I teach a fairly large fine arts course at a mid-sized state university in Texas.
I used to teach it at a really big state university in Texas.
And by midterm I've already forgotten that whisperers, late comers, and text messaging aren't the absolute worst thing about being an educator. But then the end of the semester rolls around and suddenly your students change a little.
I know they're tired. I know every semester is a long semester when you're an undergrad. I know it's so easy to get lazy. And stupid. And I know it's not a reflection of me as a person or professor. But.
Plagiarism is really the very worst thing about what I do. It absolutely ruins my day, and no matter how hard I try to remain objective it always changes how I see the student.
Some of them don't get it. They copy a whole paragraph verbatim from a website with no quotation marks and no internal citation and so long as that website is listed on their Works Cited page it's okay, right?
They wrote the paper with their room mate, not for their room mate. That's just working together, isn't it?
Can't they at least get credit for the 50% that is in their own words?
Then there are the ones, and these are worst, that just thought they could get away with it. They are the ones that never answer your e-mail and never show up in your office to discuss it. They won't contest it, either. They know they messed up, and they're not even going to answer for it or try to explain.
Today I did talk to a student who fessed up, and we both discovered much to his chagrin that he plagiarized on what unbeknownst to him was extra credit. And he didn't now it was extra credit because, "I just wasn't paying attention in class."
And so what do you do with that? How do you get that to affect their grade? Deduct what the extra credit would have added? Maybe? Worse? Less?
Out of 280, so far there are 13 instances and 11 students. Yeah, two of the "wrote it with my friend, it's okay, right?" students did it twice.
By the end of the week I bet I'll hit 20 instances.
Ready for a new semester and a new hope of integrity.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Hi Jackie, just wandered over from Holidailes. Having spent 8 years teaching high school English, I can absolutely understand where you're coming from. Teaching classes as small as 12-15 students, it feels incredibly personal: did the student think I was actually that stupid/lazy/indifferent?
ReplyDeleteIn my experience, a certain amount of it comes from a general attitude that sees education as an elaborate game we play, a useless but necessary hurdle whose only objective is the piece of paper that will get them into college or get them a job after college. It's us vs. them, and in that case anything goes. Such students expect to learn exactly as much from writing the paper as from plagiarizing the paper (zero). As an educator, I obviously think they're mistaken every which way, but that *is* my sense of what's behind at least a portion of plagiarists (though they probably couldn't articulate it as such and may not even buy that attitude so much as they've absorbed its residue from those around them).