One of my students freakin' plagiarized their incorrectly done paper.
Whelp...guess that means I need to go through and do searches on all of the papers that don't follow assignment guidelines. Also means that that's one more student failing my class.
21 minutes ago
I feel your pain. Been there, done that, numerous times. I once had a student research paper that plagiarized the data from a previous semester's paper. It was just by good fortune I still had the previous semester's student's data book to check against.
ReplyDeleteThe student who plagiarized in that case wound up dropping out. I don't feel too bad about that. We don't need people who plagiarize going to med school.
Nor do we need them in teaching positions (*cough*Ward Churchill*cough*) or politics, but I guess we can't have everything.
DeleteWord.
Delete(Do people still say that? Or did it go out with the 90s?)
You would think with the length of time Google (and other search engiens) have been available that they would suspect you might go a google search of some of their prose. Learning goin' on here - just on a different level Ms. H. Failure is, indeed, an option.
ReplyDeleteI explicitly TELL my students that I do google searches on unique phrases from their papers....and I STILL catch plagiarized papers. The fail is strong with some people.
DeleteAlso, I often get papers that have a telling change-of-font mid paper. That's like a big blinking sign that "THIS PART OF THE PAPER WAS CUT AND PASTED"
Bill--Like Ricki, I also tell them I check suspicious papers. I'm a writing instructor, so I see enough of my students' work early enough (and my assignments are pretty unique and hard to plagiarize on) to notice the big, neon warning sign that my C student suddenly turns in a high A quality first draft.
DeleteRicki...have you ever had one with four different fonts? Times New Roman, Comic Sans, Calibri, and Courier. Had one like that last semester. 12 pt., 14 pt., 11 pt., and 10 pt., respectively. All the student wrote of their own paper was the intro and conclusion.
Nope, I think three was as many as I ever got in one paper.
DeleteIt's also fun to ask a suspected plagiarist to define a really complex word in the part of their paper you suspect of being blindly copied. Well, for some values of "Fun" at least...
That backfired on one of my grad school profs. He was teaching a theory course, was big into deconstruction, and kept applying it where it didn't work, so I wasn't doing well on his tests. Theory is what it says--deconstructing theories just make them unintelligible and meaningless.
DeleteHe called me into his office and asked me about one of the minor points I didn't have space to discuss in my paper, and I really went off--it was interesting, and I was excited to get his take on it. He stared at me for a second, slapped the paper down like he was disappointed, and said "Well, I guess you did write it, after all. Why don't you do this well on everything else?"