The Persistence of Time (or lack thereof)
I’m in a grade dispute with a student right now, and even though I have no reason not to trust her, I feel like she’s trying to pull a fast one on me.
There was an assignment due on Thursday, March 5th, at 2:30 PM. We were still in Eastern Standard Time then, and would switch to Eastern Daylight Time nine days later. The assignment had to be submitted through e-mail (a process which I will be changing for the fall, so that I don’t have to go through this again). She used her Hotmail account to send the e-mail to my school account, which gets forwarded to my Gmail account. In Gmail, when I click “Show details” on the e-mail, it says:
date
Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 2:41 PM
And so I assigned a grade of zero, because the assignment was late. But when she forwarded me a copy of the e-mail from her sent folder, the following text appeared in it, presumably put there by Hotmail:
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2009 13:41:27 -0500
13:41 is, of course, 1:41 PM in military time. So, I’m trying to figure out exactly what is going on here, and I think it’s got to be one of the following:
- Scenario 1: Gmail has “translated” the original sent time, in EST, to EDT, so that it looks like 2:41. I feel approximately 0% certain that this is the case, but I can’t test it until November, when we go back to EST.
- Scenario 2: Hotmail has “translated” the original sent time somehow. Of course, for that to make sense, it would have had to make the time later, not earlier, since we “spring forward” and “fall back”. Again, my certainty in this hovers around 0%.
- Scenario 3: In forwarding the original e-mail to me, the student — whom I have no reason to distrust based on any past events, but who is still a student trying to get good grades — changed the original time an hour earlier in an attempt to get credit for an assignment. My certainty that this happened: 10%.
So, I’m 90% certain that whatever happened is something I really don’t understand, and am incapable of thinking up. If any of you dear readers think up an alternate explanation, please let me know, because I’m out of ideas. Thanks.
The student just showed me the original e-mail in Hotmail on her mobile phone, with the 1:41 pm sent time. So, she’s off the hook. That still doesn’t help me figure out exactly what happened, whether Hotmail initially screwed up the timestamp, or if Gmail’s screwing it up now, or what. I’m actually more confused now than I was before; if she’d cheated, everything would have made sense. Damn honest kids.