One word: plagiarism. I spend a great deal of time at the beginning of the semester, on the first day actually, talking about it, explaining it and making sure my students understand my policy, which is: If I catch you willfully trying to fool me by passing off someone else’s work as your own, you will fail for the semester, no second chances. I lecture in excruciating detail–with more than a few examples of students who were passing (one was even getting an A) whom I failed because I caught them willfully plagiarizing–about why I take it personally when someone tried to do this: because it means that he or she thinks either that I am stupid, that I won’t know the difference between her or his writing, which I have been reading all semester, and the professional-grade writing that students inevitably hand in when they plagiarize, or that I don’t care enough about my job actually to pay attention to the work that students hand in. I repeat this warning several times during the semester, with a shorter version of the same lecture, especially when I assign any paper that involves even the smallest amount of research. I even tell my students how I am going to catch them. Most plagiarism these days involves students cutting and pasting stuff from the web, and if it’s on the web, I tell them, Google can find it. “Please,” I ask them, “don’t put me in the position of having to fail you. If you are having problems with an assignment, come talk to me. As long as you are someone who has been coming to class and doing the work–even if you’ve been getting D’s–I’d rather work something out (an extension, whatever) to make it possible for you to do the work than to fail you for plagiarism.”
Inevitably, though, there are students who don’t believe me or who think they are smarter than I am, and this semester is no exception. I have caught three plagiarists in my Technical Writing class, and it’s really pissing me off. First, the assignment they plagiarized–writing a set of instructions, a description and a process analysis–while not necessarily easy, is not hard to do well on if you take the time to do it right. Second, two of the students were clearly passing; one of them was on his way to getting a B. (The other would have ended up with a D+ or a C, depending on how he did on his final paper.) Third, the remaining plagiarist does not have English as his first language, and so the work he’s been handing me has not only been sprinkled with the kinds of grammatical errors one would expect from someone writing in his second language; even when his writing was grammatical, it had a slight “accent” that betrayed his country of origin. So what did he hand me? A grammatically perfect description of a light bulb, as if I wouldn’t notice the difference.
All three of them are going to fail for the semester.
And now that I have vented, I am going to bed. I need the sleep.
Cross posted on It’s All Connected.
I had the same problems with some of my students. One of the copy-pasted his entire essay from a Wikipedia article, of all places. How stupid did he think I was? And then, when I caught him, he had the gall to deny it. He said that he did look at that article a couple of weeks ago, and it must have “stuck in his memory.” Of course, if he had this kind of photographic memory, he wouldn’t have failed both the final exam and the midterm.
I hate it when the students take mme for a fool.
I don’t know if this would work as well for Technical Writing, but a relatively effective plagarism deterrant for term papers is to require students to hand in an outline halfway or three quarters of the way through the semester. People aren’t going to take the time to look up a paper to plagarize in October and then outline it–that’s not the “point” of plagarizing.
This is not foolproof; I have still gotten papers with individual paragraphs cut-and-pasted from Wikipedia, like Clarissa mentioned. In my “favorite” case, the student actually tried to claim that she had written the Wiki text. Thank you, edit history.
The other wonderful Wikipedia story is a former student who copied-and-pasted from the article…but forgot to remove the hyperlinks. How…?!?!
I caught two this semester, and had one more who I’m pretty sure plagiarized more than one paper, although I could never prove it.
I talk their ears off about it at the beginning of the semester, and still they’re astonished when I catch them. Come on…
I am so fucking ecstatic that–except under exceedingly rare circumstances–I never have to grade papers.
I spent some time on Yahoo! Answers. I’m sure it’s used for delicious (“how is babby formed????“) trolling every so often, but from my perspective, it’s generally used solely to cheat on homework.
Seriously. Go there, open up the Computer Science or Math sections and note that nearly every question is not only asking someone to do their homework for them, but is, in fact, simply a homework question copied and pasted into the question box. Sometimes, the cheating excuses for a student don’t even bother to reformat them; they just add a question mark.
I can’t believe that I never knew that cheating was so common when I went to school (it wasn’t that long ago). It’s disgusting; these students are defrauding their instructors, their parents, and the institutions proving scholarships. They have no business being there; they’re just wasting everyone’s time.
A friend of mine actually had a situation where a student (after having been given an extension) turned in an exact copy of someone else’s paper from a different section. I can’t even fathom that level of stupidity. He must have really thought she wouldn’t read it.
Of course he failed the course and couldn’t graduate (and he had a job lined up in the fall!) I had a really hard time feeling bad for him.
My husband had the awesome irony of three students plagarizing an assignment that asked for ethics review panel instructions (related to legal writing). I could tell at a glance that the papers were plagarized, mostly because all three of them absolutely failed to change the formatting of the web article they plagarized when inserting it into their completely differently formatted paper.