Lesson Plan Über Alles

Link to a Site a Student Plagiarized

Here's a site a student used on the Man's Search for Meaning essay. 

What Does It Mean When Students Get “Help” on Their Essays?

 

With students finding new ways to adapt to instructors’ defenses against plagiarism, such as making students submit their typed essays to turnitin.com, more and more students are attempting to beat the system by getting “help” from a variety of sources. “Help” is a loaded word with many meanings, many of which indicate that students are not giving me authentic representations of their writing. While there are many shadings of meaning to the word “help,” I will break it down in its two basic applications:

1. The tutor proofread your essay for grammar and diction errors, but didn’t explain these errors to you so that essentially you’ve enjoyed a proofreading service without learning anything. In this scenario, if I find grammar errors, in spite of the tutor’s “help,” you sometimes shout at me in self-righteous indignation, “But my tutor promised me there were no mistakes!” Clearly, you don’t know how to identify your own grammar and diction errors. Nor do you understand that your anger is misdirected toward me. However, you still think, erroneously, that you have leverage for a semester A grade.  If plagiarism exists on a scale from 0-10, we can call this type of “help” Plagiarism Code 7. The student’s essay evidences that the proofreading service was performed in the absence of any teaching experience for the student; therefore, the essay gets at the very highest a D grade. A lot of students will protest that this isn’t fair. But is it fair for me to give higher grades to students who receive this type of “help” than to those who don’t? What superior learning experience did the former camp of students receive over the latter group? If anything, a certain amount of deception was employed by the “helped” students, so that if anything they should receive a lower grade. What’s the takeaway from all this? If you receive “help,” make sure you actually learn how to identify the grammar mistakes you’ve made.
2. The second scenario is even worse: A tutor, a friend, or family member “rewrites” your essay, or in a spirit of grand generosity says “the hell with it” and just writes “your” essay from scratch so that it has an elevated prose style superior to that of a college English professor’s writing and worse the essay bears no resemblance to your in-class essays, which are larded with basic verb, grammar, predication, and diction errors. We call this type of “help,” whether it is a major rewrite or an outright manufacturing of an entirely new essay, Plagiarism Code 10. These essays must receive an F grade.

 

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Plagiarism Isn't Limited to Manuscripts Detected on turnitin.com Software

Plagiarism Isn’t Limited to Manuscripts Detected on turnitin.com Software

Plagiarism isn’t limited to manuscripts detected on turnitin.com software; it also manifests in essays in which the students received “help” from tutors, friends, and relatives so that while their in-class essays show rudimentary literacy or, worse, severe diction, predication and verb errors, their typed essays miraculously render the elevated and shimmering prose style of Vladimir Nabokov.  

In fact, as students become more savvy about the plagiarism software, they're resorting to getting "help" as described above. Such is the cat and mouse game that defines a lot of what I do these days.

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