This is fascinating: a professor goes back to meet a student he failed for plagiarizing. (Her plagiarism was direct and outright, copying a paper directly.) Because he thought the consequences were too extreme, and the college system too regimented ("over and over I saw how the nature of the institution and its agents reduced the complexity of student experience to neat bureaucratic decision tree") she was the only student he ever punished for plagiarism.
The agents of the institution reduce, by the very nature of the institution, the complex experience of students into tree-like bureaucracy of decision making. This has happened over and over.
I've caught several plagiarists, one kind and another, but never one making her first and only foray into the dark arts. I'm wondering what he'd do confronted with Adam Wheeler.
Yeah, me too. Whenever conditions warranted my talking to a dean's office, I always discovered that I was not the first prof. to do so. Only once have I exercised the nuclear option of failing them for the class. (The case was completely egregious, exactly what the student did was amazingly deceptive, and she went to great lengths to deny she had done it. Of course, I informed her of my final decision the day they were filling out evaluations. Whee!)
They met at the Waffle House. Lulz.
STC: Imagine getting a call from the college professor who failed you for plagiarism. Do you suppose she felt smothered?
And then there's this fucking asshole, a professor from my alma mater: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n10/kevin-kopelson/diary
After that, I did well enough in school - even without plagiarising - to get into both Harvard and Yale. Well enough on the SATs, as well. Nor did it hurt that I'd attended both Bronx High School of Science and Juilliard, where I studied piano.
And that's when I clicked the close tab.
I would love to be able to suck my own dick.
What are those 4,500 words doing in the LRB?
I have a lot of sympathy for those who have made mistakes, not properly cited something etc. But I've had one or two do exactly this- they've run against a deadline, and substituted someone else's work, start to finish (when they could simply have asked for an extension, which I never deny). And in those cases, giving the F and moving on hasn't caused too many problems (that I know).
One student's reaction was basically "You've caught me, fair's fair", as in she took the risk and it didn't work out for her; she knew what she was doing. Besides the failing grade on that one paper (she'll do fine in the course at large), her future work will be examined more closely.
I've not felt I've been harsh on this, but I certainly seem to have been harsher than this fellow. And certainly there are situations where the bureaucratic options can be insufficient; I guess I agree with him there.
kill 'em all. let thoth sort 'em out.
That essay really confused me, and I say that as someone who just reported yet another student to the Dean's office for plagiarism. So it's not like I'm unfamiliar with the subject.
He feels the university system can be too rigid in it's response to plagiarism. OK, fair enough, studies have actually shown that a too tough "zero tolerance" policies results in more plagiarism because soft hearted professors stop reporting students. This isn't an argument against plagiarism, it's an argument for altering university policies. However, his university's response sounded pretty mild. The students only punishment was to fail the paper and have a letter on file in the office. Trust me, unless she self-reports the offense to an employer or grad school, no one will ever know. Our school is similar, and there's no "one size fits all" response. The university tries to balance consistency while acknowledging the complexity of individual student circumstances.
He also argues that students have a hard time figuring out what plagiarism is, that it's not always cut and dried, and that he even considered teaching a course on "riffing." Again, that's fair point. We spend a lot of time discussing paraphrasing when citing material, especially since our students are citing difficult scientific literature. Just because it's hard or that there's a gray area doesn't mean plagiarism doesn't exist. It doesn't sound like his example student was confused or riffing, she knowingly plagiarized.
His major issue seems to be that he feels bad about making her feel bad because she's really a good kid who made a mistake. Or maybe his point was that MLK plagiarized so it's OK. Or maybe it's that if some cranky prof had reported MLK for plagiarism we wouldn't have the civil rights movement so nobody should get in trouble for plagiarism. See, I'm confused.
Me, too. I liked the piece, but can't help thinking that I've dealt with so many more shocking academic integrity situations/repercussions. If this is the one that scarred him for life, he got off pretty easy.
Again, I agree. It doesn't seem that harsh as a punishment; I think his issues are around the singling the student out/ turning from an instructor into an authority figure axis.
I can't imagine failing a first-time plagiarist for doing so on a draft, especially if they weren't on record as a problem child. That said, it always irritates me because it's idiocy times two: the decision to plagiarize, and the belief that they have their own private internet which I cannot access. Sigh.
I did fail a student this semester for plagiarizing a final paper directly from the freaking Encyclopaedia Brittanica. It was unsurprising to find that he had a disciplinary paper trail miles long.
Assignment: Describe a biographical situation in which you remember and then utilize some important advice you've been given. Conclude your story with a lesson drawn from the experience.
Knoxville: Summer 1995
by Screen Name
We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child. A screaming comes across the sky. It was a short one-paragraph item in the morning edition. "Do you understand, ladies and gentlemen, that all the horror in plagiarism is in just this - that there is no horror!" Of course, I had always enjoyed masquerades, of the sort where the mask may be dropped at that critical moment it presumes itself as reality.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in mind ever since. "It is a truth universally acknowledged," he said, "that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
All this happened, more or less. Here's how it started. Three o'clock in February. All the sky was blue and high. My apartment in New York was on Perry Street, a five minute walk from the White Horse. I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. A green and yellow parrot, which hangs in a cage outside the door, keeps repeating over and over:
"Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi! That's all right!"
I am 40 years old and haven't been to bed with a woman for four years. I have no women friends. I am an invisible man.
For a long time, I went to bed early. But not always straight away. Now, when I am run down and flocked around by the world, I go down to Farte Cove off the Yazoo River and take my beer to the end of the pier where the old liars are still snapping and wheezing at one another. This is where I am now, but the lake is dry. Out in this desert we are testing bombs, that's why we came here. The colors seem very bright against the mist, and through the air, so softly we cannot be sure we hear it, come the sound of the men chanting to welcome in the night. It was a pleasure to burn.
In order of appearance:
James Agee, "A Death in the Family"
Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"
Haruki Murakami, "A Wild Sheep Chase"
Aleksandr Kuprin, "Yama (the Pit)," (that particular quote itself lifted and massaged from Nelson Algren's "The Man With the Golden Arm")
William Gaddis "The Recognitions"
F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby"
Jane Austen, "Pride and Prejudice"
Kurt Vonnegut, "Slaughterhouse-Five"
Louis-Ferdinand Celine, "Journey to the End of the Night"
JP Donleavy, "A Fairy Tale of New York'
Hunter S. Thompson, "The Rum Diary"
David Foster Wallace, "Infinite Jest"
Kate Chopin, "The Awakening"
Charles Bukowski, "Women"
Ralph Ellison, "Invisible Man"
Marcel Proust, "Swann's Way"
Barry Hannah, "Airships"
Adrienne Rich "Trying to Talk with a Man"
Andrea Barrett, "The Forms of Water"
Ray Bradbury, "Fahrenheit 451"
This was amazing.
Nah, if you get stuck just go to 100 best first lines from novels, the essay pretty much writes itself: http://www.pantagraph.com/news/article_a125216a-649f-5414-88b5-76a688ea3b6a.html
Hope I don't get expelled.
@Screen Name: My personal bureaucratic decision tree (it's a poplar, incidentally) tells me I should buy you a shot at the Bawl.
@C_WEBB If I can get several others to plagiarize your purchase I might get drunk enough to actually start talking to people.
SN, you'll be in good mute company.
For a few lines, I was thinking, 'Carson McCullers novel?'
He was born with the gift of plagiarism and a sense that the world was dumb.
I really loved the honor code at my university, which expelled students for any kind of cheating -- as well as roommates who knew. I always tell my students about that, then say it doesn't matter what code the university has, I have a lot of time on my hands and will personally make sure they get kicked out if they cheat. Neither is true, but it basically works.
I failed this one bozo for plagiarism (who had written a four-page paper by copying lines from the introduction to a standard translation of a play -- adding the phrase "in my opinion" at the beginning of every third sentence) and he was from the Ag school. So a dean from the ag school shows up for the little kangaroo court that you have to hold whenever you fail some bozo for plagiarism, and argued that writing four pages' worth of English was too hard for his boy, and anyway, back in his native country his method of composition would be considered SOP. So I failed the dean, too.