A certain unnamed office-mate of mine (after today, I'm thinking of calling him "Kewpie Doll") caught a plagiarism case. There were whole pages copied directly from different web-sites. It was so glaring that he noticed it right away just from reading through. He was easily able to track it down with Google. However, he completely failed to be fired with the righteous indignation proper to the situation. He went and talked to his supervisor, and that person told him that that failing the plagiarist on that paper was the absolute minimum punishment, and that failing them for the entire class was perfectly possible.
Now one thing that's clear is that there has to be a Talk. Several of the other office-mates said, well, okay, don't fail her in the class but you have to make her cry. You just gotta do it. Kewpie Doll: I don't want to make her cry. I just want her to know that she can't do that.
Still, I was expecting at least a few fireworks. Instead I hear the following dialogue.
Kewpie Doll: You know you can't do this right.
Cheater: Yeah I know.
Kewpie Doll: You know you can really get in a lot of trouble for this.
Cheater: I just didn't know whether I should put a works cited page at the end or what?
Kewpie Doll: Look, there needs to be some sort of penalty for this.
Cheater: Well, if you want I can rewrite it. I mean, it won't be five pages, but...
Kewpie Doll: I'm just saying, there needs to be some sort of penalty because if it hadn't struck me and I hadn't done research--well, you're presenting other people's ideas as your own. You know you can't do this right?
Cheater: Yeah, I know.
Kewpie Doll: Are you unclear about how to cite things, or were you just trying to fill out the page requirement?
Cheater: Well, I kind of like did write it but it was like three pages, so I just put some stuff in, and I was gonna change it but then it was like 1 o'clock.
Kewpie Doll: Okay, well look, you need to rewrite it, but there has to be some kind of penalty. What do you think is fair?
Cheater: [No answer.]
Kewpie Doll: You're not going to be able to get above a certain grade on this paper.
Gentle reader, do you know what that ceiling grade is going to be? A C. The gentleman's C, apparently. I have too much respect for female genitalia to say that what Kewpie Doll was doing here was "pussying out."
Following the above conversation, he proceeded to discuss with "Cheater" for 45 minutes how to make her paper better on her re-write. And get this, the paper was on copyright and intellectual property (specifically with respect to music sampling, U2 and Negativeland). And GET THIS: Cheater is arguing in her paper that U2 was right, Negativeland was wrong, and sampling music is cheating.
Kewpie Doll: Never do this again. Some teachers would throw you right out of the course for this.
Cheater: I know, I know. All I was thinking was "length, length, length."
Maybe that's what Negativeland was thinking too. Points off for hypocrisy.
8 comments:
Your office has an uncanny ability to make me angry as hell. She'd have a complaint on its way to the ODS if it was me. A "C"? A f''ing *C*? Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Also, Negativeland was totally in the right, and that case screwed over a lot of contemporary music.
Oh, mercy. This very thing happened to me, only Kewpie Doll was the other faculty member team-teaching a course with me. I was furious, and then he goes and tells the (graduate!) student that the best he can get in the class is a... ... ...B!
I have never team-taught a course since, and never will.
This is why students cheat. For the most part, the penalties are nonexistent. I would be pissed, and I would tell Kewpie Doll this in no uncertain terms. I would also try and get KD to change his mind. He's done the confrontation bit, now all he needs to do is stick the big mess into an envelope and send it off to the Dean of Students.
I may be an evil representation of the monolithic capital machine, but that girl should have failed the paper, been made to cry and once she finally manages to stop the waterworks told that "you've failed the class and life. don't bother coming in until you retake it next semester, IF they let you stay in school," just to make her cry again.
What will Kewpie Doll do when Cheater does it again? In my experience, she will. She hasn't learned one thing. But he has: to be a compliant, easily manipulated wuss-bag.
This is why I quit grad school.
Good luck!
i like the conversation itself, it sound like KD is actually apoligizing to the student for having to confront her, doesn't it? "well you know i'd rather not do this, but i have to address it somehow - help me out here, will you?"
i'm always surprised how students imagine that a prof simply cannot have the same access to the internet - "wait a sec, they have computers too?! waa?!" that student needed some good old fashioned corporal punishment, but not in a perverted way, of course, that would be scandalous and all over the tele...
Thanks for the input all! Mikhail, you're right, that's exactly what it sounded like he was doing. And yeah, though we have Blackboard Safeassign here, where Blackboard will even tell you if the person plagiarized, this kid was caught the old-fashioned way, just because something about the prose felt wrong. Angry Prof, a GRAD student plagiarized!? That's unreal.
Just in case y'all would be amused to know this, the day after I overheard this conversation, I caught a couple of my own students cheating. How's that for karma. So now I guess I have to do the paperwork myself too! But I've gotta say, I have a certain amount of indignation built up for the confrontation part. Dumb kids.
At my university there would be major repercussion. Most instructors are more than willing to both fail the cheater and do their damnedest to actually get the cheater kicked out of the university. It's a heinous crime against scholars everywhere.
It's amazing what students think they can get away with. I'm an editor at a University student-run newspaper. A few weeks ago, I found out one of my writers had been making up quotes in his stories. I forwarded the writer the e-mail that someone sent me to tell me about the invented quotes and said, "we need to talk." I have not received a reply.
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