I have been grading research papers for eternity. This task is made Sisyphean by the failure of many students to turn in their papers on time and by my weakness in allowing them to do so. In the week since the "final" due date, I have received a dozen papers, one of which sported an 8 1/2 x 11 cover note written in bold blue letters on pink paper, to whit:
"I'm sorry this is late, I was absent Fri. Please understand that i [sic] did take this assingment [sic] very seriously, and work [sic] on it and my reasearch [sic] very hard."
The paper and its accompanying Sharpie commercial came from one of my English I Honors students who manages to miss many of my classes and barely does any work in or out of class. If I may indulge you with her opening paragraph:
As the Internet enters its second decade as a mass medium, it's worth looking back at one of the old saws that was bandied around the covered-wagon days, when California sages made gnomic pronouncements about the future and the rest of the repeated them at dinner parties. "The net treats censorship as damage and routes around it." These are the words of John Gilmore, radical libertarian, Sun Microsystems employee number five and bona-fide west-coast guru-gazillionaire, and for much of the last 10 years they've been repeated as part pf the founding story of the Internet, along with a gloss about the net's inception as a military communications network designed to withstand partial destruction by nuclear attack.
Now, I really wish I could take credit for bringing ninth graders up to this level of writing. Unfortunately, my students don't even know half the words used in this excerpt. Some are more educated than others but, as you may have already figured out by comparing the quality of these two writing samples, the student in question is not among them. I don't even use "gnomic." I only know what it means because I looked it up after I read it in this well "reasearched" paper. (For those interested, it refers to a general truth. In this case something that is taken for truth without criticism.)
Fortunately, the student's lack of good plagiarism skills and eagerness to get the paper in made it simple to locate its source: The Guardian UK.
This research paper assignment generated several instances of plagiarism. One student was relatively sophisticated and copied chunks from several different sources and then altered a few words in an attempt to defeat a simple Google search for exact phrase matches. She did not, however, alter the original enough to make finding it difficult especially given my wife's fondness for solving logic puzzles and and tracking things down (thanks babe, for the academic CSI action).
Another student copied and pasted an entire essay from essaydepot.com and several others stitched together staggering semblances of essays from multiple sources and made an effort to get them walking.
Still, the pink-noted wonder writer made me angry, really angry. I wasn't mad at any of the other plagiarists; they were just giving it a shot to see if they could slide one by. Their attempts lacked malice and deceit. So, in addition to giving her the goose-egg she deserved, I wrote the following note:
A____,
You have wasted my time and yours. I am insulted both that you would present this as your own work and attach a note asserting that you took "this assignment very seriously."
Mr. Rice
The rest of my students worked hard and produced papers thick with errors and rich with honesty, certainty, and a lovely naivete.
They passed.
5 comments:
Some have failed to learn that while the 'net makes it easier to cheat, it also makes it easier to detect cheating.
how refreshing for a teacher (and his forensics officer) to spend the time to verify the authenticity of students' submissions. I've always done my own work for better or for worse and have, unfortunately, had to compete against those who chose to cheat. (as an aside, the cheating was rampant at UCI's biology department in the 90's, where student cliques recycled lab analyses done by others in previous quarters. This had a direct effect on my grade. I was a good writer who invested substantial hours to write cogent lab reports. Sadly, my good writing only kept me at the mean, because my peers were able to use the graded reports and the comments thereon to avoid the normal pitfalls of the learning curve).
Your 9th graders are lucky to have a teacher who holds them to the unanticipatedly high standard of doing their own work.
Will the cheaters have an opportunity to resubmit an honest piece of work, or must they suffer 100% of the penalty? Perhaps as a condition of entitlement to a rewrite, the student must stand before his classmates, admit what he/she did and why they chose to cheat, and how their act hurt not only themselve, but their classmates, too. Such personal reflection and public honesty may serve a greater lesson than merely receiving a zero for a grade.
Invasion of the Gnomes?
Thats what gnomic means... doesn't it?
I truely hope you handed the kids that committed plagiarism their collective arses.
The typos, and lack of ability isn't something you can really blame them totally for... but the taking the whole essay copied and pased and handed in took less than 5 min work on the internet.
That sort of thing will get you kicked OUT of college, I hope they know that.
In my old highschool committing plagiarism like that (totally clear cut case) would get you an F for the entire semester.
I didn't realize plagarism was so rampant. That's tragic. I'm not going to lie, I have contemplated plagarizing many times in my 16 years of schooling. Especially when it's midnight and i'm not even halfway through a paper that's due the next morning... but it always comes down to "what if I get caught?" As such, I have never plagarised and I never will. And I have always found that even if it takes me all night to do it, and even if I hate the topic every step of the way, I always learn something from my efforts. And I imagine it would take longer to plagarize in most cases (except the cutting and pasting kind) than it does to actually sit down and just write it. I guess there's really no way to teach that except by trial and error. But hopefully these students will decide to save themselves the embarrassment later and just write it. It's not that hard, and it might end up being sort of fun.
nice post. I would love to follow you on twitter.
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