Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Roz Franklin And the Tale of the Photocopied Lab Report.

I teach a biology lab at a community college, and my students have to write lab reports. I have given them an extensive how-to guide for writing these as well as two weeks for each one to complete them.

I just graded a paper from a student that made me stop and go, "hmm?" because the methods were not right. As in, it wasn't what we did. However, it was something that the same lab did last year. I wasn't here last year.

Then, I started looking more carefully at this lab, and realized there were odd marks around some of the edges. I had ignored them before. Then I flipped another couple of pages, and I saw a big 18 in a circle at the bottom of a page.

My student had handed in a previously GRADED lab report. Then, my assistant dean and I looked him up, and he had never taken the course before. So, he handed in someone else's previously graded paper.

Seriously, my students are so dumb that they can't even cheat right. What's that about?

- Rosalind Franklin
"Girls Are Geeks"

14 comments:

  1. The electronic equivalent is failing to change the mismatched fonts in patchwork plagiarism. It happens more than you'd think.

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  2. My "favorite" was during my HS teaching days.

    Remember when Encarta came on CDs/DVDs and had to be loaded on to a computer? One of my darling snowflakes printed out the article relating to the assignment topic in that unique Microsoft Encarta font. But, if you recall, printing out an Encarta article automatically included a copyright notice.

    So the student ... wait for it ...

    ... cut the page to remove the notice.

    Yup, that's right kiddies!
    He passed in a "report" that was -- physically! -- two and two-thirds pages long.

    Also from the Hall of Shame, the best citation:

    The Bible. (C) A long time ago. Written by: Alot of guys.

    Srsly -- can't make this sh!t up!

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  3. Well, at least it didn't say "Written by: God." I hope you nailed him/her for proper citational format:

    God. The Bible. Ed. A Lot of Scholars (Faraway: A Lot of Scholars Press, Long Ago).

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  4. I had a student turn in a paper that I had gotten from another student the previous semester. They just changed the name on the title page.

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  5. I had two students turn in identical individual reflection papers -- same class, same semester.

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  6. I got substantially the same (original) final paper from two students -- roommates -- in the same semester. I'm still angry on behalf of the victim, who was terribly upset (and the student honor board did *not* do its job and nail her thieving/plagiarizing roommate to the wall, though even if they had, there still would have been an effect on the victim's final exam grades, since she was seriously unsettled by the betrayal of trust involved, and by anxiety that she'd somehow be blamed).

    I've also received work plagiarized from the same place by two students in the same semester, but that's not so surprising (nor so wrenching to deal with).

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  7. One of my students re-submitted a paper from MY class to her NEXT teacher in the course next in the sequence, but she left MY name on it! Busted! The teacher found me and queried me about it. It's just educational Darwinism...

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  8. For electronic submissions of the original Word document, I am amused when the student doesn't change the 'Author' name in the Properties tab in the File menu (the computer username of the person who originally created the file - awesome when the original author's username is their actual name, rather than a nickname or alphanumeric ID). Hilarity ensues at the disciplinary hearing, when the student learns about "file metadata". You'd think they'd know more about this kind of stuff than me, having grown up with it rather than being first introduced to it in their mid-twenties.

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  9. "Wear a suit. Be on time. Bring extra copies of resume."

    That was the answer to "List three examples of applications of Jobs Method."

    I guess google spits out job seeking advice when you input "applications" and "jobs". Obviously the part that blows the mind is that they didn't realize this (...'they' isn't just poor neutralization of the 3rd person, it was literally turned in by TWO students. Lab partners. The blind leading the blind...) couldn't possibly have anything to do with Chem I lab. But it bothers me just as much that they thought those choppy directives were examples of an application of something.

    Closer in theme to this... the take-home practice final (that counted as a quiz) came in from three girls who'd divided the work in thirds, made copies of their work for each other, and then.... stapled the packets together. They didn't transcribe each other's work, they just all submit something that was 1/3 in their hand writing and 2/3 xeroxes of something not one, but two other students would also be submitting, in THEIR handwriting.

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  10. Always nice to know I'm not the only one with the crazies in my class. I've caught the "wrong font" in the middle of the paper before. That's always a favorite.

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  11. my fave: the one who copied a chunk of text from the middle of a book written by my co-teacher, so faithfully that they included such clues as "...(see page 292)..." in their three-page 'essay'.

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  12. interesting...pupils everywhere do such wonders not only in writing lab report but also in other things.

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  13. Here are two examples of a lab report. The first is what not to do, the second is a cleaned-up and much improved version of the same report. Dr. Ethan Gallogly ... http://www.bestcustomwriting.com/do-my-lab-report

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