Thank you for sharing your outrage, Gentle Readers. It is good to know I am not alone in applying direct pressure to hemorrhaging academic integrity. Our high school will also expel students for cheating although I only know of one case. A freshman was expelled for stealing his English teacher's semester exam and posting in for sale on-line. Standard cases of plagiarism like mine are common and I suspect often go unnoticed in the rush of hundreds of pieces of writing. When caught, a student can be punished in a variety of ways including expulsion but our administration has their hands full dealing with more serious issues of student safety and non-academic criminal behavior. Even next year, I will probably not give a failing grade for an entire semester for a first-time plagiarist but will almost certainly do it for a second offense.
Which brings me to the latest: more victims fell this week. I found this last batch of plagiarism particularly galling. The assignment was simple: select five poem forms from a list of twenty and write one poem for each of the poem forms selected. Bind your poems creatively. Turn them in for an easy 100 points.
I received many excellent entries. One student wrote a poem, word by word, on seashells and put them in small wooden box. The reader puts them together to form a poem. Was it her original poem or is it your own creation or, more likely, a blending of the two? Another wrote her poems on 12" x 12" floor tiles and bound them together into a book that weighed at least 20 pounds. Others made poem cubes and posters and fold out books. Almost all collections were colorful and original. The poetry was honest and heartfelt and filled to overflowing with overwrought emotions written in the self-absorbed style one would expect of high school freshmen. They were, for the most part, lovely to read. Some were too lovely.
I have yet to understand why my students think I cannot recognize various levels of writing skill at a glance. Do they think I am an English teacher who doesn't read or write? My previous plagiarists and their classmates all look at me with amazement as if I have some magic power to see into their minds and "sense" what they've been up to on paper. Almost every class asks me if I "check every paper on-line" as if all writing is equal and the only way I could possibly detect an evildoer is by cranking through Google searches on every single piece of student writing. This week's plagiarists may also be flummoxed as to how I detected them.
To be honest, I caught only two of this week's three plagiarists. My sexy research assistant nailed the last one. I knew this particular student's work was plagiarized: city-bred freshmen don't use lines like "the air resounds with voices piercing Autumn's still" or "the woodlands stand aglow in colors rarely seen." However, she had hand-written each poem and I couldn't get any hits no matter how many combinations I tried. The poems were mediocre, amateur poet stuff, but they still outstripped anything my students could produce. They key, it turned out, was that she had transcribed rather sloppily, omitting enough words here and there to thwart my hurried search. A deeper and more patient search teased out the sources and I gleefully zeroed out her work.
As mentioned earlier, I was particularly miffed by students plagiarizing on an assignment that was designed to be easy, fun, and a gimme"A" to anyone who wrote original poetry and stuck it in a binder. I made it clear I wasn't grading anyone on the quality of their poem, only that they had researched at least five poem types and gave writing each of them an honest shot. They could write five short and crappy poems in less than an half an hour, print them and past them on construction paper with a few crudely drawn illustrations and still get and "A:" pump out a Haiku, Tanka, Cinquain, Free Verse, and Couplet and your done for the semester.
Better news next post. I swear.
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