College Misery. Misery. Misery.Plagiarism has exploded in the past 2 months. So many of my students are cheating that I have begun to grant Bs to anything that is poorly written -- just because I know the person actually did the work themselves if it sounds like nonsense. Incomplete sentences? Wonderful!
I figure being thoughtfully illiterate is worth more points than copying Wikipedia.
The problem is getting so bad that I no longer trust a single thing my kids say. It is all probably stolen from StudentOfFortune.com anyway (the blind leading the blind, believe me). I wait for a paycheck that can only come if I manage to keep my students happy during the first two weeks of class. I am paid by the student. Any student who drops in the first 14 days does not make my official count on Day 15. I am only paid for the official count. And they are dropping like flies.
My provost is convinced that we need to be understanding about this generation's inability to discern between research and copying. I know of students who plagiarize 5 or 10 times -- whose offenses have been filed that many times, they probably plagiarized many more times than that -- who are happy seniors, still maintaining a middling GPA, ready to graduate. She replies to my concerns with a thank you for following protocol and a plea to give them a second chance at the assignment.
They didn't understand, she says. They want to learn, the dears.
No one is learning anything. I have gone from happily designing courses based on the exciting ideas and unorthodox content (Won't they love this!) to merely playing cop. I scour every submission for the telltale signs of plagiarism. And about 40% of the time, I find it.
My average scores are Ds. My administration wants it to be Bs. But they also tell me that I shouldn't compromise for plagiarism, so I continue to give Fs and Ds and report everything faithfully only to have students continue on cheating. The administration admires my toughness and continues to give me courses, but gives these students a second chance as well (something tells me they enjoy charging the student twice for the same course).
The degrees are worthless. So worthless, in fact, that I feel my University is actually doing a disservice to society by existing. The feds ought to shut it down for massive fraud, especially since we are almost entirely funded by the GI bill. I want to quit, but I have student loans and the job market is... Hoooo boy. The Market.
It is growing ever more difficult to get up in the morning. My saving grace is my adjuncting at an R1 University, but even there plagiarism follows me around. I hate living life distrusting everyone around me. I long for my undergraduate experience, when professors trusted me to come up with ideas and I tried my best not to disappoint. What happened to those students? Do they even exist any more?
I want to quit but I can't. So I CM before bed.
Get your spouse to call in an anonymous bomb threat from a pay phone. Make sure that she uses a Muppet voice (preferably Miss Piggy) and that she emphasizes she's going to blow up the entire school because of all the plagiarism.
ReplyDeleteHere's about the only way I can see to completely prevent plagiarism: make them write only original work--no sources other than what is in their heads!--and only in your face; yeah, wouldn't THAT be a fine use of our time? So, you could teach one session, assign reading for between, then everybody writes, working out a connection between the lecture and the text read, then everybody turns in their written work, then a discussion on all that which intros a new mot to the mix, rinse and repeat. Yeah, there's the ticket. And it doubles the time needed to teach the content, so degrees/certificates/diplomas take twice as long to achieve, keeping asses in the seats and cash flow steady...Wait, a win-win? This could work! Each of us "teaches" then requires phrasing like "Based on what you taught us last class..." and "According to the chapter I read last night..." Failure to use those kinds of annotations would result in dings to the grade but would not be considered plagiaristic--at least not purposely so--but merely sloppy. You wouldn't even hafta grade it all--kids would need highlighters (likely provided by us, along with paper and writing tools; WHAT? they're just kids; we can't expect them to come to class ready to work!) and would be instructed to mark the three most important points in their piece as well as those bits of evidentiary phrasing. Bada bing bada boom! Teaching an online? No prob; a shift must come. All done in real-time in a 'blog or somesuch. Dicier, yes, but thems the realities of the high-tech universe.
ReplyDeleteAcadMonk, I feel your pain!
ReplyDeleteActually, I have my own pain, which meant this past term I needed some of that "flexibility" we are so often called upon to provide our students with a myriad of issues. (For the record, I actually DO have a doctor's note and a surgical report!)
But I just spent most of yesterday trying to craft yet another appropriately milquetoasty "Sorry but you screwed the plagiarism pooch" letter.
Of course, I couldn't come right out and say that. But the student did claim that because grading of his work wasn't fast enough, he couldn't have known that cutting-and-pasting entire passages is inappropriate. His response to the initial "I'm not accusing, I'm just asking" letter was to claim that he forgot to include a couple of citations.
Nice, but what about the ENTIRE FREAKING PARAGRAPH that you copied verbatim from the heretofore unlisted citation? Oh, and what about that text from About.com in the next paragraph? And Wikipedia in the one after that?
Let's up the ante just a bit. This was NOT a ONE time thing ... but repeated in 3/4 of the assigned short essays during the term. Also, the reason the assignments weren't returned in a timely fashion was that the student couldn't seem to find Turnitin.com and submit his work there as did the 90% of his classmates who read the several announcements indicating the mandatory-ness of this procedure.
Did I mention? This is a GRADUATE program!
By way of contrast, I also had a conversation with a different student about one of the same short essays. This student got the personal touch because the initial inquiry was worded "I'd appreciate the chance to discuss ...", "I'm not sure, maybe I did mess up ...". After a few minutes it was clear that this student DID, indeed, misinterpret some of the source material. But instead of trying to flip it over and blame me, the phase of the moon, the glare on the laptop, this student ::gasp:: accepted responsibility.
So, perhaps there is a glimmer of hope ...
what about the ENTIRE FREAKING PARAGRAPH that you copied verbatim from the heretofore unlisted citation?
ReplyDeleteWould it make it OK if they cited the entire freaking paragraph?
I once slam-dunked a student for block-quoting a solid page of text. It was quoted properly, it was cited properly. The student could not understand why I didn't like it.
Let me guess: Your administration often asks why your class is the only one with such a high percentage of plagiarists and assumes the problem must be you. And they don't understand that IT JUST MEANS YOU'RE VERY GOOD AT CATCHING THEM.
ReplyDeleteI had a similar experience. In one year, of all the students reported for cheating at my entire university (of 5000 undergrads), I reported one-quarter of them. And I was just an adjunct, teaching a class or two a semester. I just happened to be very sharp with the Google.
I felt like freelancing my services to other proffies: Give me a stack of papers, and I'll pick out the most egregious plagiarists in a few minutes. Give me a few hours, and I'll have fully documented proof.
Academic Monkey is right. Plagiarism--some of it legitimately unintentional, some of it devious--is thoroughly rampant in our universities. We just don't catch most of it.
Apparently, we are allowed to turn off the copy/paste feature in my online course. I just did.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if this will change anything?
@ introvert_prof
ReplyDelete"Would it make it OK if they cited the entire freaking paragraph?"
Uh ... HELL TO THE NO!
There might ... MIGHT ... be a rare instance where a block quote could be used.
But I don't teach hamster fur literature where there may be legitimate rationale for wanting a verbatim paragraph.
I teach hamster fur WEAVING so the flakes have been instructed ... repeatedly ... that they are supposed to obtain ideas and concepts from sources ... NOT TEXT!
But, as you can see, apparently several made it through their undergraduate programs on the cut-and-paste plan.
(FYI: This particular flake is the second HAM 801 Intro to Graduate Hamster Fur Weaving student to "realize" HFW is not the discipline for her. I'd really like send a BOLO to my colleagues in Goat Hair Macramé!)
Nice one. Worthy of the old RYS days.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely a classic. One of my remedies is something very much like what Mrs. C describes: I have them write about their own experiences, then make them use their own and their classmates' writings as sources for a paper that also engages with a scholar or other fairly authoritative figure writing on a related subject (think "why I chose hamster-fur weaving as a major" as a writing topic, followed by a paper that references their classmates' writing and the president's speech on the urgent need for more hamster-fur-weavers). At the very least, this gives me a baseline for judging future work by the same students.
ReplyDeleteOf course, this won't work for every class. And it works best if you switch up writing topics and readings fairly frequently, which goes against the trend I'm seeing, especially in online classes: administrators seem to want packaged, repeatable course materials from which new instructors can teach on short notice (rather like textbooks/readers with a bunch of virtual bells and whistles thrown in), which of course invite exactly the problems Monkey describes.
Given the wide range of materials available in virtual form, and the fast pace of the information/news cycle, it's entirely possible to have each class read and write about at least some fresh material, but (and this is a big but) that would require hiring instructors well in advance (or having them on the payroll already) and paying them for the time it takes to find and swap in fresh material on a regular basis.
But it sounds like Monkey is already doing this -- "designing courses based on. . .exciting ideas and unorthodox content" -- and they're still plagiarizing. I'm stumped.
Grad program? Throw the fucking book at them. Hard.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, there should be NO social promotion in grad school.
ReplyDelete