But not about STUDENTS.
When it comes to students they are half-wits, boobs, placators, imbeciles, gladhanders, knobpolishers, and doofuses.
We've all shared a student I call Plagiarizing Patricia. She acts like a nice person; she is on some huge campus committee and her photo has been in the school newspaper a couple of times shaking hands with the President and feeding orphans and distributing kittens and flying kites with blind seniors.
But she likes to turn in essays copied from the Internet. She did it in at least three classes I know about. I was number 3.
I pulled her into my office one afternoon, showed her the evidence, and she spilled out a terrible tale of her long hours and her one panicky mistake of inadvertently copying 240 words off of two free essay mill pages without giving credit.
"Wait," I said. "Why would you think that citing some student essay off the Internet was going to be any good anyway?!?!"
But she mewled and bawled and battled and I took it all in, weighed it carefully, and pulled out a syllabus. First incident of plagiarism is F for the paper. 2nd is failure of the course. "There it is," I said. "These are the rules of the road."
I was sharing this meeting with some colleagues in the faculty lounge when 2 of them told me she'd done the same to them.
"She's under a lot of pressure to succeed," one said.
The other said, "I really tend to look the other way in these cases, especially with someone of her character."
I chomped away on a sandwich and said, "Her character was revealed to me when she tried to cheat her way through my essay."
They were horrified. Why couldn't I see what they did in her? Didn't I know about the kite thing?
I'm baffled. Or I mean I continue to be baffled.
Good on you for taking a stand. People like your colleagues baffle me, too.
ReplyDeleteI hate it when colleagues have drunk the Kool-Aid. One with a sinister air, a bullying demeanor with junior faculty, and a thick German accent I have described as "an educational menace." Why the fucking hell doesn't this walking corpse retire, already?
ReplyDeleteThe colleagues with whom working with hurts much more, though, are the otherwise seemingly normal ones. What the hell gets into them? Oh, the Kool-Aid. Right.
When it comes to cheating or plagiarism, the buck stops with me. I would award this student an F for the course, as I always do. When she starts mewling, I would explain that I take any attempt at cheating or plagiarism very much as a personal affront. You thought I was stupid enough for you to be able to deceive me, did you? Well, I'm not that stupid.
I'd also explain that if you're overscheduled, as are we all, it would have been better to concede defeat honestly, not turn in a paper, and take the consequences from that. It might have resulted in the overall grade for the course being a letter grade lower, but it wouldn't have been as bad as the F you deserve and will be getting.
But of course, I can say all that, since I have tenure.
Whenever colleagues start making excuses, the way yours are, I start screaming at them, much like I do with students who cheat. I'm very good at it. But of course, I have tenure.
DeleteWhen one is non-tenured and the colleague in question is one's DH, one must muffle one's screams.
DeleteMy favorite part of serving as Chair was all the excellent SHOUTING I got in. Don't worry, no one GOT it who didn't richly deserve it.
Delete(Truth be told, I did very little shouting. I made so many jokes about it, everyone was so terrified, I got what I wanted mainly by being nice to people.)
Why has she not been expelled?
ReplyDeleteBecause my policy is for an F for the assignment in a first instance and failure from the class for a second. And because the other faculty meted out no penalty at all.
DeleteAnd, we don't have a campuswide policy that includes expulsion.
Expulsion seems to be a penalty that's right up there with corporal punishment these days. Few schools have honor codes anymore, and even those that do don't seem to enforce them with the stated consequences. In the nearly 20 years I've been at Large Urban Community College, the only expulsion I've seen came when an international student hired someone to take his math class for him while he was also taking a PE class as himself. He got caught because a student who was in both classes noticed two different people were answering to the same unusual name and told both proffies. For plagiarism, we're lucky if we can get the disciplinary committee to uphold an F grade in the course.
DeleteP-R-I-V-I-L-E-G-E
ReplyDeleteNot just for white men.
If she'd just included a free kitten with the paper I'd have looked the other way.
ReplyDeleteWell, you know how if a bunch of females room together, they synchronize their menstrual cycle? (Not being sexist, it's just a fact.) Well, I suspect that something similar is happening to your colleagues: the stupidity is being rubbed off on them.
ReplyDeleteColleagues say some pretty stupid shit sometimes.
They've been around their students for far too long.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteI appreciate the comparison. As someone who actually teaches about menstrual synchrony in several of my classes, I thought the analogy was apt. People are not even aware that they are influencing each other and changing each other. And stupidity seems to spread and infect at an alarming rate.
DeleteI'm not sure if it's shared stupidity, but for some of my colleagues, it feels like a shared perspective. The faculty in my department who ignore plagiarism and other poor academic performance are the faculty who were, sadly, hired directly out of our doctoral program. It seems like these faculty over-identify with our students and excuse or ignore things that really should be addressed with harsh consequences. Meanwhile, those of us who were trained elsewhere are battling everyday to keep academic standards high despite the others. This is just one more reason academic incest is a bad idea.
DeleteHi Ima. While your name is certainly clever, there is a blog rule that says: "Do not post anonymously or with "non-names" like Nobody, No One, Anonymous Prof, etc." Sorry. We've had a few problems with this in the past.
DeleteI'd very politely ask you to come with something different if you don't mind. Many thanks.
Fab,
CM Mod
I have the same baffling colleagues. One of them even offered to take a serial plagiarizer off my load b/c she thinks she can be more nurturing than I have been.
ReplyDeleteWhat Froderick F from F says: The thing that really bothers ME most about plagiarism is that it insults my intelligence. Students really think I can't tell their writing from professionals'?
ReplyDeleteSo are your colleagues' egos less fragile than mine? Are they just more laid-back and slower to take offense?
I REALLY don't get this one. "Palagiarizing Patricia, just go on ahead and act as if you think I'm completely stupid and gullible" isn't a sentence that would come out of my mouth. Ever.
Hiram, your colleagues are dicks.
ReplyDelete