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.
Those who plagiarize after you've explained it don't care. They don't care about the risk of a zero. I hope that you can let your frustration go on this. Sometimes there are going to be people who just don't care. It's not your fault.
Posted by: Karen | May 05, 2017 at 10:00 PM
Ugh. This is the perennial that no one wants to see flower. You've done all you can. It's on them to want to be better than this.
Posted by: Celeste | May 05, 2017 at 10:01 PM
Do you use Turnitin? My most conscientious grad school professor used it. Seemed to take her out of it personally and may have made people more fearful of being caught. Alas, I now know that at least 2/14 students just had other people do their work.
Posted by: Andrea | May 06, 2017 at 08:28 AM
My institution won't pay for a Turnitin subscription. Alas.
Posted by: Jamie | May 06, 2017 at 11:33 AM
Easy for me to say, but I think you need to let it go. There are people who just don't care, as Karen says, or who truly believe that they won't get caught. There are people that must learn the hard way before they care. And then there are people who don't read the syllabus and don't listen. You've done what you can and it is their responsibility no matter which group they fall into. Do you have an email template ready to go for their pleas? Maybe make one that you can personalize just a bit for each plagiarizer who begs via email so you can spend as little of your mental energy on it as possible -- after all, they spent little of their own mental energy on your assignment.
Posted by: Pippi | May 07, 2017 at 05:06 PM
I'm glad that the Honor Code is such a HUGE deal at Thomas Jefferson's school... students are simply expelled if they plagiarize. The consequences are just too extreme, so they don't do it. Well, not that anyone could get away with it in language classes (all you can possibly do is cheat during an exam or copy someone's answers to a questionnaire which sometimes they do and I warn them).
Posted by: L - Mama(e) in Translation | May 10, 2017 at 03:19 PM