Final Exams week and term papers
Published on Dec 12, 2007 at 4:30 pm.
2 Comments.
Filed under college teaching.
Just a note for my regular readers. I am still here. However, this is final exams week, and I am swamped. When I was a student, I used to think that the professors had it easy during finals week. After all, they didn’t have to teach classes, so they had nothing else to do, right? Sadly, some of the college’s administrators seem to have the same idea.
But, the reality is that I am now every bit as busy during finals, if not more so, than I was when I was a student. I have to create exams, I have to make the keys, and I have to grade the exams. Also, there are plenty of other papers to grade. The last set of papers are turned in last week, and I have to grade them to turn back this week. Oh, and there are also all the papers that take me longer to grade than I had planned. They are stacking up, and they have to be graded. Then, there are students who are trying to turn in late work. Every semester, there are a lot of students trying to turn in late work. Each one seems to think that they are the only student who is trying to turn in late work. If I actually took time to grade all of that work, then I’d never have time to do anything else. I spend untold hours grading all semester. Then, students pick this week to turn in what would take me five hours to grade. With ten students trying to do that, … . Well, there simply are not enough hours to do that. Of course, this late work isn’t really worth grading, for the most part. After all, they can’t actually do the work properly in such a short period of time. I guess that they think that they’ll get points for simply turning it in, or that I’ll be too busy to grade it and I’ll just give them full credit. Well, that isn’t what happens.
And, for my astronomy class, I give the students a term paper. It is amazing what they’ll turn in. Seeking Solace recently wrote about a student’s term paper. So, it isn’t just my students. But, really, this is silly. These are supposed to be college students. I had an assignment that was a seven to ten page paper. So, a student picks a topic that has a lot of information on it. There are several books in the library about their topic. There is a set of reference volumes in the library about space exploration, with chapters in there about her topic. I know, since I wrote one of them. Does she look at any of this? No. To get her seven pages, she uses 24 point font, 1.5 inch margins, and an inch between paragraphs. She counts the cover page and the bibliography, and she puts the conclusion paragraph (loosely termed, since it was only two sentences) on a separate page. That comes to barely seven pages. Oh, and her bibliography? It is three internet sources, with two being Wikipedia. Yeah, right. She put a LOT of effort into the paper. The students have had months to write the paper, and this is the best that she can do??? She must have spent a couple hours, at least, the night before it was due researching and writing it. This is supposed to be a term paper. That means that it takes the full term to do. In her sources, there were apparently two statements that did not mesh. So, she says one thing, and then says the other just two paragraphs later. It is obvious that she didn’t think about what she was writing. She simply paraphrased her sources. Now, I had another student write on the same topic. His bibliography was a page and a half. He also had a cover page, but he did not count it, nor did he count his bibliography. He did not count the final page of text, either, since it had only a few lines on it. He used ten point font, and it looked like 1.5 line spacing. What he counted came to ten pages (14 pieces of paper). He really did a lot of work. He pulled together information from a variety of sources. He synthesized it into a paper. He pointed out that different authors had different things to say on certain matters. Fine. He noticed that. The other student didn’t. He proofread his paper. There were no serious grammatical errors, or strange words that were spelled correctly (so spell check didn’t catch them) but not the right word for the sentence. His paper seemed to be one that he took at least a month to work on. His paper was college level work. The other student’s paper was elementary school level work, at best.
Oh, and there was also the student who came up to one of our adjunct faculty. This studnet has not attended class all semester, done none of the work, taken none of the exams, and who wanted to make up all the exams and do all the labs by Friday. Yeah. Like that is going to happen. Even if she were brilliant, then there’d be no way to physically do all that in just a couple of days. So, when she was told “No!”, she asked for an incomplete in the class. But, that’s not all. She was also signed up for my class at the same time! She was taking both first and second semester of the course concurrently, and she did the same in my class, and also asked for an incomplete. What nerve! She didn’t even offer a lame excuse. She just acted like it was our duty to let her make up everything in 48 hours or to give her an incomplete. Of course, she didn’t get her incompletes. So, now she is going to have two F’s on her transcript for the semester.
Every semester this just seems to get worse. At least so far, I have not found any blatant plagiarism, but I am not done grading, yet.
-Astroprof
Update: I spoke too soon about the plagiarism. Someone lifted some things from Wikipedia, complete with underlined links and end notes.
Seeking Solace on December 12, 2007 at 8:43 pm: 1
Wow. I once had a student copy a section from a website which included “Click here for more information”.
My husband and I were trying to figure out if students did the same thing when we were in college back in the 1980s. If they did, you didn’t hear about it. Plus, there was no Internet to copy from. You either had to find someone to do the paper, did the paper the prior semester, or buy it from one of those ads found in the back of Rolling Stone!
Brian W. on December 13, 2007 at 12:21 am: 2
There are times I am glad that I stay on m y mountain and that my wife is the one in academia. For whats it worth she has the same problems in the Philippine system. On the other hand you must get some satisfaction from your work or you would not do it.
Brian