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| graphic by Cal |
How'd this student go from "By making hampsters into potpourri saves lives" to "As Whiskers (1997) attests, the cricetinae are among the most aromatic of crepuscular mammals." Crap. It's wikipedia. Great. Wait, maybe it's not that bad. Maybe she just didn't understand how to cite Whiskers (1997). I better look it up, before I throw the book at her. Maybe she's just failing to properly quote Whiskers, and wikipedia is the one plagiarizing . . . Better read that article. Oh. Huh. No, that phrase is pure original wikipedia.
Damn. I didn't catch that in her first draft? Was it in her first draft? Was she there when we talked about paraphrasing? Does it matter? No, it doesn't matter. Does it? I don't know. Maybe she didn't mean to.
Stop it, you weakling. She meant to. You know she meant to.
Wait, let's find more proof. There, see, she cites an article after another spurt of wikipedia. An article that . . . has nothing to do with the topic. Oh, wow. Okay, blatant.
Isn't it?
Maybe. Maybe not. I don't know. Should I . . .
Holy caviormoph, I have spent two hours on this one paper.
She just wasted two hours of my time. Dirty little . . .
Oof, but to turn her in means I have to go into the office tomorrow. I had tomorrow off to grade. Now I have to in. Shave. Talk to people. About the weather, probably.
I wonder if she realizes the depth to which I hate her right now?
I feel your pain.
ReplyDeleteI am settling down with a stack right now, and have my Google search bar open, waiting for the first string search of the day.
This describes EVERY. SINGLE. PAPER. ASSIGNMENT. I have ever given.
ReplyDeleteAnd it's amazing how a 20-minute per paper schedule can turn into 2 hours whenever they plagiarize. Plus the meetings. Plus the paperwork. Plus the post-failure whining. One act of plagiarism turns into 3-5 hours of (essentially) unpaid work.
And yet we question whether or not we taught them properly when it's blatantly obvious they didn't learn from us, the book, previous instructors et alia.
I have the plagiarism statement of my college in they syllabus. I wrote "use your own work" within the directions of the assignment, and STILL had pople copy/pasting from the online textbooks my university insists we use and pad their student loan requests with books the majority of them will never purchase.
ReplyDeleteThen theywereamazed hen I called them into my office.
In addition to the statement in the syllabus, I tell students about my pretty awesome record for spotting plagiarism -- and my similarly awesome record with formal proceedings for plagiarism charges.
DeleteYet, every term, somebody tries to test my abilities and conviction.
Same here, Lucy.
DeleteGak. The newest update has made it so that I can't go back and correct things on my iPad. My apologies for the atrocious errors.
ReplyDeleteI hate when I grade the first of a batch of identical reports and I'm all excited because it's good so I write nice stuff all over it, and an hour or so later I get to the second... This happened last week and, this being my last semester, I have totally lost my filter. I literally wrote "You can forget all of this" and drew arrows to the nice stuff "because either you copied from ****, you and **** independently copied from a 3rd party, or you did write this and despite a firm grasp of colligative properties, you were stupid enough to give it to ****, so I take it all back." then I lightly crossed out the B+ so she could see what it was, and next to it drew a heavy handed F, going back and forth over the lines a dozen or so times to fatten them up and leave a trail of pink from where the side of my pinky was rubbing across the gratuious layer of ink.
ReplyDeleteYou could pay a fortune for that quality of therapy.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very familiar internal dialogue to me, too. I don't exactly hate them (I think I'm too tired/jaded), but yes, if anybody wants to know where our time goes, this is one very good answer. A single case of plagiarism -- whether inadvertent, caught in conference, and ultimately remediable, or deliberate/last minute and requiring referral to the honor board -- takes at least 4 hours to deal with, and can easily require a full day's work (not counting the distraction/exhaustion factor). And they always happen at the worst possible time in the semester.
ReplyDelete