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The nonexistent grade-point-averages of some 12 students are thought to be in jeopardy as word of a devious Machiavellian scheme in the English department spreads across campus.
Professor Alan Cooper, a tenured English literature professor with a Ph.D. in the written word of the abolition movement, "acted like a total dick," according to one of his students, in anticipation of his class's final exam.
Cooper is said to have altered key details to the Wikipedia entry for the Harriet Beecher Stowe classic. For example, Tom's cruel master Simon Legree was excised from the article and replaced by Gandalf from the Lord of the Rings saga.
"I just wanted to make sure students were paying attention," Cooper claimed. "I figured I would throw in a character ludicrous enough to make it clear they should not rely on Wikipedia but rather do the assigned reading in the first place."
"However, a sizeable majority of the class turned in exams that mentioned, in some capacity, Balrogs and the One Ring," the professor said. "Perhaps my creative substitutions and edits to the article were not as blunt as I had hoped they might be."
This, however, was not the edit that inflicted the most damage upon students' grades. In one famous scene Eliza desperately leaps across floes of ice on the Ohio River with her child Harry in her arms, nearly dying in her attempt to physically pass the barrier between North and South. In Cooper's Wiki-vandalized version of this scene, Eliza's pursuant Haley tracks her down using his iPhone's GPS and fails to catch her in the blaze of Uzi fire as she hops on a jet-ski to free territory.
Dellon says he expects to receive a zero on the section of his exam essay in which he analyzed the jet-ski as a metaphor for Harriet Tubman's Underground Railroad.
"Shit, man," he said. "I was in the zone on that part, too. I even knew who Harriet Tubman was. Maybe that will get me at least one point out of the possible ten? Wait, was she even in this book? Fuck. That Cooper is just one son of a mother."
"And don't even get me started on the part where Uncle Tom starts singing Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah," Dellon said. "It never occurred to me that the professor was messing with our heads, y'know? How was I supposed to know that Harriet Beecher whatever didn't use the song before Disney?"
Cooper said he has no regrets about testing his students' trust of online sources.
"It's getting far to easy to pass off falsehoods as truth on the web," he said. "I hope my class has learned from this experience that we must be vigilant when we write and read information online."
At press time, the Wikipedia entry for Professor Cooper prominently featured a photo with testicles photoshopped on top of Cooper's head, a section devoted to "over 9000 days served in the South Dakota Correctional Institute for Pedophiles," and repeated references to his three sets of female genitalia.
