stunned, and then a nailgun is used to shoot a bolt into the center of its skull, killing them. However, since horses have longer necks than cows, they move around more and it’s harder to hit the target — multiple nails are often necessary, while the horse is injured from the first. And when that doesn’t work, they get strung up by their hind legs and gutted, exsanguinated while they are still alive. Seeing it is enough to make me eat a little less meat this week, that’s for sure.

The good news is that legislators cracked down on horse slaughterhouses and now there are no more of them operating in the United States. That was the end of the original story.

This revisit shows the unintended consequences of outlawing horse slaughter in the U.S.: many of the horses that would have been taken to an American slaughterhouse are now taken instead to either Mexico or Canada, where they don’t have the same animal rights legislation we have here. The result is that the horses suffer even worse deaths than they would have here. In Mexico, some have their spinal cords severed with a knife while still alive and with no anesthesia. In Canada, some are killed the old fashioned way: shot in the head with a rifle.

More and more racetracks are instituting their own laws, so that horse owners who sell to meat brokers can be banned from their tracks, removing the financial incentive to sell a horse to recoup a few hundred dollars. And there are new programs by individual stables and horse enthusiasts designed to rehabilitate former racehorses so they can be used as event horses or trail horses, with a new lease on life.

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These private measures taken by racetracks and other organizations is a step in the right direction. I don’t know what the most effective solution is. What I do know is that sometimes when you try to fix one problem by passing a law, you create an even worse one, and this is a prime example of that. My favorite example of this concept is not as graphic but perhaps more deadly. In the U.K., emergency room patients were waiting to see a doctor for 6 or even 8 hours and people were fed up with it. Lawmakers responded by passing a new law: a patient can not spend more than 4 hours between the time he or she steps foot in the emergency room until the time that patient receives medical attention. The intention was obvious; the result less so.

After the law was passed, when ambulance drivers got a call and picked up a patient in need of medical attention, but not in a life-or-death situation, they were told by the hospital to park on the street until they receive further notice. Then when the hospital knew it wouldn’t take more than 4 hours to see the patient, they gave the ambulance clearance to bring the patient in. So instead of sitting in an emergency room, patients sat in ambulances instead. The result was lots of ambulances parked outside hospitals with people in them not getting hospital treatment, and fewer ambulances and EMTs available to actually go and pick up anyone who might be in need of critical care.

There’s another example in today’s news. In an effort to protect people from credit card companies, the government is imposing major changes in the way they do business. The basic change is to reduce the variability of interest rates, which sounds like a great thing when interest rates are rising because of credit problems in the economy (as is the current situation). But when you go from a variable rate to a fixed rate, the fixed rate is usually higher when interest rates are expected to rise, and that’s what we’re seeing right now. The result is that most of us will see higher interest rates, less availability of credit, a reduction in the grace period that one receives before finance charges start, reductions in frequent flyer miles and other bonuses, and perhaps even a return to annual fees that most of us haven’t had to pay for over a decade. At a time when credit is vitally important, what Congress is doing right now is going to shrink the supply of credit. But don’t tell that to Congress — they’re trying to help fix a problem. If it creates an even worse problem, well, that just means they get to pass another law next year…

No, that question is not about George Bush. No need to apologize if that’s what you were thinking — I can see how he might leap to mind. No, this one’s about the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. She promised to bring us the most principled, honest, transparent Congress in history. Perhaps she’s just showing us by example what unprincipled and dishonest are first, so that we will know honesty and principle when we see it at some point in the future. Here’s a one paragraph summary of what happened in the last week or two, for anyone who hasn’t been paying attention:

Pelosi and several other Democrats lend support to the idea that the Justice Department needs to investigate the lawyers who informed former President Bush that water boarding was legal, and want a “Truth Commission” to investigate everything. Karl Rove defends his administration, saying that Pelosi and others in Congress knew about everything the CIA was doing all along, so if these lawyers are guilty of something, Pelosi is just as culpable. Pelosi says that she was never told the CIA was water boarding. She refines her statement later, saying that she was told that the Bush administration had some opinions from the Office of Legal Counsel saying that water boarding is legal and that it might be used in the future, but that she was never told anyone was actually doing it. It is revealed that her aide was present at a briefing, along with important committee leaders of both parties from the House and Senate, where it is revealed that terrorist Abu Zubaydah was in fact water boarded. Past tense, as in “it happened” not “it might happen.” Pelosi says she was never directly told, so she didn’t know about it. But she also says she was against the practice — you know, the practice she didn’t know was happening — but never went on the record because it wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. Then she has a press conference and changes her story again (she has to get her notes out and read it verbatim to remember what her story is this time). This time she says that the CIA, who came out with a list of all the briefings she was at where water boarding was discussed, is lying about what was in their briefings and she was never told anything about water boarding. The CIA produces evidence that she was in fact told, and director Leon Panetta says that the CIA does not lie or misrepresent anything to Congress. Pelosi says she wasn’t really trying to blame it on the good people at the CIA — it was just that Bush twisted everything.

Just think about everything that has to be true for Nancy Pelosi to be telling the truth. Her aide has to have never told her anything about water boarding and did not take any notes on it at the briefing on Abu Zubaydah. (Her aide has not said a word — you’d think that if her story was true and he had never told her, he’d come forward and say that to defend her, but he’s keeping quiet.) She had to have never had any discussions with any of the other Democrats that were at those briefings about what happened. In order for her to be telling the truth, she has to be horrendously incompetent. But does anyone really think she’s telling the truth? I think you know where I stand on this one.

I didn’t think there would be anybody defending her, but it appears Katrina vanden Heuvel is making excuses for her. Here’s what she said today on This Week with George Stephanopolous:

I am not here to absolve or condemn Nancy Pelosi. I am saying we need to use this time to get to the truth of what a party in power in 2002, with all the power in the world, did in terms of briefings. Insufficient, incomplete briefings on a range of issues: WMDs, 9/11 Commission, Iraq. We need to use that. We need to declassify the briefings materials.

Katrina’s explanation: the briefing Pelosi received must have been incomplete and insufficient. Heck, it was Bush’s people, so they must have lied to everyone because, well, that’s just what Bush does. Never mind that Leon Panetta said that “contemporaneous records” indicated that she was in fact told that water boarding occurred to Abu Zubaydah. Never mind that other Democrats who were there, like Jay Rockefeller, Ben Nelson, and Jane Harmon (from the same state as Mrs. Pelosi), remember being told that we had used the practice. In fact, Jane Harmon reacted so negatively to the news that she went on the record and stated her opposition to the practice. Pelosi somehow never found out about that?

(Rhetorical question: If these briefings are classified, how does Katrina know how insufficient and incomplete they are? Hmmmm.)

What exactly is Pelosi’s defense? She says that she was told that water boarding “might be” used in the future at one briefing in 2002. So she finds out there’s a horrible, immoral practice (a practice so evil that she wants the Justice Department to prosecute lawyers for even suggesting to Bush that it might be lawful), and her strategy apparently is to wait until it’s actually used before stating any opposition to it? It’s either that, or she was actually told about it and knew about it and just wanted to go along with it because it was 2002 after all and, like most Americans, she thought that anything we might have to do to prevent another terrorist attack was something we would just plain have to do. That’s the choice here as I see it: either Pelosi is incompetent and doesn’t remember anything and never writes anything down, or she knew about it and was okay with it and didn’t have the conviction Jane Harmon had to oppose it, and now she’s lying about it to try to score political points. She wanted to stick it to the Bush administration officials who decided to use water boarding, and it came back to bite her bigtime. I don’t remember another time in recent memory when a political ploy backfired this badly…

Can low prices actually be a bad thing?

Two weeks ago, Oprah announced that KFC would be giving away a free meal of their new Kentucky Grilled Chicken to everyone in America who wanted it. As you are probably aware, the promotion was a logistical nightmare. Their coupon delivery system was not working well, people were making copies of what they found off of the web, and it led to many people having their coupons denied — and rightly so, since KFC could not prevent people from using multiple coupons and eating free chicken for a month. They eventually changed to a smarter solution, whereby individuals go to their local KFC and fill out a form so that a coupon is mailed to them, preventing people from receiving more than one coupon.

But even when the coupons were being honored initially, many people were upset at the outcome. At many KFCs around the nation, they were sold out of chicken before dinner time. Angry customers flooded the web site, and it actually made quite a few news stories: “America shocked that free chicken offer results in stores running out of chicken!” KFC said they were overwhelmed by the response to their promotion. We are in a recession and KFC offers people free food, and advertise it on Oprah. This should have been a no-brainer. And customers were mad that KFC didn’t have enough chicken and that they had to wait in line. Apparently they thought there was such a thing as a free lunch.

Prices ration goods in a market. It seems like a no-brainer to say that low prices benefit consumers, but this example illustrates that that’s not entirely true. Sure, if you’re only looking at the price of a product, lower prices must be better for consumers. But when you consider the availability of a product, and the inconvenience caused by not being able to buy a product you expect to be available, low prices can be bad for many consumers. You have to wait in line to ensure that you get the product, which costs time; and if you don’t, you may be left out entirely. When states have price-gouging laws that prevent people from bringing in supplies of needed goods to an area, you might not really be helping consumers at all by “protecting them” from high prices.

When I was in St. Louis for grad school, Dominos Pizza ran a promotion for a few years: for every touchdown scored by the Rams on Sunday, you would get $1 off any pizza on the following Monday. One day Kurt Warner and Marshall Faulk ran up seven touchdowns, so every pizza was $7 off the next day. At dinner time, I tried calling my Dominos to place an order but they left the phone off the hook. I quickly learned that every Dominos in St. Louis left the phone off the hook on Mondays. You had to go to the store to place an order. They did not institute any policy on limiting the number of pizzas one could buy (or if they did it was at a dozen pizzas), so people were stocking up buying a dozen pizzas at a time. Small pizzas that cost $7, so they were basically free. You had to wait at least an hour to get your pizza made, and by 8:00pm, they ran out. Considering the hassle of driving to Dominos, waiting in a line just to place an order, either waiting there or driving home and back again to pick up the pizza an hour later, for one person ordering one pizza it’s probably a stupid thing to do. Those geniuses that got a dozen pizzas for their family and their neighbors were smart. And they ruined it for everybody else who just wanted to celebrate a Rams victory with a cheap pizza. You might say prices were too low.

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Another great but unrelated economics example comes from Oprah’s show 13 years ago when, after airing a piece about mad cow disease (which had never actually been seen in the U.S., despite being present in the U.K.), she said on her show that she would never eat another hamburger again. It’s a wonderful lesson in the impact of expectations on a market. Oprah says she won’t eat beef any more, and millions of women watch her show — the same women who probably are in charge of putting food on the dinner table. Cattle ranchers expect a significant drop in demand for hamburger meat, which will cause lower prices for their product in the future. They try to get ahead of this and start slaughtering their cows early to sell while the price is still high. This flood of supply causes prices to plummet and they end up losing money. Then they have the cajones to sue Oprah for what she said. (Note: had they not overreacted and instead just countered her show with a little better information for consumers, they probably could have avoided the entire mess.) Oprah won the case, and in the process met Dr. Phil. And now everybody knows that no matter how flat you try to make a pancake, it always has two sides.

Light posting for the next few days as I have a stack of exams and they don’t seem to be grading themselves.

One quick story to tell though.

As universities across the country and across the world settle in for final exams, people at universities are searching for a variety of things and some of them end up finding their way to different posts on my blog. I use a website that keeps track of visits to my site, including the website someone visited right before they came to mine. For example, when I add a new post, I usually put it in my Facebook status, and when someone clicks on that, I will see that they are coming from Facebook. Similarly, when people come here as a result of a Google search, I can click on the link and see what they were searching for, and the other sites that came up in their search.

New traffic in the last week or two has been a mix of both professors and students, judging by the IP addresses listed that are attributed to universities from the U.S., Turkey, South Korea, and India, to name a few countries. Some are faculty searching for what to do when they catch students cheating. Some are students searching for a few different things: 1) tips on how to cheat, 2) what will happen to them if they get caught cheating, and 3) what happens to their financial aid when they fail a class and/or don’t take a final exam. I always knew students searched the web for ways to cheat, but it’s a lot more real when you actually see it for yourself.

Some people may think that incentives don’t matter, and students are going to cheat regardless of the punishment. This provides a little anecdotal evidence showing that, at least in some cases, cheating is a calculated decision based on the perceived punishment. Similarly, whether to fail a class on purpose when a C is out of reach depends in part on the financial aid implications. University administrators and faculty would be wise to consider this when crafting their policies about punishment for academic dishonesty, replacing failing grades, and revoking financial aid when students fail courses and don’t even bother showing up to the final exam.

During the presidential campaign, President Obama established a goal of 1 million new plug-in hybrid cars on the road by 2015. His recent efforts to intervene in automakers’ decisions shows that he is willing to do what it takes to meet this goal, respect for property rights and free markets be damned. But he made a good point in his 100-days speech: if Japanese car companies can produce more fuel-efficient cars, why can’t American car companies do it? Maybe they can, but consumers don’t want to buy many more hybrids than they are already buying from the Japanese companies. Chevy was making the Volt, but the Obama administration wanted them to scrap those plans because apparently the car wasn’t profitable. Ford has new hybrid models this year. Will we buy them?

When gas prices spiked last summer, many people wished they had a hybrid, and prices of used SUVs plummeted as people tried to get rid of them. Now that gas prices have fallen by over 50% from their record levels, I haven’t heard as many people talking about the financial motivation to switch to a hybrid. Whether it is really a money-saving thing to do is debatable. At the Minnesota Economics Association’s conference on Energy and Environmental Economics in October 2007, a speaker talked about her choice between the Toyota Camry and the Camry Hybrid. In her situation, when gas was around $2.75/gallon at the time, she calculated that it would take her over 7 years in order to actually see any cost savings, since hybrid cars are more expensive up front. Add that to the lack of trunk space because of a giant battery, and she decided to save some green instead of going green. It seems that if you want to buy a hybrid, you are doing it to help the environment or feel good about yourself, not to save money.

In an effort to change that result, Obama said that he would give $7,000 to consumers who buy plug-in hybrids. I personally have a problem with the kind of government intervention that we have seen in the last few months, and with a giant subsidy like this (if people don’t want the cars, why are you spending taxpayer money to bribe people into buying them?). But even if I didn’t have a problem with it, the question I ask in this post is: is $7,000 enough? It’s probably enough to change the math so that, at current gas prices, it would only take you a few years to have it be a good decision financially. Even so, there are other considerations.

When you buy a hybrid car, you are trading higher costs now for fuel savings in the future, but there is another trade-off many people are making: trading down from a larger car or SUV to a smaller hybrid that often saves fuel costs by being lighter. When you make that trade down in size, you also unfortunately increase the probability that an accident will become fatal. I love my SUV, but I would like a more fuel-efficient car, especially for those long road trips back to California and Arizona. Should I be worried about the increased risk? Here are the numbers from the NTSB:

If we average the rates for cars and SUVS in each size category, the average deaths per million small vehicles is about 72, and the average deaths per million midsize and large vehicles is about 52, a difference of 20 deaths per million cars on the road each year.

For anyone trading down from a mid-size or large car to a small hybrid, the probability that you will die fatally in a car accident increases by 20/1,000,000 every year — arguably not that much. Assume you’re going to have the car for 5 years. A risk-neutral person would say that as long as the expected cost of the hybrid (increased crash risk times the value of your life) is less than the expected benefit ($7,000), the hybrid is a good move. You would have to value your life at $70,000,000 or more for you to be worse off because of the safety concerns. Obviously many people might be risk-neutral or even a little risk-loving when it comes to their money, which explains why people gamble even if the odds say you will probably lose money. But when it comes to your life, are you really risk-neutral? I couldn’t find any research on this, but I would assume probably not. That explains why we go overboard about swine flu when it’s less virulent than regular flu, and why we are a nation at war with peanuts, even though you are more likely to die from lightning than killer peanuts. There will be some that will say the increased risk of a fatal accident is not worth the $7,000 in savings, and I understand that. Those that value their life beyond any monetary measure may feel there’s no amount of money that would be worth the increased risk. I’m not sure I would believe them — give them a free hybrid and they’ll probably drive it.  It seems to me that the trade down in safety is worth the $7,000 present from Obama your fellow taxpayers. Will I buy a hybrid? Probably not. When it’s “your money or your life,” sometimes even an economist has to choose life. If I were older or more miserable, maybe I’d buy a hybrid. But not yet.

Market Forces Postscript: The previous analysis assumes that the price of hybrids at dealerships would not increase, which is probably not going to happen: with much higher demand for hybrids because everyone wants their $7,000 rebate, you might expect to see prices of hybrids rise at dealerships — maybe even an amount close to $7,000. Then much of the benefit from buying a hybrid evaporates.

When Joe Lieberman lost the Democratic primary in Connecticut to Ned Lamont a few years ago, he decided to leave the Democrat party and become an Independent so he could win the general election. It worked, but the Democrat-controlled Senate punished him by not allowing him to keep his seniority — this new Independent Joe was deemed to be completely different from the Democrat Joe that had served for 18 years, so he was stripped of his rank. I remember the outcry from Democrats at the time Lieberman made the decision to leave the Democrat party, calling him opportunistic and shameful. Chris Dodd, fellow senator from Connecticut, said he disapproved of the decision. And I remember Republicans hailing Joe as being true to his values and standing up for what he thought was right. Heck, the Republicans had him give a speech at the Republican National Convention in 2008 for John McCain, and he’s not even a registered Republican.

Now I see these same Democrats cheering Arlen Spector for doing the exact same thing they disapproved of Lieberman doing, because now he’s helping their party instead of hurting it. Spector is a hero and is welcomed with open arms. Democrats  even say they will honor his seniority of 29 years so he can keep his rank on his Senate committees — something they did not offer Lieberman. And I see these same Republicans calling Spector a traitor (Benedict Arlen) and an opportunist for leaving the party, and a liar because he said a month ago that he would not switch parties. And if they were in power right now, they’d be stripping Spector of his seniority the way the Democrats did to Lieberman.

Lieberman and Spector are both political opportunists. They did what they did so they could keep their seat at the table in Washington, plain and simple. At his press conference, Spector tried to explain why he made the switch. And after first saying that his views have changed and he finds himself more in line with Democrats now (despite voting against them in his first vote after he made the switch), eventually he admitted that what it ultimately came down to was that he had seen the primary polls and knew he could not win in the primary election. He said he was not willing to let the Republican primary voters decide whether his 29-year career in the Senate would be over – never mind the fact that he was perfectly fine letting these same voters play a part in deciding his fate for the last 29 years.

It seems opportunism and shamelessness only apply to people in the other party. The hypocrisy is blatant and disgusting, and just one of the many reasons most people don’t trust politicians, and are so disenchanted with the political system. It seems the only standard, the thing that matters most to politicians, is what will make their party more powerful. The American people are a distant second or third on the list of what matters to our national political parties and to far too many politicians. I find that truly shameful.

UPDATE 5/6: It appears that despite their promises by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (NV) to let Spector keep his seniority on his committees, the Democrats have passed a measure that moves him behind all other Democrats on all but one of his committees. (The committee on which he retains his seniority — the Special Committee on Aging. Poetic justice?) I guess when Spector goes back on his promise not to switch, he can’t really complain when other people break their promises to him, can he?

Now that the semester is drawing to a close, it’s time for an update on the student I caught cheating on an exam earlier this semester. I don’t want to reveal anything about the student, even whether the student was male or female. But it’s clunky writing to keep saying “the student” and using gender-neutral language, so I’ll make it easy on all of us and just call the student Adam. I’ll spare you all the details on how I caught Adam cheating and all the drama that led up to it, but suffice it to say that two cheat sheets were seen on his desk while he was taking his exam and, when I approached him, the cheat sheets were crumpled up and stuffed into his front pocket. When I asked him to empty his pockets, out came the cheat sheets. I made it explicitly clear in class and in an e-mail before the exam, and it says on the exam itself and in my syllabus, that the only thing students were allowed on exams are a pen or pencil and sometimes a calculator. Again it seems a student used my suggested solutions for practice exam questions against me — shrinking them down to 4-point font and printing them out. Grrrr.

I took the exam from him and went back to my office, telling him I would contact him and let him know what I was going to do about this. I was a little hot at this point and I needed to cool down and think this through. I write in my syllabus that the punishment for cheating can be either a failing grade on the exam or a failing grade in the class, depending on the severity of the offense. I spoke with colleagues about the situation and everyone seemed to agree that I should throw the book at Adam. If there were ever a time to fail a student for cheating, it was for this, a clear case of premeditated cheating. It would be one thing if, during an exam, he were looking on the exam of the student next to him and continued to do so even after being warned. In that case, I might just give him a zero on the exam. But this was about as bad as it gets. At that point, I contacted the Office of Student Life and Development  (OSLD) and asked them what I should do next.

I was informed that I could mete out the punishment I deemed proper, and Adam would have the right to appeal the resulting grade if he so desired. I was told that I could also take it one step further and file a complaint against the student for violating the Student Code of Conduct (SCC).

(Note to professors: even if you decide to handle a cheating incident in-house and not pursue any violation of the SCC, you are still supposed to contact the OSLD and inform them of the situation; they will put something on the student’s record so that if it happens again, they can take this previous behavior into consideration. Despite what some may think, including myself before this incident, contacting OSLD does not automatically start an investigation or hearing; it’s entirely up to the professor.)

I wrote a detailed account of the events that occured and e-mailed it to the OSLD, along with scans of the cheat sheets. They contacted Adam and informed him that I was initiating an investigation. At that point, Adam came forwarded and admitted wrongdoing. He later sent me an e-mail apologizing for cheating. He said that given the situation, my giving him a failing grade in the course was an appropriate punishment. He felt embarrassed about everything — he hadn’t studied enough for the exam, had some family issues going on, and was afraid he would fail. I give him credit for the apology, and I appreciated it. This was an educational lesson for Adam and I wish him well in the future. No hard feelings.

Okay, now here’s the problem. I serve on the Judicial Board at SCSU, and we hear cases brought by the University against students that are accused of violating the SCC. The composition of board members changes with each proceeding, but it consists of one faculty representative, one staff representative, and three students. All the proceedings are confidential. We take notes throughout the hearing and everything is taken from us at the end and shredded. We are not to discuss anything that occurred during the hearing. We listen to the testimony, ask questions, take in evidence, and then the parties leave the room while we deliberate. We consider everything and first decide what the facts are. Then we decide if the accused party is “responsible” (the University’s word for “guilty” but since this is not a legal hearing, the language changes a bit) for violating part of the SCC. We then bring the parties back into the room. When someone is found responsible, we inform that party and any other relevant complaining party (for example, the victim in case of a sexual assault) that the person was found responsible. Then everyone else leaves the room and the Board members decide on appropriate punishment. The Board recommends a sanction, anywhere from a slap on the wrist to expulsion from the University. Ultimately it is up to the person in charge at OSLD to decide on what to do; I am told that he usually follows the Judicial Board’s recommendation.

When students are found responsible for violating the SCC at a Judicial Board hearing, they are told that they will be informed of the sanction within three business days, after the OSLD makes its decision. Everyone else involved in the process is told nothing. While the victim in a sexual assault case will learn at the hearing that the accused party was found responsible, the victim is never told what the ultimate punishment actually is. Judicial Board members are never told whether their recommended sanction is what was imposed, or whether OSLD decided to change it and substitute their judgment for the Board’s. In my case, I will never know what the punishment was for Adam. By coming forward and admitting responsibility for cheating on the exam, Adam bypassed the Judicial Board system, saving a lot of time and hassle. The OSLD decided on the punishment, with no recommendation by the Judicial Board. I have no idea how he was punished. I received an e-mail simply saying that he accepted responsibility for this violation and “was sanctioned appropriately.” I have no idea what “appropriately” means.

Some students at the university are considering changing our current SCC system, whereby the University provides an extra punishment on top of any criminal sanctions for things like sexual assault or drug use. I won’t get into whether I personally think that is appropriate or not, but if you’re going to have a system like the one we currently have (providing extra punishment for offenses which our legal system already finds worthy of punishment), shouldn’t the actual punishments meted out by the University be public information?

I am disappointed with the current system and its lack of transparency. I will never know whether the OSLD decided that Adam’s failing my class was already punishment enough, or whether they decided to suspend him or expel him. It would be nice to know where the University draws the line. How blatant does a violation of the most important part of the SCC have to be to warrant suspension or expulsion? I understand privacy issues, but without anybody knowing what the punishment for cheating is, how do we communicate to students just how wrong violations of academic integrity are?

I mentioned in a previous post that there should be a Student Cheating Report, much like there is a Sexual Assault Report every year. After writing that post, I sent an e-mail to the head of the OSLD letting him know my opinion about this and asking him why we don’t currently provide this information. He said that in the past the University has not put out a report because of the lack of a good information system, and this kind of report would require going through files by hand. (Personally, I think this should be a priority, regardless of how busy the OSLD is with other things, but at least I have an explanation.) He said they now have a simple system they can use for this, but it has a few glitches that need to be worked out. He said this is a summer project for him, and he agrees with me that faculty and students really need this kind of information. Every interaction I have had with him has confirmed to me that he is a great asset to this University and is very good at his job, so I trust that he will do what he says he will. I look forward to the results.

I’m not sure what the over/under is on the number of student violations of academic integrity in the last academic year. Feel free to state your guess for the record in a comment to this post. Closest to the actual number without going over gets $20 from me, via Paypal, when the report is released. (In the case of a tie, winners split it — I’m cheap, you know.)