But not taking it personally doesn't mean that it's not still emotionally exhausting, and this semester has been a doozy: in one single class I've had two clear-cut cases of plagiarism, with two or three additional papers that I believe were influenced by outside sources--but in a relatively minor way and to a degree that I wouldn't be able to prove anyway. Moreover, they were all on the same paper assignment.
For privacy reasons, I won't go into details, but we're not talking about a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears freshmen, or lazy-ass non-majors. This is a smallish class with good energy, and I genuinely like all the students in it.
And that's what's hard about catching and prosecuting academic dishonesty. When you take it personally, it's easier to nail the kid; you've got the righteous (or maybe self-righteous) sense of indignation to carry you through: "Ha-hah! Play me for a fool, will you? Here's your violation report, asshole." But when you like the kids and have taken some pride in their intellectual growth--and especially when you have some knowledge about the shit going on their personal lives--the anger is different. You're pissed off at them for being stupid and for fucking up, and you're pissed off that they've trapped both of you in a legal process where it's hard to say what you want to say and where what you want to say probably wouldn't be heard anyway.
I gave my class a lecture in the quiet, Angry-and-Disappointed-Mommy voice, and it freaked them all out and maybe it helped and maybe it didn't; part of the problem is that "plagiarist," like "racist," is a term that doesn't allow for gradation or nuance, and no one believes he can be that thing. But although the reality is that not all forms or instances of academic dishonesty are equal, any suggestion that some might be lesser or more deserving of leniency could only come back to bite me in the ass.
So this is what I'd like to tell my plagiarists, and what I wish they'd hear and believe:
"You did something unethical, and you knew it was unethical; 'giving you a break' would be unfair to your classmates and it would be unfair to you; it's my job to enforce academic standards and to see that you wrestle honestly with tough intellectual tasks. You're selling yourself short when you think that you can't come up with good ideas or write a good paper on your own. You will fail this class and the academic dishonesty charge will go on your record. But if you repeat the class, the 'F' will disappear, and if this is your first violation--and you never have another--you'll get to stay at RU and there will be no indication of this on your transcript.This shit breaks my heart."This doesn't make you a bad person. It makes you a person who fucked up, and there are consequences when you fuck up. But you can make things right over the long term, if you want to."
23 comments:
I've always wondered, how exactly does one catch a plagiarist? Is that the writing all of a sudden changes or improves for a passage? Is it that you've read the secondary literature and therefore recognize a passage or idea as someone other than the student's?
Wait: so what *do* you tell them? (And I agree, it sucks; and I still do take it way too personally).
FLG, sometimes it's there from the get-go. They write in language that doesn't reflect the student. You might also get a paper that's not "on target" but just covers a boilerplate topic. Or the paper shifts madly back and forth between cut-and-paste styles. Or sometimes the formatting of Wikipedia is clearly visible in the print-out!
Back in the old days, I used to make many trips to the library to test my suspicions against the sources. In the digital age, it's both easier to offend and easier to catch.
Ferule, I love your speech. I think I might adapt some of that for the next time I have to sit down with a student and lay out the sad case.
FLG: honestly, it's damn easy most of the time. When your life revolves around reading and analyzing prose, you become really sensitive to minute changes in the texture of someone's language. I was once grading papers at my then-partner's place, when something made me pause. I handed the essay to him without explanation and said, "read this paragraph." He did and said, "this sentence," pointing to exactly the one that had stopped me. And sure enough, it was partly plagiarized.
So often it's no more than that: the texture of the language. But when you add in the fact that most of us teach generally the same set of texts to generally the same kind of students year after year, we usually have a feel for the likely range of ideas and observations that our students can make.
Veralina: we're not supposed to confront them in person; at the instructor level, everything is done in writing (they can appeal in person at a higher level). So I write a letter outlining exactly what seems plagiarized and detailing their rights, they write back with a defense or confession, and then I write up a violation report explaining why I don't accept the defense, and it moves up the chain. Sometimes I will email them with a more personal response (as I probably will in this case), and sometimes, though rarely, they WANT to talk to me in person. But though the process is admirably transparent and straightforward, it was obviously designed by a team of lawyers.
I like to describe plagiarism as a failure of reading. As in, the student fails to read his or her own writing: they're not recognizing what to us seem like shocking changes in vocabulary or style. Or, for that matter, between the texts they're trying to plagiarize (SparkNotes for one sentence, Foucault for the next...).
I'll be inappropriate and share one of those plagiarism stories that gives me vicarious glee. I'm not sure who the teacher was, because I couldn't see them, but yesterday I was in my office and overheard a female professor discussing a plagiarism case with a student. Feeling either self- or male-entitlement, he continued to insist, more and more loudly, that "YOU DIDN'T TELL US WE COULDN'T USE THE INTERNET." For about twenty minutes she responded by the script, politely informing him that he could use the Internet, but he couldn't copy large, unattributed passages off it. When he got so loud I was actually tempted to intervene, this woman just exploded: THIS IS YOUR PAPER! THIS IS THE INTERNET! ARE YOU TRYING TO TELL ME THAT YOU WROTE THE INTERNET?
I'm kicking myself for not writing down what she said, because she delivered about ten minutes of pure awesome before the student shuffled, humiliated, out of her office. I know enjoying this makes me a terrible person, but there you go.
SEK: you may be inappropriate and a terrible person, but you have brought pure joy to my evening.
I actually did once have a student insist that the internet source had been plagiarized from him ... several years earlier, somehow. One of the most bizarre academic dishonesty experiences I've ever had.
But it's the nice kids who fucked up that break my heart. I still vividly recall reading one kid's paper and starting to cry when I realized he'd copied from the internet; he was such a great kid, and he'd gone and shot himself in the foot while lying to me about it. Really sad.
I love your speech and think that it might help some kids who were ready to hear it.
I'll have to remember that. I'm not self-entitled, I'm male-entitled.
I wrote a full explication of the lyrics for American Pie about two decades ago on what was, at that time, the Internet's largest BBS. Many years later (as recently as five years ago or saw), I could still find what was obviously my text repeated (without attribution, though if it was attributed, it would have to have been to my BBS handle at the time) in at least a dozen places on the Internet. Sadly, I did a quick Internet search just now and can't find any remaining traces of it. Just saying that sometimes the Internet plagiarizes you.
Five years ago or so, not saw.
If the paper uses the English language smoothly and confidently, you have to check for plagiarism.
I once had seven students (in a discussion section of twelve) plagiarize their final source analysis paper from the same source. When a student pulling C-minus/D-plus grades all semester comes out with "[X] used indirect speech to deconstruct the boundary between mystical and meditative experience"... well.
On the other hand, when seven such students in a single class do the same thing, you stop being angry and start laughing hysterically.
And SEK, your colleague just made my day.
But I do hate it when they cry. It's uncomfortable for everyone.
I had a couple of recent cases. One was very much like Notorious' example. A C- (at best) student turned in a book review that began something like "Since the publication of Joe Schmo's seminal 1933 work on early industrialization in Massachusetts, the field has been dominated by studies that foreground such issues as . . ." I thought, "Why would my C- student be so familiar with the historiography on this topic? And when did he learn to write?" It was not hard to find the entire review online.
In a second case, a student was supposed to be analyzing a specific book about religion in the American colonies. The book she chose is one that I've probably read five times. When she started using a whole bunch of examples and evidence that I knew the author never talked about (complete with falsified citations) I started looking. It did not take me long to find the original source.
The most egregious one I caught was a small research paper. The student turned in a paper on a topic other than that which we had previously discussed. The prose was much more sophisticated than the student's usual, and read very oddly, and had an abrupt change of tone in the middle. Plugging a couple of phrases into google rapidly turned up the two sources the students had copied-and-pasted into one document.
I have had plagiarized papers that referred to a chart, which of course was in the original but not in the copied paper. One paper was on a topic that a friend specialized in, so I just went and checked her publications, and voila. Another time a student used the word "trumpery" in a discussion of trade items - what U.S. undergraduate knows that word? I found the source in the third book I picked out from a colleague's shelf (part time teaching and without my own office at the time), and it was written by a Swedish scholar, possibly explaining the use of an archaic word. Undergraduates somehow do not realize that their professors are very familiar with sources in the field, and may immediately recognize plagiarism when they read it.
Google any sentence that is written with proper grammar. I used to routinely fail 20% of my students for plagiarism. There needs to be an iron wall by faculty to turn back the tide on this issue.
"Google any sentence that is written with proper grammar"? Really? I can certainly appreciate that when a passage in an undergraduate paper is not written in the voice of an undergraduate, it shows. But I'd like to hope that if I turn in a paper that sounds halfway intelligent, my professor's first reaction is that I've written a good paper, not that I must therefore have plagiarized it.
For the record, I vehemently disagree with Withywindle and J. Otto Pohl; sorry, guys, but that's some seriously elitist shit. I teach at a public comprehensive college, and I know well how widespread poor writing can be. But I've got plenty of students who write clearly and accurately--and some, although not tons, who write with a strong, individual voice and real stylistic confidence.
In my experience, plagiarized papers are usually also badly written (and plenty of clearly-written papers are nevertheless crap, because they don't actually make an argument; in fact, that's the problem I encounter most frequently).
Nevertheless, to Emily's point, it's true that when a student who rarely speaks in class turns in a strikingly good first paper, I run a few checks (and I often look up her transcript). I'm very prepared for it to be her own work. . . but I'm also prepared for the opposite. That's not a statement about how I feel about that particular student, it's just a reflection of the realities of teaching.
FLG: sometimes it's by fluke. I was on the academic honesty committee as an undergraduate in college. Each student who was charged with whatever dishonest action (mostly plagerism) was required to write a letter explaining what had happened we then met with the student and faculty asked them any questions we had and rendered our verdict. We had one case where 3 students in a very large lecture had been caught turning in the same paper to their 3 different graduate TAs. Unbeknownst to them a single undergraduate TA was asked to give the papers a once over and quickly realized they were all the same. When they came before us and we read the paper and their letters it was quite clear who had written the paper because only one of the 3 could write. Since none of the kids were willing to say whose paper it was they all failed the class. Had one come forward and admitted to wrongdoing the faculty member had been willing to offer a reduced punishment.
Flavia none of my students have been native English speakers. When I had serious plagiarism problems in Kyrgyzstan, English was the third language of most of my students after Kyrgyz and Russian. I do not think my position was elitist since 90% a grammatically correct sentence put into Google yielded at least a paragraph, usually a couple of pages of verbatium text copied from the internet.
Otto: my apologies. That fact was not clear from your initial comment.
My most amusing case of plagiarism involved a young woman who handed in a paper about the Old English poem "The Wanderer." She cribbed the annotated bibliography off the Georgetown English Department website, but the bulk of the paper was actually the work of a senior at a small college in New England. The kid had been so proud of it that he'd posted it online--but, God bless him, he'd randomly seeded it with anti-plagiarism landmines, such as references to "White Castle hamburgers" and "Lego bricks." My student never bothered to skim the work she'd stolen to see if it even made sense!
As an adjunct, I never taught more than 20 students at a time, so I was able to get to know their abilities and writing styles pretty well, but I can't imagine I would have been as effective in catching plagiarists if I'd had larger classes or a heavier teaching load.
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