Ruining the life of an Engineering student

He's a second-year student - he's likely taking mostly whatever Purdue's name for their common core classes are.

Have him accused of faking data for a lab test. A lazy chem student might decide not to go through all the tedious steps of running an experiment in which he already "knows" what the results will be, so just write up the report, fudge some numbers, and viola, experiment done!

Perhaps your character, if you don't want him to actually behave unethically, might have taken a shortcut. One that he didn't think was really cheating. You know, skip step 7 in a 14-step process because that's by-the-numbers textbook procedure, we'll just assume I did that... Add some time pressure and/or sleep deficit, and a lab culture of allowing this kind of laziness ("No one actually repeats all 14 steps by hand") except he did something wrong. Or got caught.

I'd suggest talking to an actual chem major to get plausible details.

Buying and selling papers/test answers will get you thrown out in a hot second. So would any sort of felony (at least at my university.) Tampering (or alleged tampering) with a rival lab's experiments will do it too...we had a case in the bio department where almost every member of the lab dismissed.

Have him stealing from the lab and get caught, or have him caught cheating on the American Chemical Society exam. You can also look up the syllabus for a chem class, alot of professors have things posted online, some universities post rules for expulsion on their syllabus. Or you could just email one of the professors, they make give you something really good.

<----engineering student

4th (of 5) year in a civil/bio combo sort of deal...

Second year is still in common courses. Lots of calculus (like half your fucking classes are calculus), a few of the required non-engineering classes like english, philosophy, etc.

Second year is a little early for "group" projects. Later years are all about "design teams" and you get to rely on a bunch of people for your grade. Which is tons of fun, lemme tell ya. But not likely something he'll run across unless it's in one of his non-eng classes.

We do write "papers" but they're more in the line of lab reports. I've had to do 5-10 page reports, with a significant amount of calculation, justification for which formulas I've used, sources of error, assumptions I've made, and why my results are not what I was supposed to get... on a weekly basis. For most classes every semester. However, fudging results on a report is mostly pointless. You don't get marked on how close you were to perfect when it comes to labs; you get marked on understanding why shit went wrong. Shit always goes wrong.

Besides, lab reports are rarely worth more than 15% of your mark and you're doing like 10 of them a semester. Cheating to get 1.5% of your final grade is pretty dumb. Grades are mostly based on midterms and finals. My nice profs make the midterm 30%, some kind of coursework 20% (lab reports plus other assignments that are really just lab reports where they give you results), and the final 50%. Hated profs have a 40% midterm and 60% final.

If he misses a midterm without a legitimate reason (ie. dead parent, dead yourself) he gets a 0 on it unless he has a reason and can arrange with the prof (I won a scholarship to an industry conference in 2 weeks and will miss a midterm so now the final in that class is worth 62.5% of my grade). If he misses a final he fails the class. Period. Unless he's dead, and then maybe (maybe, if he's lucky) they'll let him write it during the next semester's exam period. But failing a class is no big deal, you just take the D and then take the class again.

"Academic dishonesty" is the catchall phrase my school uses for plagarism, cheating etc. And it's srs bsns. Every class syllabus in the engineering faculty includes the entire policy on academic dishonesty. Engineering students are apparently fabulous cheaters. Highest rate among university students pretty much all over N America. And it's pretty much is the only way I can see to end an academic career while still in undergrad.

In grad school if you piss the wrong people off you can lose funding or have your thesis rejected, but in undergrad? Nothing like that. Even flunking out takes a while and you can always go back and try again (my school is GPA below 2 for x number of semesters and then you have to take a year off to think about what you really want to do with your life) so that's no big deal.

Course materials are the intellectual property of the instructors... doing something with a prof's notes, powerpoint slides, or any kind of written material might cause an issue, but that's hardly equivalent to academic dishonesty, and he'd have to have already really pissed off a prof for anything to come of that other than a "hey kid, that's mine, get it off your damn blog".

I know scholarships are totally different in the US and a lot of kids end up with no cost for tuition... but I don't know what the terms of those are. Maybe he has to maintain a certain GPA or he'll lose his scholarship and he can't afford school on his own?

Maybe he finds out a tenured professor is making DMT or ecstasy and using it for sexual favors or selling it. He fails to report the activity because he fears repercussions. Think Penn state.

I think that Jimmymc has a good idea, but a little better might be having a lab instructor making drugs and labelling intermediate products as things that various students made. Any number of drugs that require multiple steps and signicant time would work. I would use LSD, but other people prefer stimulants.

A more common scenario (it's really hard to get kicked out for plagiarism, even for the plagiarists - colleges really really really want to keep getting your tuition money) is an accusation of rape. Alcohol is ubiquitous on college campuses and even though most rape accusations are brushed under the rug by authorities, every once in a while there's one that gets a lot of publicity and the university is pressured into doing something about it. I could see a scenario where he goes to a party, leaves early, and then someone accuses him of rape later in the evening - he knows he wasn't there (and possibly wasn't even drinking), but everyone else who was still there was too drunk to remember properly. And if the girl who accuses him has enough platform at the university - writer for the paper, important athlete, etc. - she might be able to make a big to-do about it and get everyone to judge him guilty before he's really had a chance to defend himself. And then if it comes out later that another student was responsible and he gets off the hook, he can have had a close shave without it being his fault (other than possibly being oblivious enough to go to a party he shouldn't have been at).

(Rape is a terribly sensitive topic to include in your book, of course, and it's hard to do it so it's not victim-blaming, which some people will find as a turn-off - but if you do it so your student wasn't even there, you can make it a sympathetic situation.)

Chem Eng is a lot of engineering and very little chemistry. This guy would not be anywhere near a lab with actual chemicals in it.

We used to party with booze made from chem eng students. Alembics were hidden somewhere on campus and it took security a full year to find them. I don't remember what happen to the distillers (I don't remember much after those parties, but that's another topic). You can assume they were brought before people who would influence their careers to a very large extent...

Quality of the booze was in question. If some student would have died or get seriously ill, that would have changed the outcome.

-cb

Captcha said:

What would be the most serious academic offense for a chemical engineer?

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Breaking the fourth law of thermodynamics. Namely: the angle of the dangle is inversely proportional to the heat of the beat.

Maryn said:

Although I have no idea if Chemical Engineering students write papers. Maybe falsifying data or presenting a project or design as original when it isn't?

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Yes, they write papers. All science majors write papers. They are very heavily cited papers where your personal opinion isn't particularly important, but they are papers nonetheless.

Captcha said:

I wonder if they do lab work? Maybe he could mix two chemicals together, and one of them was mislabeled or contaminated somehow leading to a dangerous reaction? It would be scary because maybe he could get a little hurt (I'm VERY open to suggestions on how this might happen) and also because it would look like he'd been the one to make the mistake.

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Yes, they have many lab classes where they mix chemicals. The first few years of chemistry are working with benign compounds that aren't dangerous though, so unless your character goes out of his/her way to do something very stupid, nothing dramatic is likely to result. When you begin working with the more dangerous chemicals, to do something sufficiently dangerous to be kicked out of an academic institution you'd probably have to be an exceptionally large moron because of the amount of observation received by lab TAs (graduate students) and other non-moron classmates.

Rockem Sockem Robot said:

Yes, they write papers. All science majors write papers. They are very heavily cited papers where your personal opinion isn't particularly important, but they are papers nonetheless.

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Engineers, though science majors, are a slightly different breed. I've never acutally written a research paper, which is what you describe. I write design papers where opinion and arguements are important because I have to justify my design choices (i.e. aluminium pipes over pvc, or fibre rebar over metal). They can be heavily cited, but they are chock full of opinion. And most of the papers are graded on who would "win" the contract. If your design is best and most likely the one to sway a client to choose your company to create their product, you get the highest grade. Everyone else is scaled under you, so there is a huge amount of persuasion involved in our reports because you're basically arguing for grades.

cbenoi1 said:

We used to party with booze made from chem eng students. Alembics were hidden somewhere on campus and it took security a full year to find them. I don't remember what happen to the distillers (I don't remember much after those parties, but that's another topic). You can assume they were brought before people who would influence their careers to a very large extent...

Quality of the booze was in question. If some student would have died or get seriously ill, that would have changed the outcome.

-cb

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The ones who did it probably got extra course credit.

Where I went, the best booze was made by chem students who used the lab; it came out 98 percent alcohol and mixed well.

Captcha said:

Yeah, I should clarify that this is engineering school, not chemistry school. The Program of Study is at https://engineering.purdue.edu/ChE/Academics/Undergrad/POS Updated.pdf - looks like second year would have two terms of Org.Chem. labs, but no others.

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Not clear from this whether they merely have lectures on Chemistry or actual lab work.
I repeat my view that (at least in the UK) Chem Eng students never go near a chemistry lab and most of them know f##k all about the reactions going on inside the reactors they have designed.

cornflake said:

He's a second-year student - he's likely taking mostly whatever Purdue's name for their common core classes are.

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My son's an engineering student. He has studied at two colleges in California. In both these programs they focused heavily on their engineering coursework during their first three years, with the majority of general ed classes being scheduled to be done senior year when they are working on their senior project.

jennontheisland said:

<----engineering student
Second year is a little early for "group" projects. Later years are all about "design teams" and you get to rely on a bunch of people for your grade. Which is tons of fun, lemme tell ya. But not likely something he'll run across unless it's in one of his non-eng classes.
Maybe he has to maintain a certain GPA or he'll lose his scholarship and he can't afford school on his own?

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Depends on the school here in the States. There is a bigger and bigger push for more early 'hands on' learning, where the student do work on projects in groups of 4-5.

The GPA suggestion is a good one to consider.

waylander said:

Chem Eng is a lot of engineering and very little chemistry. This guy would not be anywhere near a lab with actual chemicals in it.

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Again, depends on the program. The CE students my son knows do get to do lab work with actual chemicals, but as someone else said, they are of the fairly benign variety, and the labs are pretty well scripted. He suggested maybe your protagonist could knock over a bunsen burner and start a fire, but that most labs have pretty good fire suppression equipment that would kick in automatically.

He suggested that perhaps someone cheats of your MC's test. Both of them would be brought up on charges and it would be rather hard for your MC to prove that the other person cheated off of him, not the other way around.

Another possibility would be an accusation of plagiarism in one of his few non-engineering classes. Many schools do offer some from of English for Engineers/Scientists sort of class. Teachers use or require students to use a site like TunrItIn.com to filter for plagiarism. He could be 'accused' in that way and have to fight to prove that just because X% of the words/phrases were 'similar' to a certain paper that it was by random chance. (son experienced something close to this, but it was easy in his case to show that he hadn't plagiarized - it was just the algorithm the program used)

Good luck!

Not sure if you still need suggestions for this, but I got a pretty good one (at least, I think it's pretty good...)

I talked to my husband, who is a postdoc in MechE. We're stateside, but have no experience with Purdue in particular. Every school has different procedures about how to get into a major and when they allow students in. There are even often differences between majors at the same school.

Husband points out that engineering is a major that sometimes you have to apply to get into, even if you've been accepted by the university. That often happens at the end of the second year. When he was teaching Statics at Ohio State, he had students who required at least a C in order to enter their major. It's usually a two-strikes, you're out sort of thing. And if you're out, that means you're out. No ChemE for Mr. Student.

And lookit what we found in the Purdue ChemE undergrad guide (page 4):

3.1 Curriculum Regulationsa. A student must earn at least a C or better in CHE 205 to continue to enroll in subsequent CHE courses.
b. You may register for a required Chemical Engineering course twice (even if you drop the course, that counts as one registration). If you do not complete it successfully the second time, you will not be allowed to retake it at Purdue. (Note: CHE 205 cannot be retaken at another university.)

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Let's say your student signed up for CHE 205 and had to drop it for some very legitimate reason. No problem, he can just take it again, right? So he signed up the next semester and *insert terrible thing here--missed midterm, accused of plagiarism, mom died, marooned in west Chicago with no car or money*. Now he's failing. He's screwed. Conflict!

jennontheisland said:

If he misses a midterm without a legitimate reason (ie. dead parent, dead yourself) he gets a 0 on it unless he has a reason and can arrange with the prof (I won a scholarship to an industry conference in 2 weeks and will miss a midterm so now the final in that class is worth 62.5% of my grade). If he misses a final he fails the class. Period. Unless he's dead, and then maybe (maybe, if he's lucky) they'll let him write it during the next semester's exam period. But failing a class is no big deal, you just take the D and then take the class again.

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Basically this is all building on what Jenn said here. Except that in the right circumstances, failing that class can be a very big deal.

A lot of people suggested he be accused of plagiarism or cheating. While this is definitely scary, the process is terribly long (several months, easily) and tedious. And it often doesn't result in the student being expelled, unless it's a particularly grievous violation or someone high up is looking to make an example. But the accusation could make him fail a class.

Good luck! Hope you find something that works.

If the student is on scholarship, what about surrendering to time pressures? If he were to fall behind, then use a Cliff's Notes overview of something for an English class, a good professor would catch it.

The student, knowing his grades affect his scholarship, and not hearing back from the professor, then getting called in for an appointment, wouldn't necessarily be enough to get him kicked out, but it could be a "slow burn" tension that builds as he realizes what he's done, then worries that the professor caught it, then learns that the professor did catch it.

I know my high school English was great at catching papers derived from Cliff's Notes. I'd rather not discuss how I know that.

Academic dishonesty is probably the most significant, and most common type of issue, outside of moral and ethical failures. Many universities (including the two where I have been employed) have a special grade for failing a class due to academic dishonesty, and it appears with that exact explanation on the student's transcript. So this would be a significant black mark on the student's permanent record. Particularly egregious events will also result in immediate and permanent expelling from the university.

If the student is a second-year student, he/she would just be getting into the introductory classes in the major, taking mostly "general education" courses as required by the university (research Purdue's general ed requirements). A major push (both good and bad) in higher education is to emphasize student learning methods that frequently have students working in small groups (collaborative learning). This can create all kinds of personality clashes and even serious accusations from group-mates. I have not only observed, but I've also been told of how some group-mates either didn't do their share of the work or did unacceptable work. This creates distrust and friction in the group. A vengeful student could easily find a way to get even in such a situation, particularly a fictional one where personality conflicts can form support pillars for our stories.

Making illegal drugs in a chem lab has happened (a colleague was caught doing it), but the reason he was caught is because there in an inventory of chemicals purchased for research and teaching purposes, and that paper trail is enough to discourage most legally arrogant individuals. My colleague was arrested and his career ruined.