Mad Plagiarism Skills

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.