Best answer ever to a “cultural” claim.
Student: In my culture, blah blah blah (insert random excuse about shitty attendance and missed work)
Professor: In my culture, we show up to class, do our homework and study for our exams.
Robin
If it’s not too late, I thought I’d offer some suggestions of my own:
- If you’re going to copy and paste large sections of someone’s book review into your term paper, try not to have it be something I’ve read this week. Also it’s a good idea not to plagiarize my advisors from grad school.
- If you’re going to bring prewritten essays and notes to copy from to the exam, don’t write them on lined binder paper with binder holes on the side. A regular piece of paper would sort of blend in with the back pages of the exam booklet, but binder holes are noticeable from quite some distance.
- If you do copy and paste your paper together from the web, try to make your fake footnotes look reasonable, like, using articles that are actually about the topic you’re “writing” on, instead of issues 5 centuries off.
3b) Oh, also in your fake footnotes, make sure the page numbers you “cite” are within the actual range of page numbers for the article. For verisimilitude. - I have 60 papers from students in your class here in a pile. I know what a student’s regular writing voice looks like. In this particular scenario-- you know, your term paper-- I’d really much rather see YOUR thin content and poor writing than my second-dissertation-reader’s thoughtful prose. I’ve gotten to the point where a uniformly clunkily written paper gives me a sense of relief.
- Be aware that I’ve noticed a trend: the first students who most eagerly approach me to see how they did on the exam/paper seem to be the ones who cheated-- not always but there’s a correlation. I’m not really understanding this pattern but it’s there. Some sort of feeling me out to see if they got away with it. I’m going to have to start keeping stats on this
- Also, when you hit the first stage of grief and tell me that’s you’re really really earnestly sorry, do realize that I realize that you’re not sorry about cheating per se, but sorry that I noticed and busted you. I suspect that you wouldn’t be on e-mail/ in my office toadyingly apologizing about cheating on your exam/ paper, had I not noticed what was going on, no? You wouldn’t have volunteered this information out of a sudden sense of virtue. Bite me.
- No, I don’t believe that this is the first time you ever have done this.
Because of what happened at the midterm with someone else, I decided to be very very clear. The fact that you could use no notes and that violators would be given zero and given a ticket to the dean was at the top of the study guide and at the top of the exam-- you even had both sheets with you to review that fact. I said it out loud a couple of times during the exam. Your notes were carefully made out before hand so this was quite premeditated. You should never have done this the first time, if it is indeed the first. Which it isn’t. - And YOU there CERTAINLY won’t do it again, because I AM sending YOUR case to the Dean. A Blackberry to plagiarize Wikipedia on a closed-book exam? Cheeky.
By Darkhold (ps I really need an A on this assignment because my mom died this week again k thx bye)
I find it easier if I don’t invite failure with the parameters given the students. Teenagers are interested in a lot of things, getting an education is not one of them. Some have realized that they have to work, or have parents who push them, but if they were left to their own choices, they’d never study.
So I design assignments that are fail proof.
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A clear deadline, including the time of day ('cause, ya know, it’s Friday all the way to midnite). If I don’t include an exact time, they will come to class, where we’re supposed to do the presentation and say “I’ll just have to print the essay”.
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I always give asignments where copying or using the web is nearly impossible. It takes some twisting to do, but once I got used to it, I find that it spares me a lot of time. A simple change of perspective might do.
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Try this if a student has written a book report. Flip up a random page in the book and ask what happens on the next page. If the student in fact has read the book, the answer will come easily.
To my voice students:
Juries are on Friday. You’ve had your music since February. Would you do me a favor and memorize it already? You’re frapping music majors! (Except my one music minor, who has all his music memorized.)
Im confused about the concept of cheating in a closed book exam. So if the student studies really well and learns a whole lot of information from internet sites, this is cheating? How do you know what they said isnt true and that they just have a knack for memorising information?
I ask because I dont see what the difference is between doing that, and learning from an assignd text book. Actually I would have thought, them doing extra work, would make you feel better about their work as they have made the effort to do outside readings.
In my class for my undergrad degree we had several chinese students who routinely learned stuff verbatim, and would use outside readings and sources in closed book exams, the three did extremely well and are now studying for a masters program that very few people without work experience get in too.
Would what they did be classed as cheating in some American institutions?
Repeating web sources verbatim doesn’t really show that you’ve learned anything, you’re just parroting. At least in my classes (as a student) the point is to explain a concept in your own words and often to give examples or use the concept to analyze something. That shows that you actually understand it. If I just repeat something I read, then I must not understand it well enough to use it myself. Not only that, but I’d bet dollars to doughnuts they didn’t memorize it; they brought it in with them.
Rehashing stuff verbatim without citing a source is plagiarism. Memorizing websites is not the same actually learning the material and demonstrating that you understand it and can synthesize information from it, which I always gathered to be the point of college. Memorization plays a role, sure (esp. in capybara’s classroom, which is one of art history if I’m not mistaken), but memorization should only be one of many intellectual tools.
Well not to speak for the other poster but I’d assume that writing something out verbatim without the proper cites would be plagiarism at the least. Then you have the lame duck “but it’s my culture” excuse added to the fact the student didn’t show up to test these skills makes it very likely they’d either printed something out or had access to the net through a hand held device during the test.
I see on preview I was beaten. Ahh well.
Easily? Hell I’ve never cheated on a book report in my life and unless you picked something fairly easy I wouldn’t be able to remember page by page what happened. I could name any subplot or major plot item you liked but if it’s a minor scene I’d probably not remember it.
This is the worst part of it for me. I’m just a lowly TA. I catch the cheaters; I don’t get to punish them. And none of the professors I’ve worked with are at all interested in doing so - I’ve had people repeat assignments with no penalty, have the assignment graded without the plagiarized bits ‘counting’, etc.
For the past year I’ve had only in-class tests to grade. However, my students are getting a take-home final, so I’m looking forward to some googling. Sigh.
But, Professor, that’s soooo meeeeeaaaannnn.
I recently gave a research assignment on Pythagoras. The students were learning about the Pythagorean Theorem and I thought it would be nice for them to learn the story behind the guy after whom the theorem is named. The assignment was pathetically easy. It was initially designed for my 7th grade Algebra class and was modified for a class of 10th and 11th graders. The sad thing is the modifications actually made the assignment easier rather than harder.
I was expecting plagiarism from at least a few students in the class, so I was especially vigilant in looking for it. Low and behold, two papers were copied and pasted almost verbatim from the internet - one almost in its entirety from one site and another from a few sites.
I photocopied the papers, highlighted the copied sections, and printed out the plagiarized web sites. I brought these to both the Vice-Principal and the learning support teacher who supervises kids with learning disabilities. The VP wanted to nail the kids - give them both zeros, call the parents, etc. The learning support teacher flipped out and said the kids didn’t know what they were doing was wrong.
One student had just completed a course dedicated to learning how to write papers. They spent an entire unit on plagiarism and how to avoid it. He got a 19% in the course. A 19%!!! I didn’t think that was even possible. According to the LS teacher, this was proof that the student didn’t learn why plagiarism was wrong and we had to allow him to either rewrite the paper or give him an alternative assignment that didn’t require writing a paper at all because he wasn’t able to pass the class in which he learned how to write a paper. (Wow, what a long sentence). Never mind the fact that he just ignored every assignment ever given in the class and refused any help offered to him. AAHHH!!!
For the other student, I found out that this was not the first time he had plagiarized. This had also happened the year before. A similar rant was made by LS as to why he didn’t realize what he did was wrong. He had been sat down, explained what plagiarism is, how to avoid it, and given a lot of help in rewriting the assignment. Maybe I’ll buy into that situation once, but twice?? The teacher was once again saying that I -and the VP- were wrong for wanting to fail the student. In the end we had to allow him time during class to sit with the LS teacher where she helped him rewrite the paper. Once again – AAAHHH!!
Something you may find interesting, from the China Currents website:
[Emphasis added.] I agree that memorization does not prove that you’ve learned the material, but I’ve seen this display of memorization before, when I was a TA many years ago. There were no websites to memorize then, but I had a number of students who memorized whole chunks of the course textbook and repeated it back verbatim on the exam. They they were not allowed to bring any notes or books into the room, they were not allowed anything at their exam desks other than a pen, and they had five or six proctors watching and wandering around the room. Problems occurred when these students repeated parts of the text in response to a question, only the parts they repeated had little to do with the question. They had focused on a key word or phrase in the question, scanned their memory for some match, found one, and went to town repeating a piece of the book. Too bad it was sometimes the wrong piece.
We didn’t worry about citing information (we only used the course text and there was no outside or recommended reading for this course), so I won’t comment on plagiarism. But while I’ve seen this memorization before, I don’t recall any student who repeated back textbook passages on the exam getting good marks for their efforts. Passing marks yes, but not top-of-the-class grades. We (the school, the professor, and I) believed as you do, hawksgirl, that memorization of the material did not equal learning and understanding the material. This caused some consternation among our Chinese students because, as the China Currents site proves, they did feel that memorization did equal learning.
I wouldn’t rule out small Blackberry-type devices today (which were unavailable in my day), but I wouldn’t be so quick to assume cheating. Memorization is possible, especially if you’ve been taught all your life that memorization is learning, and it has served you well in your education so far. Until you come to a Western university, of course, where the same feeling doesn’t hold.
That’d be a great excuse if the student were in China, and the class’s goal was memorizing internet sites.
I suppose I should have clarified, thats the way its done here too, we learn the theory and we give the examples. When I spoke about those students, I just meant that they consistantly did a heap of extra work, and gave extra examples - I have no idea if they wrote in their own words or just copied stuff - Ive never seen the papers. I do know that plaigerism is a big deal here too, there were two students caught in a class of mine last year, and as far as I kow were punsihed - although the punishment couldnt have been too bad as they both graduated.
And theres no way those people cheated - they had no need to - it was obvious that they knew the work, besides were not allowd to bring in paper to the exams, or cell phones for the matter.
A colleague told me the other day of a student who plagiarized in creative writing class. He turned in a story called “King of the Bingo Game,” whose actual author is Ralph Ellison.
:rolleyes:
I get that. Only with my students it’s “I need an A so I can get into the nursing school!” My response to that: “Do you have any actual experience working in the nursing field? Candystriping, interning, hanging around hospitals? No? You probably won’t get in anyway. They look at much more than your grades these days. Oh, you do know you’ll have to pass an essay exam to get in, right? Yeah, didn’t think so.”
I’m getting my final portfolios tomorrow. Expect more rants then.
My response to educators:
If you’re going to assign a paper of decent length, require an accepted proposal, and then issue a checklist with minutiae so anal that it takes 20 hours to write the damn thing, don’t tell us how much you hate reading them or that you have no real intention of reading them.
I hate busywork. College is nothing but busywork. In other words, I hate school. You’ve all seen my recent thread. In my eyes, he is simply the most egregious offender.
I’ll tell you what. I’ll do whatever you tell me to do, on the condition that you teach me something I don’t know. If you manage to do that you will be the very first.
I don’t agree with the above statements, and I’m not even an educator. It all depends on what you’re going to school for.
For me, the history major, college is the exact opposite of busy work. I have very few requirements in my major, other than a certain number of credits and a couple of required seminars. Basically, whether the class is American History 1877-1914 or Crusades and Jihad, the teachers don’t care if I can cite chapter and verse (or in my case, year, month and day) as much as I can analyze information and craft and defend an argument. Did I mention how much I love my major? That’s the most fun, ever.
Sorry. I do think a lot of college classes can amount to basically busy work, but if you come out of school with a degree but no new knowledge or skills there’s definitely something wrong. I do think there needs to be more of an emphasis on the kinds of classes where you actually learn to think rather than spit back whatever the text or professor says, but not all courses or programs are just busy work.
Parts of college may very well be busywork if the instructor never alters anything or if the student already knows a lot about the subject and what to do.
But from what I’ve seen over the past sixteen years, that’s not usually the case. Older, returning students who go at night and on weekends to college already have a great store of knowledge, but the majority of students do not fall into this category.
We have students who don’t know how to analyze or think critically because they were never taught how, students who can’t manage time or juggle work and school because they’ve taken on too many units, students who don’t realize that high school is over, refuse to be accountable for anything, don’t know their parents can’t rescue them anymore, etc.
One of my colleagues received a poor evaluation from a student because, in the student’s own words, “She made me think.”
As RedRoses said, “it depends on what you’re going to school for.” The student taking fire academy classes is not doing busywork. Nor is the student learning the ins and outs of the flight simulator for the aeronautics program. Nor is the student who wishes to work as a paralegal, or the one studying child development in preparation to work with little kids. And that’s just at the community college level.