December 2009

“As another recent story suggests, plagiarism seems to be governed by a sliding scale, with consequences lessening as the wrongdoer’s status rises.” –Michael Leddy of Orange Crate Art, as quoted at BoingBoing

A recent story on Maureen Dowd shows that she didn’t flunk her course or get a 0 on an assignment for stealing someone else’s work.

When did we decide that it was okay to do this? And why?

For grading:
Decide how you will check for plagiarism. Are you only going to check when a sentence appears unlike the others or when a word you don’t think the student knows is in the work? (This is my preliminary standard. After one plagiarism is found, I check that student’s papers for the rest of the semester.)
Be sure that your policy is clearly stated in your syllabi.
Make sure the policy is the same in each syllabus. (I had one syllabus where I used the departmental template and all first plagiarisms flunked the course, while all the rest of my courses had the students with two plagiarized papers before they flunked the course.)
Make sure that whatever your policy is, you are willing to enforce it. What about that student who is a joy to teach? If you find out they plagiarized on a paper, do you want to flunk them?

For myself, I am starting to wonder if I should add an “egregious plagiarism” statement along the lines of:
If more than half of your paper has been plagiarized, you will automatically fail the course.
If a paragraph has been taken from a source which is not cited in your references, you will automatically fail the course.

But I also wonder if that just encourages cheating on a “lighter” scale.

Note:
I have also added to my syllabus the right to recall papers I have already graded if an incidence of plagiarism is found. In the case that caused me to add that, an egregious policy would have allowed me to fail the student without having to go back and look at older papers.

One of my students told me yesterday before our final that she is leaving school. She owes $6,000 to the school and she doesn’t have the money to pay it.

So she is going to go to her part-time job and work full-time for a while, paying down her bills, maybe taking some classes at the local community college, and then come back. I think it is a good idea, much better than getting out of school with $50,000 in debt.

Others like her are also dropping out, according to the Washington Post.

When choosing between a degree and going to work, paying rent, buying groceries or supporting family members, many students are forced to drop out, said Jean Johnson of Public Agenda, a nonpartisan public policy research firm that conducted a telephone survey of more than 600 people ages 22 to 30 for the report.

I am teaching my first online course next semester. I am a bit nervous about it, but this article by Daniel Willingham gives me some encouragement.

The chief drawback of online schooling was equally obvious to me: The teacher-student relationship, funneled through an Internet connection, would necessarily suffer. How could a teacher really get to know students when all of the interactions were via email and webcams?
That disadvantage was obvious to me until I mentioned it, in passing, to a friend who is an online teacher. Her experience was the just the opposite. She felt that she knew her students better in an online environment than she had in a bricks-and-mortar school.

I was intrigued enough that I tracked down five other online teachers at different grade levels, all of whom had taught in traditional schools. They all reported the same feelings.

Once they explained the reasons, it seemed not only plausible, but obvious.

I had several students plagiarize on papers and one student plagiarized not only his paper but two extra credit assignments.

My husband argued with me over the definition of plagiarism (He does not think missing citations are serious.) and was upset enough to not want to continue the discussion.

This article, which came to me via NCTE, appears to agree.

In his essay “Beating the House: How Inadequate Penalties for Cheating
Make Plagiarism an Excellent Gamble,” Matthew Woessner calculates that plagiarism is a strategy likely to pay off: “when expected value functions indicate that engaging in plagiarism will (in all probability) raise a student’s grade and save her time, assuming the risk of misconduct must be described as rational” (314). Students’ and instructors’—and later, employers’—fixation upon grades inhibits understanding and ameliorating the systemic, contextual nature of the problem. But once one acknowledges, as Woessner does, that a context of evaluation invites academic dishonesty, then it cannot follow that the solution is aggressive punishment of that dishonesty. Yet this is exactly what Woessner, and many others, recommend: “all but the most aggressive plagiarism sanctions inadvertently reward students who elect to engage in this type of misconduct” (313).

The author argues that paying attention to grades limits integrity. I do not think this is true. Grades are always important. In my seventh grade social studies class, when the teacher was out, all but one student cheated on the exam. I reported them and I was also penalized. Were those students, most of whom were from the inner city, really worried about their grades? Or did they think that an easy A would be fun?

The article also says:

This belief helps explain the actions of both students and teachers around the issue of academic dishonesty. If this student were to study successfully, he might get an A on the exam; but if he were to cheat successfully, he would have a better chance of getting an A because cheating mitigates the randomness of the outcome—it eliminates the personal factor and puts the student more firmly in control.

Does that make any sense? Cheating is less random. I suppose it somewhat is true for a test, but how is cheating on a paper, which is the topic of the discussion, less random that actually doing the paper?

I totally disagree with this article, but it is an interesting one to look at because it is a different perspective.

Kevin Brown, in a Chronicle article, talks about some of them. I have, indeed, found these to be true, though I have also been part of a SLAC where the departments were funded separately and competition was fierce.

The specific section I am responding to with that comment is:

Professors at research universities tend to see their departments as the defining aspect of their employment at the institution, fending off space and financial concerns from other departments, while we tend to see the university as a whole, with subgroups within it that help shape us, but do not define us, per se.

When writing a book review, always read the author’s name.

I was working on a review of a book. The book is full of fascinating information told in a very plebian and uninteresting style. It is repetitious and some interesting bits are left out because they are already in print. I wasn’t going to write a scathing review, but I was going to point out some significant issues. I still will. But now I’m going to feel a little more that I am “going out on a ledge” to do that because the author is a big name in the field. There is a significant difference in our statuses; I’m a baby and he is a grandfather.

I am not sure I would have volunteered for the review if I had realized who the author was. I picked the book by its subject matter.

Oh well. At least now the fascinating information is more credible, though I think some of his points are… reaching.

How much am I getting accepted?
In October, my rejection:acceptance was pretty good.

6 poems submitted, 2 accepted, 4 rejected

5 papers (as opposed to presentations) submitted, 2 accepted, 2 rejected, 1 pending

I have tried to be very careful in placing my work where it is most likely to get accepted. Even with that, my acceptance rate is a 2:3 ratio.

This month I had a paper turned down for a chapter. They were probably right to turn it down, but I wish I had taken the time to work on it until they would have accepted it. Unfortunately, I had a book due then, too, and that took precedence. I wonder if I rewrote it now and sent it back if they would be willing to take another look.

I had a presentation for CEA accepted.

I had 6 poems rejected, none accepted.

So this month, my acceptance: rejection rate is 1:6. Gotta get more stuff accepted!

What have I been writing since October?

In November, I had a book review due. The book was potentially interesting but was too tangential for me to really enjoy it. I think I was fair in the review, but I honestly struggled to finish reading it.

I had two or three abstracts to turn in.

And I am fairly sure that I wrote a paper for something, though I don’t remember what it was.

I have a review and an article due this week. Then in two weeks I have two conference presentations. That same week I have a chapter due.

The next week another abstract is due. I need to get cracking.

I sent out an abstract with a subject-verb agreement problem in the first sentence! And it was to an English group. Ouch. “Science fiction and fantasy has…”

How many times have I pointed this same type of error out to my students?

It’s not the best attitude, but it is mine.

From Jorge Cham’s PhD Comics.