In my undergraduate classes about 10% of written assignments will have some degree of plagiarism. These days I define it in my syllabus, and spell out the potential consequences explicitly. When I introduce an assignment I say clearly, "I do not tolerate plagiarism. I would hate to give you a zero, but I will give you a zero if you plagiarize." I give zeroes. I don't back down on giving zeroes, no matter how plaintively a student asks me how she should have known that quoting Wikipedia without attribution would present a problem.
And yet I can't seem to move the needle. For the assignment I just finished grading, I was as firm as I knew how to be when I introduced the task. I freaked out a bunch of students who never had any intention of plagiarizing. Lots of them showed up in my office, asking questions like, "Is it okay for me to use this word that the authors use?" (Answer: yes.)
And...approximately 10% of the completed assignments had some degree of plagiarism. I know I have been complaining a lot this week, friends, but plagiarism is THE WORST. I don't know how to respond to it in a way that doesn't eat up a ridiculous quantity of hours and mental energy. I'm not going to stop requiring students to write, and I'm certainly not going to pretend I don't see it when they plagiarize.
One of the most painful things is the codas, the students who email in hopes that perhaps the axe needn't actually fall. You know what I might put in my syllabus? A re-grading policy: any re-grading requests must be made in person, not by email, and -- by the way -- re-grading may or may not work out in a student's favor. If I spot an oversight, the grade may go down further. Then I can just reply to the piteous emails with a screenshot of that part of the syllabus.
There is a cynical part of my brain observing that the students who are unmoved by the "don't plagiarize" part of a syllabus will be similarly unaffected by the hypothetical "don't beg" part of a syllabus. And at the same time, conscientious students may hesitate to request that I correct a math error because they're afraid I'll say HAHA TEN MORE POINTS DEDUCTED BECAUSE I HATE RE-GRADING!! (Which I would never ever do.) (Even though re-grading is really painful.)
This is not a problem I am likely to resolve tonight, here at the end of an exhausting week. Perhaps some solutions will present themselves to me after a good night's sleep. In any case, I am steadfastly refusing to check my email tonight. I don't even want to know what's in there right now.
Recent Comments