A very poor investment
Published on May 11, 2006 at 6:35 pm.
1 Comment.
Filed under college teaching.
Well, I’ve given my last finals. Grades are due tomorrow. I told my students that all their work is due last week. I don’t have time to grade anything but finals before grades are due. Well, these two show up to the final and plead with me to take their term papers (due almost a month ago). I tell them that it is way too late. Anyway, they plead. So, I tell them to leave the papers, and if and only if I have time, that I will look at them, but I won’t promise anything. Well, I looked. Neither paper seemed quite right. Hey, what do you expect? The students don’t have time to write a good paper during final exams week! Well, these were not badly written. That was a first clue. Second, they were not the right format, and they weren’t quite the narrow topic that I wanted. So, I decided to look them up. Sure enough. Both were plagiarized. One was cut and past from a couple of wikipedia articles. The other, though, was different.Â
Normally, my students just cut and past from web pages, or else they just use an entire web site. Heck, one student turned in a paper that said “Click Here” to access more information. Yeah, right. Another one used equation numbers that started at 24. Yeah, like that wasn’t lifted from somewhere. Another semester, two students both plagiarized from the SAME web site. They copied different sections, but the end of one paper overlapped several paragraphs with the beginning of the other one.  What was even more stupid was that they were lab partners!!! One student clearly didn’t understand the concept and photocopied an encyclopedia article and turned it it. Yeah, like I wasn’t going to catch that one.
OK, so what was special about this semester’s plagiarism? Well, I did a search on a key phrase of the paper, and lo and behold there was his paper! OK, it wasn’t the whole paper. It was only the first page. You see, the first page of the paper was shown as an example of what the rest was like on a term paper site where you can buy a term paper. This particular one was rather expensive at $75. So, this student pays big bucks for a paper that winds up hurting their grade. He’d have been better taking a zero. That makes this a very poor investment choice.
Do they really get away with turning these things in with their other classes? I find that every semester I find plagiarized papers. It has been several years now that I have not found one. Another physics faculty member at my college also assigns papers, and has had the same result. We both every semester find at least one, and usually more than one plagiarized paper. Do we just look harder than the other faculty, or does everyone catch students? Or perhaps, the students just think that they can pull off something like this with a science professor that might be caught by someone in the humanities? I don’t know. Oh, and my colleague also found an intact term paper online from a student this semester.
I have noticed that just about every term paper turned in very late, as in finals week, is plagiarized. The students are not slow in writing the paper, nor are they waiting for a book to come in from another campus or something. One student once had ordered a book and it was late arriving, but he came and asked me about turning in the paper late after the book arrived. He actually did a very good paper. But the rest are just about always a case of the student blowing off the paper, and suddenly realizing that they want a grade for it, but only have 30 minutes to an hour to write it. So, they cut and past off of the internet. I haven’t caught one who purchased a paper before. That is a new one. Perhaps a few have slipped past me. That’s a sad thought, since I already find between 5 and 10% of my students’ term papers are plagiarized. I know that I am missing some. This semester I made an extra point of warning them about not plagiarizing. I still got three. Well, that isn’t surprising, since the students who plagiarize don’t listen to me anyway. That is obvious from their exam and laboratory scores.
Anyway, it is really frustrating.
-Astroprof
Emmaduel on August 30, 2006 at 4:14 am: 1
I have noticed that just about every term paper turned in very late, as in finals week