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.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
All three of them are going to fail for the semester.<\/p>\n
And now that I have vented, I am going to bed. I need the sleep.<\/p>\n
Cross posted on It’s All Connected<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading