Do I need to start putting a little fucking smilie at the end of all my posts… JHC. whooooshhh yerself.
There is nothing new und… I mean, ummm, ah – I gotta go.
How about the freshman who, when assigned a deconstruction paper, turned in a chapter from a fucking OXFORD dissertation on–get this–cosmogeny and cosmology in the works of John Donne? And then made the usual, “I changed some of it, so it’s my work.”
When I told him he’d just failed the class and was going up in front of the Dean’s review board, he about shit.
God, I don’t miss teaching!
Why not? Isn’t that fun?
In all honesty, no. Teachers are teachers because they want to help their students learn, not because they enjoy having to double-guess everything their students do in order to detect cheaters. By and large, teachers do not a sadistic kick out of cornering a student who has fucked up and trying to ruin the kid’s life.
It is no fun catching a cheater. No fun at all. It’s disappointing to find someone who has no respect for his teachers, his fellow students, or himself. It’s stressful to confront a student, and to justify yourself to the academic heirarchy. And more often than not, justice is not done.
All that having been said, I kind of miss teaching.
In one of my classes, one student copied her paper out of the textbook. The textbook that we were using for the class]!
When I informed her that she would, at minimum, be receiving an F in the class, she asked me if there was any chance she could have an “incomplete” instead, because an F would ruin her chances of getting into the Masters program in Education. Even she (eventually) saw the irony in that one.
I teach Intro to Theatre. During the course of the semester we watch some videos and I ask the students to write an opinion paper about what they saw. (i.e. “In your opinion what was the best and worst things in the production and why?” “Choose an actor and tell me ‘in your opinion’ how he or she performed.” etc.) No research. No “facts.” Just what they felt about certain aspects of the video. One to two pages. (I’m just trying to get them to apply what they are learning in class to what they see on stage and screen.)
Even if they type using two fingers it shouldn’t take longer than two hours to write this paper.
But, !!!
I always get at least one pair of papers that are exactly the same. Sometimes several pairs. Occasionally I get a copy of an Ebert review.
I warn them before the assignment that I remember everything I read, but they never believe me until after the first assignment. When I pass back papers, I’ll read the first paragraph from one, then the other paper to the class. I then tell the plagerizers that they should drop my class (Normally this happens before the deadline to drop without grade.) because they will not pass my class. If they have a problem with this I suggest that they can appeal to the dean. This always shuts them up, because they know that they will be suspended if the dean hears about it.
I hate this part of teaching, but the response I get from the rest of the class when they hear the stupidity of their fellow students is worth every second of it.
When I was a TA years ago, we had a similar situation: on a proctored exam, a student had answered the questions by repeating material from the textbook. The student’s answers were word-for-word, and even led off with something along the lines of, “Chapter X of the textbook says…”
We weren’t sure what to do. It appeared to be some kind of cheating, but it was a proctored exam, there were a number of us wandering through the exam room during it, and each student was allowed only to have a question paper, an answer booklet, and a few pens on the desk. There was much more material repeated from the text than could fit on an arm or a stick of gum or any other aid. And this was in the days before electronic organizers and other things that could be used to store text.
When we confronted the student, he was upfront. He said he knew his written skills were poor, so he had memorized the chapters on which the exam would be, knowing that something in them would help in the exam. But he also knew that the text said things better than he could, so in his mind, the best thing to do was to memorize and “barf it back,” word-for-word.
He could actually write out material from other chapters on demand–and he did, right there in the office, without help or any kind of reference. Anything we asked for, as long as it was from the chapters assigned for the exam.
We still weren’t sure what to do. During the exam, it was obvious that he hadn’t used anything other than his brain, so he hadn’t really cheated. He freely admitted on the paper that it was from the textbook, and never claimed it was his own work or thoughts, so it wasn’t really plagiarism.
In the end, we gave him a passing grade on the exam. It wasn’t a great grade, but we felt he deserved something for sitting down and memorizing a good chunk of the textbook. Still, he hadn’t proved that he had actually learned the concepts in the material.
The student wasn’t happy with his grade, but accepted it, and decided to go for help with his writing skills. And to his credit, he didn’t try to repeat the textbook to us again.
Spoons,
In some educational systems students are expected to be able to quote from the text. According to my Taiwanese friend this is common in Taiwan and mainland China. My East Asian Civ. professor says he has often has international students from China who quoted from the text on exams. He said that if American students did this he’d suspect cheating, but the Chinese students are just doing what they were trained to do. Maybe your student would have been happier going to school in Asia. 
Similar experience for me:
As a sophomore in high school, I was taking a college-level history class. I was being bogged down by the workload, and realized that the textbook would be a great source for the proctored exam. (Remember- I’m only 15 years old at the time.)
After studying the text several times, I decided that the best way to master the material would be to copy the textbook by hand prior to the exam. I sat down for several hours and dutifully reproduced the relevant chapters, feeling much like a medieval scribe.
I felt more confident than ever before in the exam. Fortunately, I wasn’t able to memorize the book word-for-word, so everything I wrote was in my own words.
Still, I can’t decide if I should feel proud about getting that A, or guilty for coming so close to plagiarism.
<animal house>
Are you aware of the work of Arnold Toynbee, Mr Kroger?
</animal house>