Thursday, October 10, 2013

Plagiarism

Sigh.

Grading midterms, I have come across my first case of plagiarism.

It is always so disheartening.

And always so infuriating, because WTF -- it's like they don't even try hard.

"How will you know if we plagiarize?" a kid asked me before the exam, whereupon I shot him a pitying look.

"Oh, please," I said.  "I'll know."

He looked dubious.

"Son," I said, "I've been teaching 26 years.  I know what a freshman level essay exam looks like by this point.  Believe me."

But they never do.

2 comments:

J. Otto Pohl said...

I had a serious problem with plagiarism in Kyrgyzstan. I just kept ratcheting up the penalties. Eventually, it worked. But, you have to be committed to failing every single student you catch at a minimum. It would have helped if I had any backing whatsoever from the administration.

Contingent Cassandra said...

Commiserations. It is, indeed, disheartening (and energy-sapping, and time-consuming, and generally detrimental to everybody's morale, useful educational activities, etc., etc.