Do you automatically fail them for the whole course when they plagiarize? Maybe you could just print up some notes, saying that there’s no need for them to attend classes for the rest of the semester, they’ve already determined their grade for that class. Staple the notes to the papers before you hand them back.
At my university if you’re caught copying another student’s homework you get:
- Failed
- Sent to an $80, 8 hour course on academic honesty (think traffic school).
If you get caught (intentionally) plagiarizing off a published work you get:
-
Expelled [I think you can get reinstated on the first offense if you go to the aforementioned honesty class, wait a semester, and beg enough]
-
Any previous degrees you’ve achieved there (if any) put under review*, and possibly revoked if it’s found you plagiarized at any time during the course of getting those degrees as well. This actually happened to a doctorate student last semester. I think he got caught plagiarizing large pieces of text from an industry standard work. :smack:
- Actually, I think all previous degrees get put under review, in that they notify your former school of the situation and ask them to review your status if they were from a different location, but don’t quote me on that.
It’s at our discretion. Most of us, including me, give the F and zero for the first offense, it’s reported, and the student has to take a “Traffic school” style course if s/he wants to keep the incident out of the permanent record.
However, if the student already has a violation on file, a one-year suspension is issued. I actually caught a couple of students plagiarizing more than once (it was in different semesters; why they took me again is beyond my comprehension, but whatever), and that’s what happened to them. I believe the suspension is left on the record.
Even if they plagiarize just once, they’ve pretty much screwed themselves. They either drop the class or just stop of their own volition. I’ve never even had to say anything about it.
I wonder if it’s time for us to try the “FD” (failure with dishonesty) grade that they’ve come up with in Canada:
Where I work now a philosophy professor asked students to read the different accounts of creation in Genesis and the different accounts of Christ’s birth/death in the Gospel and write a paper on the reasons for and significances of the differences. Because one of the writing lab professors was off due to a family emergency and the other due to a scheduled leave time I volunteered to do proofreading at that time and read some of these papers. Damn. Awful. Dreadful.
Admittedly these weren’t the better students (as evidence they were the ones who had to have their works read by the writing lab) but I don’t think they even understood the assignment (in spite of it being fairly cut and dried) or even read the specific differences the professor was talking about and gave chapter:verses for. A couple took it as an opportunity to witness, basically saying that it was the will of God and that it didn’t bother them at all (not the question), another made it very clear she didn’t see any differences to speak of, and one made a remark about how haters loved to find trivial things to confuse the believers. The professor’s whole point of trying to get them to read the Bible critically was completely lost. (The professor in question is, incidentally, a Christian.)
While I’m not so sure about the “youth is wasted on the young” bromide, college most definitely is. I wish there was some way that people could afford to go from high school to trade school or some other “learn a profession” course, and then have a few years real world experience, and then go to college when they’re at very least in their mid 20s, preferably their 30s.
I think back on some of the papers I wrote in college and cringe. I’m (pardon the immodesty) a decent writer- the papers were well organized and phrased and all that and the research was probably decent- but at 18 or even 20 I thought I knew everything, I thought I had everything figured out, and because I’d had the fortune to live below the poverty line and be caretaker for severely mentally ill relatives and other oddities (and I honestly don’t mean that as sarcastically as it sounds) I felt I had extra insight, but damn. I came across as the most arrogant “I think therefore it is” person on Earth… well, not on Earth, but probably just as much as the Homecoming Queen two seats down from me though with a better structured paper.
The gift of perspective is what’s missing from most college students. You think you’ve lived and seen things at 19 but you just haven’t, if only because you don’t have any real concept of the passage of time. When I went back to college in my mid 20s after years of altogether abstinence or “course here/course there”- all the difference in the world, and to this day non-trads tend to be by far my favorite students.
But having read abortion papers (and I was very anti-abortion as a teenager) yeah, they’re generally dreadful. As are most of the ones on political issues of any kind: gun control, gay marriage, global warming, evolution in schools, etc.; a lot of glib talking points that on a scale where 10 is “Mr. Gambini, that is a lucid, intelligent, well thought-out objection” and 1 is Kirk Cameron’s Banana God, they usually bat about a 3 or 4 tops.
For general “research something in the boundaries of the class” type papers I tend to pick a topic that the instructor isn’t likely to know/care about that I’m still interested in and is valid for the class. Not so I can make stuff up, mind you, but so they don’t:
A. Have an encyclopaedic knowledge of it that they then use to systematically destroy my paper because they have six years of analyzing the subject versus my six weeks.
B. House any particular vitriol or major bias towards any one viewpoint on the subject and are less likely to go out of their way to tear it apart out of spite for my viewpoint.
Note that I’m not particularly adverse to having my ideas challenged, it’s just that a lot of times “ideas challenged” seems to be coupled with “points lost.” I’d prefer to have those challenged in the safety of an after class discussion where my A isn’t hanging over my head. I find I’m more willing to take a risk if I care about the class, though. I think it’s because if I care about the class I’ve probably already done study into what I’m writing about and feel confident about expressing my viewpoint in a way that is solid enough to stand up well and be graded highly even if the instructor thinks it’s ultimately incorrect. This method is, of course, harder the more specific the topic the class covers. The cousin of this method for when paper is on something specific (“analyze this chapter/book/verse/quote”) is that I usually try to focus on an aspect that’s important but not likely to be analyzed by other people, otherwise you run the risk of having someone argue what you did (or worse yet - the opposite), but much better, making you look bad by comparison.
I still get marked off for organization and sentence transition, tho…
In the words of one of my better teachers (high school Chemistry, so in general exercises only had one possible solution): “if you copy, do it in a way I can say you fooled me - if you’re that guy who can’t remember the formula for the perimeter of a circle, you sit behind Mr 100% and you suddenly hand in a 100% exam, I will not believe the Blessed Virgin Mary whispered in your ear. She didn’t know any chemistry anyway.”
It certainly is. Most kids don’t know enough about life in general to get much out of college. I’m considering going back just for fun, because there’s so many things that I’d like to know more about. I tested out of a full year of college, I took one year, then got married at the ripe old age of 19, and I’ve managed to take another semester’s worth of courses…but I think that I would get a lot more out of college now than I would have if I hadn’t dropped out to get married.
It’s true. I got a degree right after high school. I got decent grades, but didn’t really put any effort into it, and don’t feel like I learned very much.
This spring, I’ll get a second BA, ten years after my first. This time around, I worked my ass off, and feel like my brain is filled to capacity with everything I’ve learned. It’s not that it’s any harder than my previous degree, it’s just that I’m actually concerned with learning. At age 18-21, I was pretty sure I knew all there was to know, anyway.
I wonder if one of the reasons there seems to be a decline in writing skills is that young people are reading for pleasure less. In my casual observation it seems like people who read often have, in general, better written grammar and spelling than those who only read what they have to read.
Never ceases to amaze me how poorly some students cheat. There was a semester in college where I graded assignments for a programming class, and you wouldn’t believe how many times somebody handed in an exact copy of another student’s program with nothing changed–including the same errors. They didn’t bother to rename variables or even change the order they were declared in.
I think this is kind of an interesting take on the matter.
For instance, if you assume fetuses are people, you could assume they have souls. And souls have feelings.
Now just because you don’t know you’re hurting someone’s feeling’s does that make it less painful.
Supposing you’re queued up to see a movie and you make some comments about fat people and don’t notice the overweight woman behind you.
Does this mean she didn’t get her feelings hurt? Would you think a paper about how one unintentionally harms the environment is bad? Would you think a paper about how one unintentionally hurts others is bad? If so, then you could make a case for this paper.
Granted it’s a stretch but with proper work, it could be passable as a topic.
Eh, college kids aren’t exactly known for being rocket scientists.
Except me, of course. I write papers and formulate ideas to make professors weep. I blind the facaulty with the brilliance of my elegant, yet provocative answers. Teachers regularly ask me to sub for them, even in subjects that I never took.
Also, I once wrote an essay on whether the biblical Samson was a terrorist, and got an A on it.
And I don’t have a spell-check handy, so tell Guadere to stop laughing.
ha!
You have to assume the conclusion three times to make this argument work. That’s a dead giveaway that the argument sucks.
I’ve always thought that in order to have hurt feelings, you’d have to be old enough to be offended–and, of course, alive.
Today’s RYS post happens to fit this thread:
http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/2009/10/early-thirsty-what-we-love-on-exams.html
Nobody with a basic understanding of biology could question that a fetus is alive. (Hint: You can have a dead fetus. Also, an ameba is alive.) The issue is whether or not it’s a person.
If it’s already been aborted, it can’t be insulted.
Yes, but presumably is the act itself that’s supposed to be hurting its alleged feelings, not the dead aftermath.