Academic Sabotage

Ibb has become convinced that people are stealing homework scripts from the folder on her office door. This hypothesis has been reached due to the number of students from various tutor groups claiming to have handed work which they have not yet had returned to them. One might at this point conclude that a) they are lying scum, much like all teenagers, and have in fact neglected to produce the required work in favour of smoking crack and tagging walls and engaging in promiscuous sex (or what have you), or b) Ibb has now outdone herself in the idiocy stakes to the point where transferring paper from point A to point B, five metres distant, is no longer a task she can perform with a better than 90% chance of success.

Having said all that, Ibb is insistent that the honesty of at least some of those affected is above reproach, and you'd have to be imbecilic even by her standards to manage to lose scripts twixt door and desk. So maybe theft is the genuine cause. Rumours are circulating of a vast conspiracy in which undergraduates remove homework from folders, copy it, and then replace. Perhaps one of these ne'er-do-wells, already lacking the necessary nous to realise their scheme is liable to be a short-term fix at best, has taken the next step down the crime highway and has started burning the original scripts to prevent comparison. This person, who we shall henceforth refer to as "The Cuckoo", never strikes the same target twice, presumably because they are so bad at their chosen subject that they can't even recognise a decent attempt when they see it.

Needless to say, in her desperate attempt to cover her own shapely ass, Ibb has found a potential suspect, entirely based on the fact that "no-one talks to her, and she looks really weird". Pretty damning, I think you'll agree. When pressed, the only further slice of evidence Ibb could provide is that the suspect never hands in any work. My esteemed colleague J-Dog then pointed out that this immediately disqualifies her as a suspect in a plagiarism case, and at worst the girl in question might simply be stealing scripts and hoarding them in her room. More Magpie than Cuckoo, although in general the utilitarian process of a magpie (shiny=better) is somewhat more easy to grasp than whatever selection process is applied to the theft of mathematics homework.

Regardless, Ibb has cranked it up a notch and is now engaged in discussion with the gentleman who runs the course as to how security can be beefed up in the Maths department. I await the results, which I trust will involve DNA scanners, armed guards, and/or compulsory anal probing for all undergraduates.