grading ennui

[rosaw]

Today I caught a student plagiarizing. And not just a little here or there, either. This kid took the text of an entire freaking website. What clued me in was one little word in the phrase "allegedly had a vision." It was the "allegedly" that made me wonder what was up, given the I-know-nothing-about-christianity attitude this student displayed in class. The sentence just kept bugging me and finally I thought, just one quick check. One google search and two hours later, I've contacted my dept. chair, the dean of students and the student. I don't think I can face another paper with the open attitude required for the end of the semester grading marathon. This is not a day I love my job.

Comments

[strangerian.livejournal.com]

It's hard to make a student's life and your own so much messier, but it's still the right thing to do. You know it is, or you wouldn't take the trouble. So keep on with the effort. There's the question of honesty and the question of stupidity. (Don't these kids know you can Google for a quote as easily as they can find it in the first place? Do they still believe in Santa Claus, or do they think they invented Googling, and probably sex and the wheel?)

In the long run there's even the question of who'll ever make new knowledge and insights and information if everybody just copies the old.

:-)

[rosawestphalen.livejournal.com]

Yes, they think they did invent the internet and no one over 22 can possibly use it. And I do believe this student thinks I'm an idiot. Because otherwise the student would have made some changes to the text before handing it in. It was easier to mark the passages I think the student *edited* than to mark the plagiarized passages. There was not one original sentence in that 7 page paper -- every word came from the website.

I think, too, there's a jaded sense in students that there is no "new" information left to know. And certainly they aren't responsible for trying to make any new knowledge, even for themselves. For many (but not all, lest I become the burnt out professor of lore) school isn't even about learning, it's about parties and the least work for the highest grade. But that's not true for all students and this was only 1 student out of 24. And in that way, I'm lucky. I have a colleague who had 6 students plagiarize papers in his class this semester. Two lost their financial aid because it was a repeat offense. *shakes head*

[cereta.livejournal.com]

Gah. I've had that happen. We're just now instituting a list to catch repeat offenders. The sheer blatancy of it was what got me. One student turned in a four-page paragraph - one long paragraph, as if that's not going to make me wonder!

I tell my students 2 things at the beginning of the semester: 1. I do random google searches on their papers. That's not actually true - I search when something makes me suspicious, but I once had a student accuse me of racism for catching him plagiarizing - it was obviously only because he was black that I had checked in the first place. Never mind that he actually had plagiarized; 2. If they can find it on the web, I can find it on the web.

I hate having to adopt that attitude, but given the number of cases in our department every term, it's pretty much all I can do.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I am appalled when students try to cheat on their education like this. Do they think it's okay? Do they not even want to learn?

So what happened to the student? What is the penalty for plagiarism these days?