It takes a lot...
...to piss me off.
I'm a big softy. No. I'm worse than that. I'm a big squishy. Anybody who knows me knows they can get away with a lot of strange, and sometimes deviant, behavior around me. My big belief is that "if nobody is getting hurt, who cares."
My students know this too. The day a paper is due I get the inevitable "my computer crashed. Can I e-mail it to you tomorrow?" I get all big and tough and say they're going to get a penalty for it being late but most of the time I don't give one. There is one thing I won't tolerate though. Academic dishonesty. This includes cheating on tests and especially plagiarism. Why? I don't care if the kid is just too lazy to study or do the writing. What upsets me is that there are other students who work their asses off to get good grades. Here comes this kid who screws up the curve and makes life harder for the ones who are actually working. Personally, I would hate to spend weeks on a paper and get a A only to find out that some jerk bought a paper on a website and got an A as well. It's just not fair. I'm a big believer in fair.
Thankfully, both the colleges I teach at have accounts with Turnitin.com, an anti-plagiarism website for educators. All my students are required to upload their papers to the site and it generates an "originality report." Basically, the higher the percentage, the more is plagiarized from another source. This is a Good Thing.
So I'm going through the one-foot deep pile of crap...er...papers, when I read a line saying:
My brilliant husband, Bear, has a program that turns scanned documents into Word files. He was more than willing to oblige so I had him scan the paper and then I submitted it for the student. Lo and behold, an 80% match to sources from the web. Ding-ding-ding. I click on the link and what do I find? Stupid's supposedly "original" paper as a web page written by a professor in Toronto. The only thing that didn't make it 100% was that is bibliography was different. Oh joy.
I then checked Stupid's second paper. Once again not submitted but he e-mailed it to me because it was late. Mwuhahaha. I took that file and submitted it. Ding-ding-ding. 91% match. This one was a little more difficult as I didn't want to pay the $29.95 to buy the original paper off the FratFiles.com website. I still was able to match the first two paragraphs of his paper to the one on the website which technically means it's plagiarized.
And what prize does this idiot win? He automatically gets a zero for both the assignments, knocking his highest possible grade down to a 70 for the class. He ended up bombing his exams so I got to fail him anyways. Whoohoo.
What's worse? He has the gall to e-mail me after I had already handed in final grades saying that he had made a "stupid mistake" but was "under a lot of stress." His mother supposedly has a malignant brain tumor--ya right--and he is already on academic probation, which means if he fails this class, he'll be kicked out of school. And here I was feeling bad for wanting to report him to school officials. This kid dug his own grave.
Well, at least I have a nice story to tell my students next semester as a warning. Don't piss off the history professor. LOL. :D
I'm a big softy. No. I'm worse than that. I'm a big squishy. Anybody who knows me knows they can get away with a lot of strange, and sometimes deviant, behavior around me. My big belief is that "if nobody is getting hurt, who cares."
My students know this too. The day a paper is due I get the inevitable "my computer crashed. Can I e-mail it to you tomorrow?" I get all big and tough and say they're going to get a penalty for it being late but most of the time I don't give one. There is one thing I won't tolerate though. Academic dishonesty. This includes cheating on tests and especially plagiarism. Why? I don't care if the kid is just too lazy to study or do the writing. What upsets me is that there are other students who work their asses off to get good grades. Here comes this kid who screws up the curve and makes life harder for the ones who are actually working. Personally, I would hate to spend weeks on a paper and get a A only to find out that some jerk bought a paper on a website and got an A as well. It's just not fair. I'm a big believer in fair.
Thankfully, both the colleges I teach at have accounts with Turnitin.com, an anti-plagiarism website for educators. All my students are required to upload their papers to the site and it generates an "originality report." Basically, the higher the percentage, the more is plagiarized from another source. This is a Good Thing.
So I'm going through the one-foot deep pile of crap...er...papers, when I read a line saying:
In the 1900s, with industrialism in the forefront, cities began a process of ghettoizationI'm sorry but it's only in high levels of academia that people use words like that. Definitely not freshman level history. Red flag number one. This piqued my interest, and feeling a bit vindictive I did some digging. This student, whom I shall refer to as Stupid, didn't submit it to turnitin.com. Red flag number two. I was in a bad mood that day so this was perfect for me.
My brilliant husband, Bear, has a program that turns scanned documents into Word files. He was more than willing to oblige so I had him scan the paper and then I submitted it for the student. Lo and behold, an 80% match to sources from the web. Ding-ding-ding. I click on the link and what do I find? Stupid's supposedly "original" paper as a web page written by a professor in Toronto. The only thing that didn't make it 100% was that is bibliography was different. Oh joy.
I then checked Stupid's second paper. Once again not submitted but he e-mailed it to me because it was late. Mwuhahaha. I took that file and submitted it. Ding-ding-ding. 91% match. This one was a little more difficult as I didn't want to pay the $29.95 to buy the original paper off the FratFiles.com website. I still was able to match the first two paragraphs of his paper to the one on the website which technically means it's plagiarized.
And what prize does this idiot win? He automatically gets a zero for both the assignments, knocking his highest possible grade down to a 70 for the class. He ended up bombing his exams so I got to fail him anyways. Whoohoo.
What's worse? He has the gall to e-mail me after I had already handed in final grades saying that he had made a "stupid mistake" but was "under a lot of stress." His mother supposedly has a malignant brain tumor--ya right--and he is already on academic probation, which means if he fails this class, he'll be kicked out of school. And here I was feeling bad for wanting to report him to school officials. This kid dug his own grave.
Well, at least I have a nice story to tell my students next semester as a warning. Don't piss off the history professor. LOL. :D
Comments