Every semester, at least one person turns in heavily plagiarized work. The policy against it is on the syllabus and on every paper assignment. I devote an entire lecture to the topic. I tell my students straight up that I run their papers through plagiarism detection software (and I do, too). But there’s one in every crowd.
I find plagiarism frustrating not so much out of righteous indignation, but because it’s a huge waste of my time as an instructor. Before I had access to plagiarism-detection software, I’d lose time because I had to do some research to find the source. This still happens once in a while, as the plagiarism-detection software isn’t perfect. When a sentence hits my ear that sounds like a grad student wrote it, I put the pertinent part in Google as a phrase search (second-semester freshmen don’t usually deploy phrases like “sexual politics”).
These days, the detection software does most the initial research, but I still have to parse through its report, eliminating false positives. After all, I prefer to give the student the benefit of the doubt. The software doesn’t know the difference between legitimate quotation and stealing, but it color codes the offending passages and gives you links to their origin. It’s helpful, but not automatic. It still takes human intervention, which means it takes time.
That’s phase one. Phase two involves stepping through the formal procedure for reporting the crime. This involves a series of emails in a certain sequence, with the paper attached and a link to the report the software generates. Then it’s a waiting game while the stakeholders sign off and the student’s failing grade is assigned.
When I taught face to face, the worst part of the process was confronting the student. Some flatly deny. Most plead ignorance (even if they’d lifted every word from a single source without any attribution). Some become very emotional. Now that I’m teaching at a distance, informing the student is done via email. And, surprisingly, no one ever replies. I dispatched one this morning–my first of the fall semester.
But what should be made of it? Are the kids less concerned with honesty, or is it simply easier to catch them these days? I understand that good people do bad thing. I understand that time constraints are difficult for students. I understand, too, that I’m only talking about a very small percentage of the students I teach, the vast majority of which do their own work. But the small percentage who try to skate by frustrate me.
[This is the third installment in an ongoing series of posts about my experiences teaching in an online environment after years of experience teaching face to face. You might also be interested in part one and part two. The journey continues in part four.]
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