Monday

Marked two more undergraduate dissertations. One was on the future of audit after the financial crisis which was very confused, mixing US, UK and Australian sources willy-nilly and with a methods section which referred to data collection using interviews and questionnaires of which there was no sign. This was from a student I had supervised, if you can call it that: a single meeting and some sporadic emails. I checked back to see what advice I had given: it had been ignored. The referencing was so bad that I was quite sure that some of his work had been plagiarised so spent some time googling random sentences. Found some of his sources but although the wording was very close he had obviously tried to put it into his own words so decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

In the course of this investigation, found an interesting paper about Prem Sikka and his work. Realised that some of our younger colleagues may never have come across Prem so sent it round to the whole department.

The other dissertation was about creative accounting, equally confused, claiming to be a case study of Enron but with only half a page about Enron.

This probably wasn't a good time to turn to my colleague's very long conceptual paper.The ideas are interesting but it's not written clearly. I didn't have the energy to edit it but suggested that the abstract could be sent off to a journal editor to enquire as to whether it would be suitable for that journal. And that the paper could be reduced in length by 40%. I won't be popular.

Continuing email conversations with the rogue colleague who persists in submitting funding bids without giving me time to consider whether to approve them. His area of work is very distant from the rest of us and I need to seek expert advice but he leaves everything to the last minute, possibly in the hope that I will just sign without asking any questions.

Read two applications for post-doc posts, one very poorly put together, the other almost too good to be true.

Read some of the papers for the meeting with the 24 item agenda.

Went to the cinema to see "The Deep Blue Sea". Excellent film. Made up for a day swamped with dealing with unproductive things, apart from the occasional email that made me laugh. Not enough of those.