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As teachers, we all remember the first time we busted a student for plagiarizing. A range of emotions accompanies such a discovery. I'm angry at the student for trying to take a shortcut on the assignment. I'm saddened that the student is too stressed or lazy or apathetic to actually attempt to complete the assignment herself. I'm shocked that the student thought I wouldn't catch him. And I'm satisfied that I have the professional chops to sniff out the mildest whiff of plagiarism.
It's the middle of the term at many K-12 schools and universities--AKA cheating season--and bloggers are weighing in with stories about plagiarism, theories about its causes, and methods for discouraging cheating on written assignments.
Happy Chyck shares a recent bust, delineates the telltale signs of plagiarism, and asks her students to bring. it. on.
Here are some clues Detective HappyChyck gathered:
- Student approached me at the beginning of the class and asked what the missing assignment on his grade was. We spent 2 days in class working on it last week. How could he not know what it was?
- After the student learned from his classmates what the assignment was, he was convinced that he did the assignment. Oh, really?
- I check my electronic in-box, which jogged my memory. He had turned in an empty document. Common kid ploy. They hope that I'll just check off the list off assignments by looking at their names in the file names and not actually open and check the assignment. Is it possible he was trying to dupe me, or was it a technical error?
- I told the student if he could show me the completed assignment on his computer, I'd accept it. He said he threw it away. If you ever look at these kids' computers, they look much like their backpacks. Funny how when they need an assignment, they've just cleaned and thrown things out. Up until that moment they are teenage pack rats.
- A few minutes later the student tells me he's found the file on his computer. He brings it to me to look at, and he says, "Here it is. See, here's my name." He is talking about his name labeled on the inside of the document. Thanks for showing me that you put your name on your paper kid. That's not weird at all.
- The assignment is very well done. I'd even say it's an A paper. The kid is not an A student. We're talking lacking ability here. I accepted the assignment from the student, but I looked up the assignments from his nearby friends. None of them turned in the assignment.
- Not many people earned a solid A on the assignment. I looked up the students who had a perfect score on the assignment. The girl who sat one row over and two seats back had a perfect score. Bingo.
Their heads are probably still spinning. Did you see how fast I discovered your cheating ways, children? Still wanna mess with me? I guess it's time for me to tell the story of the time I benched (or rather their actions landed them on the bench) half the baseball team because they were a bunch of cheaters.
A couple years ago, I was a teaching assistant for two very different classes. Within a single week, I caught a plagiarist in each class. The first student plagiarized--I kid you not--an ethics paper. The second student--and again, I'm not pulling your leg--plagiarized an assignment where he was required to plagiarize. I'm still trying to figure out which situation is more ironic.
Allow me to explain. The professor of the second class, Bob Ostertag, asked students to write papers composed entirely of brief quotations from websites. The assignment was brilliant, as it forced students to think about writing: about essay organization, sentence order, phrasing, and the practice of research. It was lovely. Students color-coded their sentence fragments to match entries in their bibliography. One student, however, had clearly just taken a series of markers and underlined random phrases, claiming they were from particular sources. Instead, he had copied and pasted the entire text of a single web page. (You can listen to Ostertag talk about plagiarism, copyright, and other issues in a video filmed during a talk he gave last spring at UC Davis.)
Why do students cheat? Lauren Forcella gathers hypotheses from teens. I'm disturbed by the distinction made by one student between "cheating" and "'white' cheating"--a concept
