STYLETHREAD -- LET'S TALK SHOP!

So right now I am deep in the trenches, finishing up my senior thesis for my interior design BFA. Part of what we're required to do for the final presentation is show perspective drawings illustrating how the finished spaces will look. Everyone competes to outdo each other on these drawings, because when they're well done they can look spectacular, and give an amazingly clear sense of the project's design--they show all the architectural elements, the finishes, the lighting, the furniture, everything. So it turns out that one of my classmates hired a professional computer renderer to help her with her drawings, which has caused quite an uproar among my classmates. She is insisting that she built the 3-d computer model herself and then turned it over to the guy she hired to add the finishes and materials and lights--she's trying to downplay the contribution that this professional made to her drawings, but she also stated that she paid him for six days' worth of work on the project, which is clearly a sgnificant amount of work. Now, we are being graded on these drawings, along with everything else--not just the design behind the drawings, but the drawings themselves, as preparing them is one of the skills we are expected to master, and with every presentation we are expected to demonstrate our proficiency at it. So, my feeling about this is that her actions are unethical and in contradiction of the traditional academic code of conduct. But I am actually much more concerned by the fact that her professor, who's known all along that she was doing this, sees no problem with it as long as she isn't pretending that the work is her own. If the rest of us had known all along that we could get away with buying professionally rendered drawings of our designs, nobody would be doing that work themselves--it's incredibly labor-intensive, so why break your back if you can get someone more skilled to do it for you? But we have, apparently naively, been assuming that such an action would be considered improper and unethical by our teachers and our department.

What do you all think? Should students be allowed to buy professional work to incorporate into their projects, as long as they come clean about it? Or should all the effort that goes into a project be the student's and the student's alone?