… by which we mean, academic cheating like plagiarism, not adultery.
The first experience is a personal affront. It makes you angry. Trust is broken (or something).
After dealing with the academic conduct office at least once, all future catches you just wish would GO AWAY. You’re angry again but from annoyance not any sort of how could they do this to you. Stupid cheaters. If you could just not deal with them, it sure would be nice.
Prosecuting my most recent plagiarizer took over 2 hours out of my life during a very busy week, not to mention the time I spent meeting with her while she cried. I finally wrote “I have no more time for this” on the form and passed it off to the academic conduct office to continue the process.
In the best case scenario, you meet once, they accept their punishment, apologize profusely, and then LEAVE YOU ALONE. Anything else leads to time wasted with the conduct office or endless apologies. I do prefer the apologies to the cases, but seriously, you only have to do it once.
Students: If you’re going to cheat, please do it well enough that you don’t get caught. Some of us have no time to deal with your selfish idiocy.
December 17, 2010 at 3:44 am
Now that my little one is in school, I was thinking about how very different his education will be with access to the internet.
I’m assuming cheating is way easier because you can just “google it” and find stuff to plagiarize, but is it also easier to catch cheaters because of software advances and stuff?
A mom wants to know.
December 17, 2010 at 7:02 am
#1′s most common cheating catch is still students directly copying each other. This may be because students have to run their papers through turn-it-in software prior to turning in papers in most of their classes. We still get some plagiarism, mostly from international students at the beginning of the semester. I like to send them to take The Class that the honors counsel forces offenders to take.
December 17, 2010 at 5:54 am
What happens to a cheater? Is it an automatic fail?
December 17, 2010 at 6:59 am
That depends on a lot of things… the institution, what you put on the syllabus, whether or not they accept the punishment, what the honors counsel says etc. At our school it can be anything from redoing the assignment to failing the course with a note on your transcript that the F was for academic misconduct. In really egregious cases the school can suspend or expel a student. The most common punishments at our school according to the honors counsel are zero for the assignment or docking one letter grade for the course.
December 17, 2010 at 7:10 am
There was someone in college that used to cheat off of me all the time, and it drove me crazy. (He was a roommate’s boyfriend.) He blatantly admitted to cheating too, and then would brag if he somehow did better than I did. We talked to one professor about it but he didn’t want to deal with it and let it go.
Ironically, the cheater is a professor now. I am sure he could catch plenty of cheaters since he is the expert. I wonder if he ever turns one in, or cheers them on.
December 17, 2010 at 7:11 am
UGH. I hate people like that. I bet he was tall and attractive too. Tall, attractive guys seem to be able to skate by on moderate intelligence and bravado without a ton of hard work.
December 17, 2010 at 1:28 pm
And it’s that type that makes it so much harder to be a woman in a male-dominated field when you don’t always have as much self-esteem as they seem to.
December 17, 2010 at 1:51 pm
Preach on, sister!
December 17, 2010 at 11:30 am
OK–full confession time. I was a little, fat and smart kid, so I spent a lot of time in the library,especially from ages 12 to 15 when other girls were discovering boys and I was discovering that discrimination against fat kids is condoned. While hanging out with librarians, I discovered the “Golden Books Encyclopedia.” Unlike every other encyclopedia, where plaigerizing would have been immediately obvious, this one had entries written in ‘normal’ language that sounded a lot like what a middle-schooler would write. So I blithely plaigerized like crazy. I was found out, but fortunately NOT by a teacher. Instead, another student, who was deaf and wore huge hearing aids (and thus was an outsider like moi!) made the same discovery about these encyclopedias (which were not shelved with the Encyclopedia Brittanica or World Book,–thus, were seldom used). We made a pact never to write on the same subjects and then both of us (no doubt, also blithely!) plaigerized our way through 7th and 8th grades. If you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, it never did. We were never caught; we both went on to college; we both went on to careers. To my knowledge, our criminal pasts ended with Middle School. The dumbest part? We were both smart kids and decent writers–we were NOT the kids who NEEDED to cheat to get by.
December 17, 2010 at 2:18 pm
*tsktsktsk*
My partner has only cheated on one thing ever in his life. He glanced at another person’s final exam during his Ethics final…
December 17, 2010 at 3:18 pm
I was a TA for few terms and caught some students cheating during the written exam. This was one of those big classes that every department offers and students usually take so they can earn general credits. At the beginning of the term, we’d give the students a set of four questions and tell them that for their final they would have to write an essay on two of them; we couldn’t tell them which two questions, but we were giving them a guide for what to pay the most attention to for the term.
Walking around and proctoring during the exam, I came across two separate instances where students were blatantly cheating. During the first instance, I confiscated the students exam and the paper he was cheating from and brought it to the attention of another TA proctor since I couldn’t find the professor right away. So I don’t know how the professor handled that one.
A bit later I caught another student cheating. The guy was one of the students in my lab section so the professor asked me to talk with the student first and find out what was going on. The student was such a player and always had been, so I wasn’t surprised when he started giving me this sob story about how he couldn’t study because he had to fly out of town unexpectedly to be with his girlfriend who had been raped. I don’t want to sound harsh, but this story just did not seem to hold water in many ways and the guy had been such a smug smart ass in lab that I was sure he was making the story up.
I truly felt enraged when the prof told me he wasn’t going to flunk the guy, just give him a D. Yet another reason I knew I wasn’t cut out for academia.
December 17, 2010 at 3:29 pm
My MIL’s chair is wondering why students all of a sudden start cheating in her second year masters class after they’ve not cheated at all their entire first year. Apparently the process for turning in a cheater is incredibly complex and painful at her school.
One nice thing about our school is that we are allowed to handle things ourselves without any interference from above (unless the student demands a hearing), but they do want us to inform the honors counsel what we’ve decided. There’s an online form and everything. Very easy process. So we’re more likely to report cheaters than at other schools I’ve been to. I think if the student gets three violations in their portfolio it gets marked on their transcript that they are without honor or something to that effect and they’re not allowed a bunch of honors at graduation.
December 17, 2010 at 5:11 pm
I went back to school in my late 40s. On several occasions students talked openly about why it was OK to cheat in a class that didn’t have anything to do with your major.
??????
In 1990 the game show “Jeopardy!” did a contestant search promotion in Anchorage. My friend Linda and I were both selected to take the test. We sat next to each other and sweated over the test, which was pretty hard (audible groans were heard around the room as the questions were asked).
After grading had taken place, it was announced that only two people in the room had gotten enough answers right to be considered as contestants. When they announced our names, Linda and I both had the same panicky, guilty thought: “They’ll think we cheated off each other!”
We didn’t. But the idea of cheating being A BAD THING TO DO had been drummed into us when we were kids.
Incidentally: I got to be on the show the next year. Linda they never called, which irritated me.
December 17, 2010 at 5:29 pm
Weird. Maybe they thought you were more photogenic. That’s awesome that you got to be on Jeopardy! Is there nothing you haven’t done?
December 19, 2010 at 3:15 pm
I’ve never jumped out of an airplane. That probably won’t happen, ever.
I’ve never been a teacher. Ditto.
I’ve never made a perfect omelet. But I still hold out hope.
December 18, 2010 at 5:53 am
I remember friends that would have access to research papers. I was always too chicken to use them :)…
So I’d write my paper and submit it, then looks at what my friends gave me afterwards.
I was always more happy with my version…
December 18, 2010 at 1:17 pm
Heh. Obviously you needed friends who were as smart as you!
December 18, 2010 at 10:38 am
You just summed up my comp/rhet master’s thesis – looking at why students plagiarize & what departments should do to alleviate the pressure on the true victims: students who want to do their work honestly and the professors who have to deal with it. (side note: my dept didn’t take it all that seriously. hence early-on academic disillusionment)
Moving on. This semester at the CC, after a student blatantly plagiarized in the first month of class (!), I gave a huge lecture in class about what plagiarism is and the possible consequences. The student broke down crying in class, and I hadn’t even said anything to that student yet.
It just drains you of your energy and morale to deal with so many cases semester after semester. In the research paper for the class, I gave anyone who didn’t appropriately cite their sources an automatic D. I didn’t spend OVER a month teaching them citation and other ways to be responsible writers for me to have to deal with it. I hope they start listening and learn to do better before they move on to the university, where they have honors councils and things like that.
December 18, 2010 at 1:17 pm
That’s really interesting. I shake my tiny fist at your department.
And what is UP with them not learning the material that we teach over and over and over again?
Ugh… I should get back to grading…
December 22, 2010 at 6:39 am
The first semester my husband had a student swipe a paper from the internet, he took it personally and spent a lot of time dealing with it. The second and third time, he just dropped them from the class and they got the hint and hid in shame. Every once in a while he has a student who is not smart enough to know they are plagiarizing, but most of the time, they know, and they’re at least smart enough to not protest.