And then she wouldn’t have to plagiarize anyway.
Yeah, it always gets me when they just copy and paste huge chunks of verbatim text and don’t bother to change a single word.
snip.
This was the absolute bane of my existence. I had to work with older versions of word where it didn’t automatically align and do all the fiddly stuff for you. I could never get it right, and would always end up with a line over, or a margin wrong. Finally i just made up my own citation style and ate any points they’d knock off. Apparently it’s a sort of modified end notes. I’d just place a number in the text starting at 1 and moving up as necessary and placed the list at the end. like this:
- A book, some dead guy, publisher, date.
Just like that, separated by commas and a normal single space like you type everything else.
Fuck location, page numbers, line numbers etc. Anything more than that and you could eat a dick. If you are that concerned over my quotation usage or whatever, YOU can go read the goddamn book that I had to sift through.
I consistently got near perfect scores for content, and poor ones for format. I got away with B’s, a 3.o GPA in college, and a hell of lot less stress and headaches. Fuck 'em.
One of the students who had been caught plagiarizing weeks ago just did it again last week…and got caught again. Same stupid crap: copying and pasting verbatim text from several websites into the “essay.” Now she’s blown it for the whole semester–not that she wasn’t blowing it already, given her record of Fs on all assignments that she actually wrote under her own steam.
I theorize that she’s either horrifically stupid or else she got a friend to write the most recent essay for her, and that person was the one who did the copying and pasting.
These two things are not mutually exclusive.
True–of course I thought about that after it was posted and I’d left the building.
After I told her not to bother turning in her research paper or taking the final (there is no point now), she emailed me the following response:
i dont care i didnt like your class your not a good teacher
I’m tempted to correct all the mistakes, but she’s just not worth it.
The spouse had a recent student who submitted a paper consisting entirely of large chunks of material copied out of other sources. When told she would have to redo the assignment, the student turned in the exact same paper, but with quotation marks around the copied material.
Err…no.
um, call me crazy but if you’re one of the teachers in this thread-isn’t it your job to teach these students how to write well? And if they are as stupid as you’re all claiming, do you take any responsibility for that?
It’s our job to teach; it’s their job to learn. Some cannot or will not improve.
No, I don’t take responsibility for someone else’s stupidity–especially when that person has already received extensive guidance, warnings, examples, etc. regarding plagiarism, why it’s wrong, how not to commit it, and so on…repeatedly.
The reason I asked is that after reading this thread I realized that I don’t remember getting any real instruction on how to write a research paper, elementary school info on how to write a book report sure, but by high school it seems most english teachers just expect you to know how to write well. I was lucky because my mom was an editor by trade, so even those 4th grade book reports had to go through her red pen treatment before I was allowed to turn them in, but not all parents can be that helpful nor should they have to be.
Also maybe I’m naive but I think mostly students cheat not because they are lazy or shiftless but because they simply aren’t capable of completing the assignment. So if a student has no idea how to write well, and that is obvious from the small samples of work that have not been swiped from the web, wouldn’t it be a better choice to transfer them to a “how to” writing class rather than just failing them? Giving them an F proves that you caught them, good for you, but do you feel you have a further responsibility to provide them with the skills they need to do a better job?
It just seems that there is a lot of “look how stupid my students are and how smart I am for catching them” going around, and not a lot of “gosh, the education system isn’t really doing its job if these students still don’t know how to write a paper by now”
A lot of the time, these students got into the class under false pretenses in the first place, either by plagiarizing their placement testing and not getting caught at it, or by paying someone else to write their placement essays. Unless it’s the most basic of first-year starter comp classes, the students shouldn’t have to be given a detailed explanation of the school’s citation policy. A reference to where the policy can be found online or an explanation in the syllabus should be enough.
College isn’t for handholding or babysitting. If you wash out, you don’t get sent to special ed. You wash out, period. And I admit to being a college washout, so I’m not prescribing any medicine I haven’t taken myself.
Oh I think there’s plenty of information on citation policy, most students understand how to do that, and I’m not saying that a misunderstanding of citation policy is the problem. What they don’t get enough of is information on how to create an original thesis and write a paper that supports that thesis. So much of high school education is used to teach students how to ace the star (sp?) test, not much on how to be an original thinker and how to express those original thoughts in writing.
My thesis being that the reason they cheat is because no one has taught them how to do it well enough to not need the cheating. It’s not inappropriate for a student to expect to be taught how to do something before they’re expected to prove that they can. Even at the college level students are there to learn something they don’t already know and to get better at the things they do know.
How far down the high school curriculum do we devolve to the universities? That stuff is supposed to be taught in high school, well before the students see a college campus. The fact that it’s not is no fault of the college instructors. There has been a huge increase in subjects that are supposed to be high school subjects being taught in “remedial” courses in colleges, because high schools have abandoned their responsibilities on this in order to shoot for perfect standardized scoring (which isn’t exactly a burden that the high schools have voluntarily chosen to bear, admittedly). I think a large part of this is the inflated “requirements” for hiring that looks for a bachelor’s degree in order to be considered for a sales career and similar things. It makes college a requirement, regardless of someone’s fitness for higher education, which in turn makes it necessary for colleges to dumb down their courses so that people can get that B.A. or B.S. so they can get a job doing things that don’t require an actual college education.
It’s a lousy system and it gets lousier as we go along (maybe in 10 years you’ll need a master’s to become a janitor…), but it’s entrenched now.
There is a HUGE difference between a honest student that comes up to a teacher and says “I don’t know how to do this, how can I learn?”, and those cheating students described here, that keep writing badly.
Now admittley I don’t know how things are done at US colleges, but there should be an class for freshman that teaches how to get information from the library. * So if you don’t know how to write an essay, you pick a guide from the library. You look for an intro course in essay writing. You read the textbook your teacher recommends. You listen to what your teacher says. I bet that all the teachers who’ve posted complaints so far would be willing to help a student ready to work. It’s not that hard if you have enough intelligence that you should be at college in the first place to read some books on how-to, write a practice essay and turn it in to your teacher for feedback.
But here we have had stories of students who didn’t read the fucking manual for the course that the teacher gave at the start. There’s not much a normal teacher can do for lazy students, you need a special program for that. And college is not the right place for such a program.
- I know that at my German university, where it should be, not every department offers this. Some profs. guide their students through the library and have a quiz sheet afterwards, some leave the students to fend for themselves, which means that some students only get their info from other students and never discover in the first 6 semesters how to get their own info. Sad.
You know, as somebody who regularly has to help students look up cites, I have to say your method sucks. I don’t understand what the version of Word has to do with not giving page numbers!
I don’t know if you wrote essays for essays sake, like an English class in High School, or if you were in a science class, but generally, in a real university, essay writing is not a task done for the teacher to get a grade, but for you to learn how to do it and hopefully, to add to the existing knowledge. True, it’s mostly doctoral thesis that are properly published and helpful for other research, but still:
if you don’t give page numbers in your cites, that means you make life hard for your teacher, and ensure that nobody else will take your research seriously.
An essay at university is not make-work, like writing an essay each week for English High School class. It’s for the world to look and use. If you deny access to your original sources, that means nobody else will use your work, because nobody else can verify that you used your sources correctly. Nobody is going to read 300 pages of 10 books because you want to “fuck 'em”. They will think you a dick and move on.
Well, I see we agree on what’s happening at the high school level, but aren’t college students expected to write at a higher than high school level? And where and how are they expected to learn how to do that if not in their college level english class?
And while I do agree that there’s not much that can be done for a lazy student, I still say some portion of this issue is about students who feel shame and frustration that they don’t know how to write well, and haven’t found a reliable avenue for changing that.
Taking them around the library isn’t going to help, teaching them how to cite sources isn’t going to help, teaching them how to form original thoughts and express those thoughts in writing will help, but although college professors expect their students to write better papers than they did in high school not many of them are willing to actually teach their students how to do that.
And while I understand wanting to send the blame back to the high school where it belongs, the problem is sitting right there in the back row of your classroom so I’ll ask my question again - don’t you feel any responsibility to teach a student enough that they can pass your class without cheating?
What share of the responsibility is on the student, who may not exactly be an eager little sponge ready to suck up the knowledge?
Having been in college, I knew personally dozens of students who cheated their way into higher level classes in pursuit of a degree. They were not interested in learning nor in doing the work well, they were interested in the paper that had the little letters B.S. or B.A. or whatever.
And they got ANGRY when called out on cheating. And they wanted forgiveness and not to do make-up or extra work learning how to write properly.
What is to be done with them? In my experience as a student and as a TA and a part-time teacher long ago (and it was these types that made me hate it enough to not pursue it), they are far more likely to plagiarize than the students who simply honestly lack skill (who are more likely to call you in a panic or not turn in the work at all).
Let’s say half?
But as a current student it’s frustrating to deal with university level professors who are so jaded that they assume every student is trying to cheat, and so virtually all instruction on the assigned essay is about proper citation, and very little about what a good paper looks/reads like even in intro level classes.
Considering what I’m paying for my education, I shouldn’t have to deal with instructors who have more invested in making sure I understand that they’re smarter than I am than they do in making me smarter than I was when I sat down on the first day, and that’s been the case in probably 50% of my classes.
I’ve noticed the same attitude with the teachers here in this thread. Although several posts mocked the essays that were original as subpar, only one mentioned suggesting the student take a trip to the campus writing center, and none suggested feeling an obligation to help the student learn to write better.
I would argue that, unless it’s specifically a writing-intensive class or an English class, there shouldn’t be much of a need for instruction in the basics of writing coherently. This is especially true at colleges like the one I attended (Penn State), in which everyone (regardless of placement scores–instead of testing out of it, you could at most test into the “honors” version) was required to take a specifically intensive college composition and rhetoric class in their first year, and highly encouraged to take it in their first semester.
I don’t recall what courses the professors who’ve answered in this thread teach, but unless it’s lower-division English composition classes, or their university is foolish about not requiring a composition class for freshmen, I don’t see how this is relevant.
Granted, I don’t know your teachers, and teachers can be jerks. Esp. as university teachers are not choosen for their pedagogic aptitude like school teachers, but for their knowledge of the subject, so some may have didactic problems.
Nevertheless, you sound as if you have a big chip on your shoulder here, instead of like a honest student eager to learn. The teachers I know, and from what the posters here have written, don’t want show off how smart they are as opposed to their students. They want to teach eager, intelligent, ready-to-work students how to do their own work. They don’t want to hand-held and spoon-fed students; they don’t want students who dislike thinking and are un-curious; they don’t want pass-the-blame students.
Because college/ university students are ADULTS. They are supposed to be old enough to go for help without being hand-held. It’s assumed that they know to ask for a writing center if they have problems, or going to the teacher to ask what they can do. Quietly failing class and then cheating is not what good students do.
If students get a how-to guide on writing essays from the library (or a text book from their teacher), read it and can’t apply at least a portion of that - then I say they don’t belong to college. If they can’t write properly, how will they manage to think coherently, reason, argue? You can’t think without words, and you can’t think logical or analyze without structure.
Also, do US students learn only the descriptive type of essay in English High School class (What I did on my summer holidays)? Don’t you have fact essays (book reports) and dialectic essays (intro, con, pro, summary, own opinion)? I did that in grade 9 (of 13) High School, and it was mandatory. Because without proper arguing, you can’t advance into university.
Again, did the students go to their professors and say “I have a problem with …”? Did they read the comments under the failed essays and apply them? Did they ask the professor whether they could turn in practice essays? Did they follow all the steps in the course book, starting with: Do the research, allow enough time, do a rough draft, etc.?
If there is a problem with a specific professor unable to teach, did they go to the Dekan (head of department) or their student advisor to it?
Otherwise, I do call them lazy. Intellectally lazy, wanting to be hand-held, and unsuited for university, which should teach interested, able people to think and the correct work method.
And the teacher dopers have already said this several times: IF a student comes up to them not with excuses, but eager to improve, they go to great lenghts to help them. They even try to point those who fail out of laziness in the right direction. If the students don’t follow where they are pointed to, it’s not the teachers job at university to motivate them. They should leave university.