So Flavia posted about plagiarism earlier this week, and then Historiann picked up on it. And I was feeling all smug because I haven’t had a plagiarist in quite some time, but then also was wondering whether I’ve just gone soft, that I’m just so overworked and overwhelmed that I don’t even suspect the plagiarism anymore. Well, I got confirmation today that I haven’t gone soft.
I read the first page of this paper. There wasn’t anything in it, probably, that would have made most people blink. The paper fit the parameters of the assignment. The paper’s ideas were something that this student could likely have produced, given hir previous work. The paper had MLA errors that were typical of a paper that a regular student would submit. There weren’t any weird formatting issues, or weird typos that gave me the tip-off. There was, honestly, nothing suspicious about it. And yet, there was something… something… ineffably… wrong. So I read that first page – even wrote a comment that the thesis statement was “Interesting!”. And then? I thought, you know, I’ve got this funny feeling. Maybe I’ll google a sentence.
And it was a paper that came straight from the internet. The whole freaking thing.
And that’s when I started shaking. Literally, I started shaking. I wasn’t angry. It wasn’t that I was taking it personally. In trying to analyze that physical response, I think that I was just horrified. I think I was horrified that the student did this (and horrified at what it might mean for the student – I hadn’t even gotten to deciding on a punishment – I was seriously like, “but what will happen?“), and I was, well, I think sad, and I think I also was thinking, “What the fuck? Seriously? This on top of all the other things?”
And then I went to my chair. And he was amazing, and supportive, and well, just perfect. (And yes, I know that I criticize him for a lot of things, but I have to give credit where it is due on this because he was perfect.)
Another story, which is unrelated except for that I think that it does relate. Later in the day, I heard some students talking about me in the hall. Apparently, even though they’d come by my office to pick up their papers, and they saw that I was in my office, they assumed that because they’d turned a couple of corners after picking those up that I couldn’t hear them even though they were but 10 feet away from my wide open office door. So they were talking about how they saw the volume of comments on their papers, without reading them, and how they didn’t even want to look at what was there. And a student who’d taken another class with me said, loudly, “No, here’s the thing. I don’t want to read mine, either. Because she really reads your paper. She catches every little thing. But it’s good because you know she actually read your paper. And the comments aren’t mean… they are right. But that’s the most horrible part. She sees everything that you meant to write, and she also sees everything that you did wrong, and everything that you would have caught if you just would have paid attention.”
On the one hand, I was horrified to overhear this speech, in addition to the accompanying conversation. DUDE! I’m in my office with the door open!!!! Do you think I can’t HEAR?!?! On the other, well, I was also proud of myself. Because I am a careful reader of my students’ work. And they know that I am. And 99% of the time, that results in them submitting their own work, because they know I’ll really, really, read it.
I’ve often said that my dissertation director was the best reader of my work that I ever had. Like really – I hated it, but I felt like he read so carefully that he saw what I meant to say. And I admired that. I don’t know that this is true, but I think that I might at least a little bit have learned to do that for my own students from him. So as much as this day sucked on so many levels (it began with plagiarism, nearly ended with the most intense committee meeting I’ve ever chaired, and then I still had 3 more hours left in my day)? It sucks less thinking that might be true.
*And I don’t think that student have been plagiarizing and I’m just not catching them, or, if that’s the case, that there is some mystery to why my students don’t test me with the plagiarism. I think it has to do with the fact that I read drafts, the fact that I assign a lot of small writing assignments that lead up to the big ones, and the fact that the writing assignments that I devise aren’t easily plagiarizable (scaffolding, bizarre topics, they must develop their own topics, etc.). I’m not saying that my students are perfect, but they don’t tend to try to pull fast ones with me with their writing. Because I make it more trouble than it’s worth on the front end.
Reassigned Time 2.0 
I have to say, I love that “She sees everything you meant to write” comment. Because that’s what we do.
Plagiarist aside, I think you should be proud of that, and proud as well that some of your students see that.
Funny, I’m reading this as I’m taking a break to google a few phrases from a student paper…there’s an odd formatting issue and a couple of more sophisticated phrases that I would expect from this student, though he/she has been improving. Fortunately, I’ve found nothing, which I’m taking as a good sign, especially as this assignment is really very difficult to plagiarize, unless you’ve been doing it all term, and I’m sure this student hasn’t (it’s the final of a series of 6 assignments, each of which builds on the last one, so it’s actually not hard to write…but hard to plagiarize, you’d actually have to get someone else to write it with the same knowledge you’ve been creating for 8 weeks). So it’s useful for me to hear you say that this kind of “scaffolded” assignment makes it harder to cheat on!
I once received a paper that I knew–just KNEW–was wrong. For reference, this was an intro to political philosophy class, where the student (with no prior theory background) had referenced multiple obscure books by Habermas that we hadn’t read in class (and which I hadn’t even heard of–that obscure). Googling for plagiarism gave me nothing. But I asked that student to rewrite, because the paper deviated from the topic far enough that it wasn’t appropriate to the assignment.
Two months later, that Chronicle (or Inside Higher Ed? Can’t remember) article by the person who writes term papers for pay came out. And damn if every single tactic he outlined in his article wasn’t used in my student’s paper. So even though it WASN’T “plagiarism” of the sort you can search for, I was able to catch it as academically dishonest anyway.
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That’s a great compliment to you.
Much better than students gossiping about how they know you don’t read their papers because they write two pages, repeat the text on those pages until they reach the minimum word count, and still get As for the assignment, as former students have told me about one professor . . .
Heh. You’ve still got it, Dr. Crazy! Students–esp. those who choose to plagiarize–just have no clue as to what they DON’T know that we do know.
[…] Dr. Crazy caught a plagiarist this week. […]
Sympathies because even when you can quickly get to the point of sleeping like a baby, having to deal with the hassle of plagiarism is no fun. But you’re right that when we hear and read a student’s work all term, the plagiarism is often incredibly easy to catch. I’ve not had a plagiarist in the last two year but I’m still powering through the last big stack of essays so we’ll see how it goes. Like you, I’m fairly confident I’m catching them if they are in the pile because these are all capstone papers that deal with projects they’ve been working on for weeks. The disconnect between an original proposal and a plagiarised paper is a big clue that I appreciate on top of the benefits of teaching students how to propose and draft a project!
Scaffolding, or even just requiring a proposal, definitely helps. You’d think that a student who’s planning to steal a paper (or reuse one of hir own) could create a proposal for/from said paper in an hour or so, but often (s)he can’t, or at least doesn’t. The proposal that’s nearly as long as the assigned paper is one of those giveaways that something is amiss.
I haven’t caught a lot of plagiarists in the last year or so. I’m not sure whether that’s because I’ve been a bit overwhelmed dealing with new things, or because , too, do a lot of scaffolding, and have also been using a turnitin equivalent, mostly in the early stages to help students catch major problems themselves, and that scares off some of the potential plagiarists. Having said that, I, too, will probably find a plagiarized paper among the final batches just now arriving in my grading queue. Because I do the scaffolding, plagiarized papers these days are almost almost supposed last-minute changes of subject by students who ignored or otherwise evaded the scaffolding assignments (and so were probably going to fail anyway, which would have been the wiser choice than plagiarizing).
And I can identify with the shaking. While I tend to take plagiarism more or less in stride, discovering it is always upsetting, even if only for an hour or two. Depending on the student, I feel sad, or mad, or exasperated, or all three, for a little while, and then I move on, having made a mental note that I have another 2 or 3 hours of work to do once the final grades are in (we have a special “honor charge pending” grade, so I can and do put plagiarism cases aside and keep on ploughing through the grading stack, coming back to the honor charge paperwork at the end).
The “She sees everything you meant to write” comment is amazing. Love it.
In awe of you, as usual. Less for the efficient catching of the plagiarist – we all know how to do that – than for the brilliant comments you overheard from your office. It’s always gratifying to know that your students appreciate being put through their paces.
[…] Crazy over at Reassigned Time 2.0 writes a poignant post on discovering plagiarism (as well as the emotional impact of marking […]
First they call it a “mandatory furlough”; however, we can’t travel too far unless we spill our own drinks on us, My husband is in a successful local band, so he’s along haired hippy too (we both clean up decently). It’s like The Help, only nobody runs to me with any cleaning solutions for this mess. Anyone know of a quick spray?
I google a unique phrase in quotes for every paper I receive. Am I atypical?
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[…] Dr. Crazy caught a plagiarist this week. […]