Spring08: Alas, plagiarism

Well, here it is, the first real day of classes for me this semester, and I am already dealing with a case of plagiarism. It is, alas, a really egregious case of plagiarism - instead of a student lazily paraphrasing (not cutting and pasting, but still scarily close to the original), this student simply cut-and-pasted from the Internet and turned in the work as his own, word for word.

Ironically... the source that he plagiarized from was me! Ha! I guess the universe does have a sense of humor. Last year I spent a chunk of time uploading annotated links to a library of online Folklore and Mythology texts at the http://edu20.org website (very much worth looking into - it's a fine project by Graham Glass!), and this student, in his annotated bibliography, simply copied the annotations he found at that website and turned them in as his own work. It didn't take long for me to recognize my own words (yes, I should laugh - it is kind of funny), but at the same time it is also sad to realize that this student has so little self-awareness that he did not realize that the copying would have been detected immediately by anyone at all - it simply didn't sound like what he would ever write.

This is sad in so many ways I cannot count them all. So, I will just list 5 ways in which this is sad, since I am a big fan of the number 5.

1. What does this say about the student's level of alienation? It must be very high. The assignment was for him to find five books he might be interested in using for his semester project and tell me why he is interested in those books. A totally open-ended assignment, very student-centric, and instead he cut-and-pasted the book annotations from the Internet. That is serious alienation. I tend to suspect that students are far, far more alienated from school than we even begin to realize. Although I really DO care about his thoughts and interests, he assumed that I cared so little about his thoughts and interests that he felt it was okay to copy something that had nothing to do with him and turn it in. Wow, that is so sad I don't even really need to say more than that... but yes, there are other dimensions to this sadness, too.

2. This student has wasted his time and learned nothing from the assignment. You do not learn anything by cutting and pasting.

3. This student has wasted my time. Depending on how this goes, it may or may not continue to be a time-wasting red-tape nightmare for both of us.

4. The incident turns me from a teacher into a lawyer. Ugh. If I wanted to be a lawyer, I would have gone to law school. Instead of engaging in a fun and useful discussion of the books that he is interested in (this is a really fun assignment for me to read and respond to with the students in class), we instead had a depressing discussion about Academic Misconduct procedures at my school.

5. My plagiarism awareness assignment, on which he had gotten 100%, apparently is not accomplishing its goal. I tried really hard to make that assignment a positive and creative assignment, where students could see that it's more fun to do your own work and express yourself in school. Alas. I guess he did that assignment on "automatic pilot." Who knows.

It is rare for me to ever find a student who actually intends to cheat - and I do not think this student intended to cheat. At the same time, the factors of alienation, boredom, lack of self-awareness, etc. that are involved in plagiarism, aside from cheating, can totally subvert the educational endeavor.

Admittedly, this is something that I don't deal with often. Thank goodness. But having it happen on the very first day of class, UGH. Luckily the other students who have gotten started early have been doing delightful stuff, as always. I love teaching these classes... I just don't like being turned from a teacher into a cop/detective/lawyer, etc., alas. :-)