Howdy, all - long-time listener, first-time caller. I'm a PhD student/TA in the humanities' Department of Writing About Hamster Hair Weaving at an R1 university in the Midwest. I'm strongly considering dropping out halfway through my coursework, but that's a discussion for another day. Thanks for having me on board!
Anyways, here's my story of the year. I assign a paper on a topic I teach, one with which I'm quite familiar. I get 36 papers, all on time (strangely enough...). I sit down at home with a beer and the hockey game on TV, and I'm working through the papers. About halfway through the pile, it's the third period and my hometown heroes are getting their asses kicked. I pick up the next paper, start to read it...and my jaw drops to the fucking floor.
Let me just say this:
It takes a mixture of courage and stupidity to plagiarize.
It takes a more volatile mixture of said elements to plagiarize from a fairly well-known source in your field.
But it takes flaming balls of fucking steel (and an empty skull to match) to plagiarize, word-for-word, from the guy who assigned you the paper in the first place.
What I had picked up amongst this pile was a printout of ten pages of my master's thesis, with this student's name slapped at the top. He had evidently neglected to notice on his search through ProQuest that my name was all over the damn thing. Either that, or he's not entirely sure what my name is.
They weren't even the best or most provocative ten pages!
This is going to be a long week.
(note: I'm not implying that I'm a well-known source in my field--far from it, certainly--but that was just for comparison's sake.)
That is a weird feeling, isn't it? It feels similar to getting your car stolen: "Wait, there's something not right here. What is it... AAAK!"
ReplyDeleteI would have loved to be a fly on that wall when the shit hit the fan? Did the student squirm? Did the student get an F in the course????
ReplyDeleteOh, this just happened the other day - we're just ending spring break right now - so I'm going to have to chat with the prof on Monday and see what the best course of action is. We're required to meet with the prof before we utter the "p" word to a student.
ReplyDeleteSo the student does not yet know that the shit is about to hit the fan. I haven't yet decided how to handle it.
> I haven't yet decided how to handle it.
ReplyDeleteDo have that chat with the prof before taking action. I'd give your student an F for the entire course and send copies of everything to the Dean of Students, but this is really the prof's responsibility, since it is the prof's course. Also, I have tenure, so there aren't too many ways a disgruntled student can do me harm: make sure to be standing right behind the prof, when the shit hits the fan!
P.S. Make no further mention of the beer, the hockey game, or the TV, to anyone. When one catches a plagiarist and there can be no doubt, it's good to make the case stick.
Good point(s), Froderick. I'm not raggin' on that policy, by the way - I agree on all counts. A couple of years ago, one of my colleagues accused a student of plagiarism (it was almost as blatant as my case) and next thing she knew, the student had gotten her lawyer daddy to fly in from the East Coast to confront the TA at the office, with a threat to sue for slander. Yikes. It all got taken care of, and the student got what was coming, but the TA learned pretty quickly about taking on issues like that on her own.
ReplyDeleteI've had that happen, but not 10 pages worth... Just 2 paragraphs. And they misrepresented the quote. The student tried to argue with me about what "the author" meant to write and when I brought it to his attention that _I_ was the author, he switched tactics & then claimed he'd plagiarized on purpose to flattter me. Sleazy AND stupid!
ReplyDeleteSometimes I worry, though, that we only catch the really bad cheaters. The ones who are good at it slip right through. And, while, granted, being able to get away with cheating is a valuable life skill that will serve our students well, it's not exactly the one we hope to be teaching. (Or, at the very least, we're selecting for them by weeding out the bad cheaters.)
ReplyDelete@Face Palmer - I don't know how many of the 'good cheaters' I fail to catch, but the ones that drive me nuts are the students who pay to have the assignments custom written for them (usually at least one or two among a term's marking). The professor for whom I teach refuses to go after these folks because, in his experience, the administration won't take action on the complaint if there's not really clear proof that it's not the student's own work (i.e., an identifiable source which has clearly been copied).
ReplyDeleteOne year, I had a student who almost failed all the class tests and exams, and yet handed in a stellar, graduate-level paper, to which I had no choice but to assign an A+. (As if that wasn't enough, the student emailed me after the course finished to ask if I would bump up his illegitimately gained B grade to a B+.)
I've had two students present my work to me as their own on the same exam -- one of them paraphrased it, lightly and ineptly, but the other just copied and pasted the whole thing. When I confronted them (individually, of course), both of them claimed they thought it was OK because obviously I wanted them to tell me what I thought about Historical Figure X, so why not go straight to the source?
ReplyDeleteThis is an amazing story. I hope you shame the hell out of the student. What brazen stupidity.
ReplyDeleteOne quibble; there is no courage in plagiarizing. They do it without a thought. I'd suspect 50% of students who graduate do so with a fully plagiarized A on their transcripts.
@SocioConvert -- have you seen this? http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/
ReplyDeleteIt's a pretty horrifying account from somebody who made a (meager) living writing papers (including a PhD thesis) for other people.
SocioConvert - I know which university you're at, and I have to say that plenty of profs there no longer bring plagiarism cases forward because the atmosphere in most faculties is that the committee at the faculty level will acquit for lack of compelling evidence - even when there's plenty of compelling evidence - if there's not a cherry put on top by the student confessing to the crime.
ReplyDeleteCrime? Plagiarism is not a crime. Murder is a crime. Rape is a crime. Treason is a crime. Copyright infringement is a crime. The plagiarist may have breached a contract or violated an honor code, but he didn't commit a crime. The idiot and his flaming balls of steel can be expelled from school, but not thrown in jail.
ReplyDeleteOf course, many of us would rather spend the night in jail than be expelled. Call it what it is, though.
Most of what I receive from students is my own words regurgitated. Maybe one in two hundred think to cite me. Since what they regurgitate is lectures and not the printed word, I don't even try to tackle the topic with them.
ReplyDeleteI have had this happen to me too. I did one of my master's theses before the whole electronic thing, so this guy went down into the dusty stacks WAY DOWN IN THE BASEMENT of the "specialty" library for our department where the bound copies were and copied the literature review in my thesis. Yeah, he didn't know it was me since my name had changed and then he argued about it until I told him that he plagiarized ME...then he sputtered that the name wasn't the same. Um, ok, like no one ever has a name change? LOL
ReplyDeleteI saw something even worse.
ReplyDeleteA pair of students turned in a project that they had downloaded. Didn't even change the original cover page, just slapped their own on top.
One left quietly, the other fought the case on the claim that the prof had framed her.
Why do students think we care enough to "frame" them or give a rat's-ass about them enough to "have it out" for them? After 16 weeks...they are bye-bye and I could give a poo less about them in general. Do the work, pass. How well you do that work determines if you get an A, B, or C. Don't do the work fail. It is that freakin' simple. Why do they think we friggin' care?? I am not going to go out of MY way and risk MY job for some snot-nosed kid. Newsflash: No matter what your helicopter, nose and butt wiping parents told you, the world does not revolve around YOU.
ReplyDelete::end rant::