Business Ethics Class Offers a Life Lesson for Cheaters

There is the Woody Allen line about cheating on a metaphysics test by looking into another student’s soul.

And there is the cheating on a different order at San Diego State: 25 students looking into their own souls and coming up with an F.

About a third of the students in lecturer Brian D. Cornforth’s business ethics class were given the failing grade, and most were put on probation after Cornforth received a tip and laid a trap to unearth cheating.

Students from an evening class were apparently parroting answers to the same quiz given to an afternoon session of the same class--but were tripped up when Cornforth rearranged the quiz.

The case, reported in the student newspaper the Daily Aztec, was unusual in its scale. And if the object of an education is to learn, one student may have gotten his or her money’s worth, telling the San Diego Union-Tribune, “What did I learn? Obviously not to cheat. It’s not worth it.”

*

Sign, signs, everywhere signs: It’s no secret that Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante and Gov. Gray Davis are not seeing eye to eye these days.

Bustamante angered Davis’ aides recently with his outspoken criticism of the governor’s decision to ask the courts to mediate Proposition 187.

And last week, Bustamante aides speculated privately that they were the victims of payback when they learned that nine of their parking spaces, controlled by the governor’s office, had been taken away.

So what will happen next? There’s no telling, although it is curious that Bustamante, on his Web site, includes a list of the seven lieutenant governors who took over the office of governor upon the resignation or death of their predecessors.

Asked about it Monday, Bustamante’s communications director, Phil Garcia, said the posting has nothing to do with the current state of affairs between the two offices. “It’s been on there since late January and is part of the history of the office more than anything else,” he said. “I don’t think anyone was thinking of 187 in late January.”

*

Load up the dollies: Breathe easier, America: Barbie’s midlife crisis is solved.

All 21,000 pieces in the Barbie Hall of Fame, evicted from its Palo Alto digs, have been sold to its maker, Mattel, which is moving the collection to its El Segundo archives as it plans a permanent Barbie Museum.

For 15 years, the collection of Evelyn and Robert Burkhalter has been packing and unpacking its tiny togs around Palo Alto, and at the last eviction, Mattel finally rode its checkbook to the rescue--price undisclosed.

Not among the definitive Barbie-abilia is a selection of lowlife Backlash Barbies sold awhile back in a San Francisco shop, among them Trailer Trash Barbie with cigarette and dark roots to her blond hair, and Drag Queen Barbie in Ken’s clothes.

*

Public School Enrollment

Latinos continue to be the most rapidly growing ethnic group in California’s public schools, according to the most recent figures released by the state Department of Education. Here are the enrollment percentages by ethnic group for the 1989-90 and 1998-99 school years and the percentage change:

Latino

Enrollment. 1989-90: 33.0%

Enrollment. 1998-99*: 41.3%

Percentage change: 25.1

White

Enrollment. 1989-90: 47.1

Enrollment. 1998-99*: 37.8

Percentage change: -19.7

Black

Enrollment. 1989-90: 8.7

Enrollment. 1998-99*: 8.7

Percentage change: 0

Asian

Enrollment. 1989-90: 7.7

Enrollment. 1998-99*: 8.1

Percentage change: 5.2

Filipino

Enrollment. 1989-90: 2.2

Enrollment. 1998-99*: 2.4

Percentage change: 9.1

American Indian / Alaskan Native

Enrollment. 1989-90: 0.8

Enrollment. 1998-99*: 0.9

Percentage change: 12.5

Pacific Islander

Enrollment. 1989-90: 0.5

Enrollment. 1998-99*: 0.6

Percentage change: 20.0

Note: In 1989-90, there were 4.8 million students in the state’s public schools; there are now 5.8 million.

* Percentages do not equal 100% because of rounding and because 0.1% gave no response or gave multiple answers.

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

*

One-offs: A drive-through burger meal is about the worst environmental crime an individual can commit, according to San Francisco’s Union of Concerned Scientists, which ranks cars and industrial meat production as humans’ two most environmentally destructive activities. . . . The descendants of an FBI agent found murdered in 1929 were given a memorial star in a ceremony in Sacramento, one of 33 given to families of agents killed in the line of duty. . . . A $500 donation to the San Francisco Boys & Girls Club secured a ticket to a screening of the new “Star Wars” movie three days before it officially opens. . . . There were 70,000 victims Monday when a pickup truck on California 92 near Hawyard swerved to avoid a collision--a cargo of goldfish from a Fresno fish hatchery.

EXIT LINE

“This is a real find. It’s a real smoking gun. It documents an event that historians have treated warily.”

--Walter Brem, curator at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, of recently acquired documents showing that the Wells Fargo Express company and Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa secretly arranged a hushed-up ransom payment for the return of stolen bars of silver bullion, money that bankrolled Villa during the Mexican revolution. As part of the deal, Villa also promised Wells Fargo’s Mexican subsidiary “protection,” a pledge not to rob its railway cars or offices “or allow anyone else to do so.”

*

California Dateline appears every other Tuesday.