In the even that appeaingl to their empathy fails (shocker there!), I’ve found that appealing to self-interest can be successful. I like to point out that if you are wrong about something, but you got it from a reputable source and you cite that source, your proff can’t really penalize you. (or at least shouldn’t, in my opinion). Citing as a CYA measure make more sense than citing as part of bieng a good citizen to alot of people.
Capy having TA’d before and taught (after I graduated with an MS in Psych) at a small private Liberal Arts College in New England for several years I feel your pain. I do hope that you make the right decisions for the school 1st the student 2nd and yourself 3rd . Remember, you may have an attachment with this student where you feel he has the ability to succeed. I do not know the whole story, of course, but be careful not to smash his entire academic career with what seems to be a blatent effort on his part to tell you and the school what he knows.
One never knows who we are teaching… a future Einstein perhaps…
You never know. I did Phd work at ASU and some of the Mexican students I worked with were the hardest working, most diligent people I have ever met. I hope a decision is not made in haste.
Not to defend plagarists, but it really isn’t easy to write a good paper, particularly if you’ve never been taught how.
When my colleague got caught cheating, I took a look at the offending paper and quickly understood. The parts that she wrote herself were not very good. She was basically just stringing along disconnected sentences that weren’t organized in any formalized style or matter. The sad thing is that this girl had written a Master’s thesis the previous year, but she still didn’t know how to write. She was stupid for plagarizing, but I think it a result of poor preparation, not malaciousness. I tend to have pity on people who cheat, intentionally or otherwise. They lack self confidence and/or skills.
Ah, well the final tally is 3 blatant plagarists out of about 60 students-- many many sentences lifted-- and one who is much more borderline. The three of them are very different fellows, so I suppose there’s no ‘profiling’ possible, thank god.
No, I don’t want to mess up anyone’s future, but I do want them to know that this is NOT cool and that they SHOULDN’T try it again. If they can retake the class and get something higher than an F, fine-- I hope they learn a lot. I don’t believe in essential characters, I guess. There are no sinners by nature, although there are those who sin on occasion, so I’m not willing to write someone off for it.
However, zero points on this one, pals.
<hijack> Weird, I took that same Art History class ten years ago. You’re at UCSB, right? I got A’s and A+'s on my papers. If he was smart, he’d plagarize from a former student. 
</hijack>
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That’s really not too bad, especially for a freshman survey/non-majors class. I’ve taken classes where i suspected fully half the papers were plagerized.
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There are sixty students in the discussion session? That seems absurd somehow. I know the trend is towards this 500-1000 student classes, but i thought the point of hte discussion section was tomitigate that somewhat. And 60 freshman compositions is a dreadful, dreadful burden. Good job preservereing.
Maybe capybara has more than one section?
Ouch.
Mr O, as far as an F being forgotten-I’ve never heard of it being otherwise. If I failed a class, I took it over. (Well, in one case I was in danger of failing, so I dropped and took it again with another professor and managed a B).
I can’t see anyone screwing around for years then buckling down-that’s a complete and utter waste of money. If you start a new class, it’s a new class.
I hate it when people cheat. It’s so disgusting. If it’s done out of ignorance, I can forgive. But if not, it just pisses me off.
I believe most schools will expell students for cheating.
Well, at least the professor you TA for will back you up on this one. My very first semester TAing, when I graded the midterms from the half of the class I had proctored the test for (no discussion sessions), I discovered 6 identical tests from students who had all been sitting in the same row (I had had my suspisions while the test was being given and noted who they were). We’re talking 6 short-answer 40+ question tests with every answer to every single question identical, including some answers where it was easy to see that one student had misunderstood the handwriting of the student next to them. I bring them to the professor, he keeps the students after class, they say “we just studied together, that’s all” (incidentally, they were all foreign students for whom English was a 2nd language). Professor says “oh, that’s fine then.” and doesn’t penalize them at all! I mean, granted, even with the cheating they had all gotten 57’s, so it’s not like they did fabulously, but still! This same professor is notorious for never giving a grade lower than a B unless you never ever show up and completely fail the midterm and the final. He also hasn’t changed the test questions in at least 5 years, so there are hundreds of old copies floating around. His classes are very popular. Not a great introductory experience.
What was really annoying was that after the prof let these cheaters off the hook, they all came to me and tried to get me to change their grades. It was an Ancient Myth course, and two of the cheaters were Greek. They argued with me by saying “Well, I suppose the professor might have said that Ares is the god of war. But I am a Greek, and we Greeks know that he’s also really the god of mining” or whatever ridiculous answer they had given. Luckily, the other TA was also Greek, so I just turned them over to him.
You know, I try to be patient because writing comes fairly easy to me, and I know that it’s not as easy for everybody else to write a good essay. But goddamnit, they have 13 years of school, 4 more years of college, and graduate school after that. There are teachers, profs, TAs, tutors, and friends who are willing and able to help. There is absolutely no excuse for a person (especially a native speaker) to not be able to write a decent paper. (By decent paper, I mean properly cited in the correct format, good grammar, correct spelling, and original thoughts. Shoot, average is a C…that’s all I’m really shooting for with some of my tutees.)
I mean, I am horrible at math. But I took it every year, and I worked hard and I studied, and I was barely able to pull off a B-, but I’m at least competent enough to balance the checkbook, work out fractions, work with percents, and use decimals. That’s all I want my classmates and tutees to be able to do…use basic English skills.
There is just no excuse for not being able to write a decent essay. The resources are there, the people, the books…everything. They are just too lazy or apathetic to use them.
Writing a decent paper-it may or may not be easy, but it’s fucking required at a college level.
Most colleges have tutoring centers, or writing workshops. I know I visited the writing center once or twice.
Bullshit.
(That’s 60 students among 3 discussion sections. One for each section, conveniently)
(Of the three, one Freshman, one Sophomore, one Junior. Pre-computer sci, global studies, pre-psych, in that order. Some more lacking an excuse than others.)
Hey, Chula: Go Gauchos! Woo-hoo! 64 oz. Miller lite at Sams to Go in I.V.! 6C sucks! Woo!
Heh. Good to see successful graduates. FYI: they’re putting up a new block of gargantuan dorms on the IV side of the lagoon, damn them, and there’s still no way to get from the music building to engineering on a bike legally.
Well, okay, maybe my school isn’t so bad for erasing an F if the class is retaken. Maybe that’s the norm–I attended only one university in the US, and they didn’t forget anything, except what they called the “Z” grade in Freshman Comp class. That was for students who really tried and did all the work, but whose writing was just not good enough to pass. It was invented for foreign students who needed time to improve their English, but lots of native speakers who just couldn’t write got it also. No damage to the GPA, but no credit for the class, and it had to be taken again.
And you’re right–there’s usually a writing center to go to for help, or a student could always come to me. On the rare occasion that I have a student who is really, genuinely interested in improving writing skills, even if it is just for a grade, I’m happy to schedule some office time to help.
I honestly don’t remember there being writing workshops at my college, perhaps because it was an engineering school. When we got assigned papers in our humanities courses, we were left to our own devices, relying on skills that we had acquired from high school. Because we were a school of science nerds, the English profs had low expectations. And you could tell that many of us weren’t good writers. In the school paper once one of the editors used “inculcate” about twelve different times. The guy was in dire need of a thesarus.
The school I’m at now is more liberal artsy, so the students have a heavier dose of humanities in their curriculum. They have to write papers all the time it seems, which gives them more chances to develop their writing skills and learn “good” writing from “bad” writing. Because of this, I have less pity on plagarists here than I would at a school like my undergrad institution.
Yes, all the Internet-swipers whose papers I’ve come across could have at least changed a few words here and there. But nooooo…They just copy and paste the whole damn text from one site or more, and all that does it make it really easy for me and all the other profs to Google the suspicious passages and find their sources.
And this was after I warned everyone, repeatedly, not to pull this sort of crap because it is so transparent and easy to locate!
Arrrrghhh…
Wow, maybe my school was just way more stringent than most, but cheating of any type or form was an automatic E (their version of an F) for the course and being reported to the dean. Two strikes like that, and you were usually out. (Not that there were many repeat offenders.) Also, we had exactly 3 repeat options for the entire time from entrance to graduation. You could use these options to replace grades for classes you’d done badly in, but after 3 you just had to average the bad in with the good, and it showed up on your transcript that you’d repeated the class.
No cites available, but there has been discussion at more than one college about inventing a new grade–for example, “XF”–which a student would receive for cheating or plagiarizing. It would mean that they didn’t get an “honest” regular F. The new grade could actually show up on a transcript if the plan were ever implemented.
Oops. Did I say “no cites” ? It looks like it may already be policy. Go to Google…Type in “XF” and “grade”, search and ye shall find.
Here’s a question: I’m a grad student which I guess implies some high level of nerdiness and anxiety about grades and academic standards, etc., so I have no idea how less academically ambitious/anxious people see this. . .
(tangent scenario: Grad student TA “Man, this was really terrible and I have to give him a C- on this. . . I’ll try to soften the blow with encouraging comments. . . ‘you can maybe do some extra credit work to catch back up-- come talk to me at office hours, please. Here are some writing issues you should keep in mind with the next paper. Remember, there are also writing tutors at CLAS.’”
Student, picking up said C- paper: "Woo hoo! A C-! Stoke! (crumples paper up and tosses in trash on way out of class). True story. How out of touch AM I?)
Unless one plans to go to grad school, law school, or enter something like the CIA with security clearances, etc., does ANYONE EVER look at a transcript in real life? If one doesn’t plan on any of the above, should one worry about any of these things? Does a BA achieved with a 3.95 GPA and upper division classes and honors essentially mean the same thing in the working world as a BA achieved over 6 years with a number of F’s, XFs, and a 2.7 GPA? Are all of these slackers who are trying to squeak by with as little effort as possible the ones who really know what’s going on?
That’s a good question. I like to believe that slackerdome eventually catches up with you, but I’m sure that’s not the case all the time. Look at who’s in the White House.