Ah, yes, the old “I have The Truth” fundamentalist types. Makes essays fun when their starting premise is something along the lines “Well of course everyone knows that homosexuality is an abomination unto the Lord…” I always rattle 'em by saying “Belief isn’t a solid basis for an argument. If my beliefs differ from yours, there goes your evidence. If you say, ‘Because God says so,’ I can’t independently verify that. I can’t go talk to Her…” The feminine pronoun for the Deity gets 'em every time. Then I add “And if I’m an atheist, then God-based arguments don’t work at all.” The mere mention of atheists is enough to raise their hackles.
And let me guess, the web pages were all completely different in writing style and level of literacy, and the student wondered what on earth tipped you off? I had one of those last year. He seemed to be a bright enough kid otherwise, but somehow he didn’t notice that some parts of “his” paper read like they’d been written by a classics professor, and other parts by somebody who couldn’t spell his way out of a paper bag.
My Very Favorite Plagiarism Story, which I’m sure I’ve told before on these boards but am going to tell again, involved a freshman comp student who was writing a research paper on iron deficiency anemia. She decided to nick large chunks of text from the online Merck Manual, which uses the chemical symbol “Fe” for iron. Apparently she decided this didn’t look right, so she used her word processor’s search and replace function to replace all instances of the letters “fe” with “iron” …
… and handed in a paper full of words like “deironctive” and “irontus,” where the original manual had “defective” and “fetus.” Either she couldn’t be bothered to read over the thing at all, or she saw nothing wrong with turning in a paper full of words she didn’t understand :rolleyes:
Then there’s the flipside. I’ve had points taken off my papers for not capitalizing pronouns referring to God and/or Jesus.
Robin
She’s just failing the course?
That’s a serious ethics violation and explusion from the university might very well be called for. Have you reported it to any admins?
Sometimes plagiarism cases are left to the instructor’s discretion, as is the case where I teach, although we are encouraged to report any offenses. Some profs will let the first one go with a failing grade and a warning, but the second offense is the end.
What I do with first offenders is give an F on the assignment and then report them. They then receive a letter telling them that a hold will be placed on their college transactions until they make an appointment to talk about the matter with Student Life. Then they have to go to a “Character Diversion” workshop. If they go, what they did will not be disclosed to other parties.
If they refuse to go, it will be released.
On a second offense, the student gets an F for the course and then the college usually suspends them for one year, during which time they may not come onto the campus at all under penalty of arrest for trespassing.
I imagine that a second offense would be disclosed.
Here’s a story for you from a colleague of mine:
A student’s plagiarized essay was discovered. When confronted about it, she said, “Well, I let my boyfriend write the paper. I thought he wrote it himself.”
:rolleyes:
Dumbasses.
Within the last week:
-
An anonymous note asking why we had to have a cumulative final exam because most of the students in the class aren’t majors and don’t have an reason to to retain the material after the semester is over, anyway.
-
An e-mail asking if a student could repeat exactly the same extra credit activity to get credit for it a second time.
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An e-mail begging for permission to write an extra credit paper to save the student’s grade, written entirely in txt-message-speak.
We get a variation on religion in the placement tests; in fact, we just got a fire-and-brimstone essay the other day, written by a guy who was supposed to be writing about someone who changed his life–or maybe it was the topic about someone he admires. I’m not sure. Anyhow, it started off all right but quickly turned into an angry sermon. Sometimes these folks just forget that they’re writing a placement test and they have absolutely no sense of audience.
Then there are the ones who end their essays with “God Bless You.”
I have to tell you, it really makes no difference when we score it!
Unfortunately, yeah, that’s all I can do (and believe it or not, some instructors don’t even do that).
I was in the habit of reporting 'em, but nothing ever happens. There are five-time offenders walking around campus!
:eek:
Un-fucking-real!
Not quite sure what else to say, that’s just pretty fucking disgusting.
Is there any chance you can get the administrative rules changed?
Yep, been there. I remember on time when I was working at the desk, I heard the printer spitting out copies. Not unusual, except that it seemed like a long print job. Looking up, I saw a Young Rocket Science Major, clicking the print icon over and over.
Me: Are you printing
YRSM: Yeah but nothing’s coming out.
Me: The printer is over here.
YRSM: Oh.
It seems that since the printings didn't come out and whack him in the head, he just kept clicking "print" over... and over. 30 times before I stopped him.
Since there wasn't a printer, or anything that looked like a printer, anywhere near him, I have no idea where he thought the prints would come from. :wallyI taught a physics lab to non-majors last year. One student was taking the class pass-fail, and therefore decided he could get away with putting very little effort into the course. There is a policy which allows students to miss up to one lab without failing, so he skipped a lab. He also skipped some sections on other labs. Then I gave students a “practical” (hands-on exam) to make sure they knew how to use the lab equipment themselves and weren’t just letting their partners do all the work. He failed. So I looked at his grades and realized that there was no way he could pass the course at this point. I told him as much, and in about 2 seconds he went from I-don’t-give-a-shit-about-this-course to I’ll-do-anything-to-pass. He was a senior and this was his last quarter, apparently–he needed the class to graduate.
So anyway, I let him retake the practical (I worked with him individually to show him how to use the equipment) and he made up some of the work, so he passed.
Another story. Last summer I taught a discussion section for an introductory physics class for non-majors. Summer classes are achieved by condensing a quarter’s worth of material into one month, so lecture was held 4 hours a day, 4 days a week (with discussion section on the 5th day) and labs were in the afternoon, for three hours, two days a week. Obviously this is not the kind of class that could be taken concurrently with any other summer class, since the other class would also require 3-4 hours of lecture every day in order to cram it into a single month.
Well, the first week of class the professor told me that a student had come to him all panicky, because this class conflicted with another summer class, and she needed both classes to graduate and this was her last chance to take them. I don’t know what she expected him to say–“Well, I’ll just tell the other 99 people that we’ll teach the class next month, instead!” I think what he actually said was more along the lines of, “Your bad planning is not my problem.”
Add about ten more shocked smilies, and you’ll have my reaction too.
The disgust can turn to amusement at times: a failed a student in Intro to Poetry because she plagiarized. She retook the class with another instructor the following quarter and submitted the exact same plagiarized essay. However, she forgot to change the date on it. A fall quarter paper looks kinda funny with a March date on it!
As for chances for changing the rules: nil. I’m a part-timer lecturer, which means I have no voice and no rights. In most cases, if I speak up about anything, it also means that I have no job. So for the sake of mortgage, I’m willing to let it slip by. But that’s also part of why I have a zero tolerance policy toward plagiarism. I never ask “Why did you do this?” or say “You poor thing; I know how stressful being a student can be.” No, I just flip right into “Alright, you’re a liar and a cheater” mode and fail their ass immediately. It’s not much, but it’s some small comfort.
Wow! And I thought that I was the only one who had that happen to him! My student said almost the exact same thing! It was like catching two, two, two plagiarists in one.
In the student’s defense, the scheduling gods aren’t always nice. At my uni, scheduling is weighted in favor of upperclassmen. Consequently, a freshman-level science course might be full of seniors. Also, a gen-ed course taken during a regular, upper-class semester is a course that replaces a major or minor course that might not be offered over the summer at all.
Or she could’ve gotten bad advisement advice and not known she needed that physics course or the other course until the last possible semester.
Or, she could just be a dumbass.
Robin
Not a teacher myself, but the spouse recently had a student who said “I don’t do footnotes.”
Her reply: “Then you don’t do passing the course either.”
In many student papers, footnotes are all that separate research from outright plagiarism.
A follow-up on my cut-and-paste plagiarizer cited above: I met with her today after the final exam (it’s a 120 student class, so I couldn’t catch her before she took it–so, yeah, she took a two hour final for a class that she was already failing before she even walked in the door. Waitaminnit! She DID get punished!). She offered up a bevy of excuses for what she did, pleading with me to only fail her for the paper, not the class as a whole.
Then came the kicker.
“If I fail this class, I’ll lose my financial aid for next quarter.”
Um, dipshit? If this class was THAT important, why did you blow it off and then cheat? By telling me the above, you’re just making yourself appear to be even more idiotic.
This wasn’t a case of simply bad scheduling luck. There is no way to take a physics course during the summer and take another summer course at the same time. It doesn’t matter what the times of the other class were–it would conflict no matter what. That’s what makes this an example of poor planning, I think.
Now I have a story (from UCSD) about an idiotic graduate student. I was taking an upper division physics course (3rd quarter electromagnetism with boundary-value problems.) The class had a grader, who was a graduate student. Every homework we got returned to us just had a letter at the top–“A” or “B.” This was frustrating because we wanted to know what we did correctly on the problems, and what we did wrong. So we asked the professor to supply solutions for the problems. When we got the “solutions” from the grader, my friend in the class became very upset–the grader had photocopied one of her homework assignments and submitted it as the “solution.” She went to the professor and complained.
The next week, the graduate student comes into our class during lecture and gives us an apology speech. Apparently he hadn’t taken this class as an undergrad (at his university in China they didn’t offer it) so he had tried to fake his way through the grading. He apologized for the deception and resigned as the grader.
That’s a weird story, QuarkChild.
In my experience, it’s not unheard of for graders—even profs—in upper-level classes to make a solution set by taking the best solutions from the students. Students whose work appeared in the solution sets considered themselves well compensated—in that they got a reputation as major studs.
Er, in a strictly academic sense, that is. (We are talking about physicists . . . 
)