TL;DR: "Most international students who plagiarize aren't trying to pull one over on their teachers."

I've been dealing with a lot of plagiarism lately (well, actually, I deal with plagiarism in my upper level writing classes all the time). There are a couple of issues that I have seen develop out of my many meetings with students, but for this entry, I'm only going to talk about intentionality.

The often knee-jerk reaction to finding out a student copied several sentences or even a paragraph word-for-word is to become insulted, indignant, even wounded. I went through this a lot in my first years of teaching. I got really upset, and it took a lot out of me.

And then it kept happening.

I had to know why. I revisited my teaching on paraphrase and citation, I looked for better teaching materials, I gossiped around water coolers and read stuff online. Eventually I came across the concept of the word "plagiarism" being too broad. Basically, it includes both the malicious plagiarizers and the clueless/accidental/misunderstanding ones. It really exists more on a continuum:

Obviously, egregious stuff like essay purchasing is clearly malicious, and most students couldn't not know that this would upset their teacher. The trouble is that even stuff that is on the far end (deleting one word out of a sentence or leaving material unquoted) can be committed by very sincere and well-meaning students. Let me share how I know this.

Back in 2009, I remember the Director of Composition requiring students to purchase They Say / I Say with Readings. Her rationale was that ENG 101 was a writing course, and so many students were getting bogged down by having to find good sources for the bibliographic essay that it lead to poorly written papers based on sources that very often were not that good to begin with. By giving them a set of sources to start using, it opened up possibilities I had never thought of:

• Students had more time to read, understand, and write
• Students had easy access to some quality sources
• Since we had access to the source texts, we could better gauge reading comprehension and also paraphrasing ability
  

This last point was very useful to me when I started teaching ESL. What better way to assess students' paraphrasing skills than to have access to all of their sources before they even started writing?

This all ties into a conversation I had on Monday with a coworker who has the same strategy with assigning source texts. She had her students writing annotated bibliographies, and surprise, surprise, some of them were plagiarized.

"It's obviously not malicious. They know that I know all of the sources--so it's not like they're trying to pull one over on me!"

This is the crux of the matter: The high rate of international students plagiarizing cannot all be attributed to deception, especially since it happens even when students are well-meaning and know their teachers cannot be tricked.

-Bill

I gave a reading test a few weeks ago, and since the class I teach is quite long, I wanted to explain the format of the test before I passed it out. The test was fifty points, but I misremembered the summary portion on the test being only five points (10% of the exam), but apparently I made the vocabulary questions 1 point each and the summary was 10 points (20% of the exam). The students, being very concerned about their lack of summary writing skills, were very concerned about the weight of the summary once they saw the paper test. They all sounded so alarmed, I told them I would change it to be the way I had said it in the beginning of class.

When the students got their test scores back, however, some of them regretted their decision and wanted the summary to count for more points. Others were happy with the value of the vocabulary and wanted the test to be the same. Another student wanted his/her own test to be weighted differently than the others.

Student A: “Can you make mine 1 point each for the vocab?”

Me: “No, I can’t weight your test differently than the others. That’s unfair.””

Student B: “Keep the test the same.”

Student C: “Yeah, it’s good already.”

Student D: “No, change it. 1 point each.”

Me: “I can’t do that now. I only changed it because I told you one thing and the test said another. I changed it to reflect what I said earlier.” (At this point, I am getting flustered in a flurry of options and opinions. Some of the students are murmuring discontent side conversations, and one student is scowling at me like I have just mercilessly kicked a puppy.)

Student A: “Can you do 1.5 points each for the vocab?”

Me (in my auctioneer voice, pointing around the room to solicit bids): “1.5? 1.5? Can I get a 2?2-2-2? Anybody-anybody? 5 points each? 5-points-5-points-5-points…going once! Going twice! SOLD!”

The students all laughed and then became quiet and civil, the classroom returning to normal. It was as if they recognized how out of hand they had gotten.

I’ve heard of many a teacher getting into a test of wills with students who want to haggle with them over grades or classroom policies. I never know what to do in situations like that. I never know if this is a language barrier (students don’t know the pragmatics of making these requests politely and appropriately in this context) or if it’s culturally acceptable to bicker with a teacher or if the student is actually just rude. It’s a kind of situation I would describe as a hostile confrontation if it ever happened with American students. I’ve taught English 101 to Americans, and it’s funny how differently a spirit of discontent is often actualized:           

“So the vocab was actually worth 20%?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” The student leans back and folds his arms defiantly. You know he’s upset. The whole class knows he’s upset. There is an awkward silence that quickly passes. In the back of your head, you make a mental note that you’ll probably be receiving a snarky student opinion survey after the semester is over about how unfair your tests are, but at no point do you expect your classroom to explode into a New York Stock Exchange-style bargain and trade operation over how you’re going to grade them.

This experience reminds me again about the need to teach students about culture in addition to language, and how important it is to have clear expectations. As off-putting it is to have my teaching philosophy questioned, I still welcome that criticism. It reminds me of that Power of Habit book I’ve been reading. In one chapter, it described a willpower study in which two groups had to resist temptation (a plate of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies), but one group was told to give their input on the study and if they had any questions before, during, or after the experiment, they were welcome to ask them. They were thanked for their time and the experiment began. The other group was ordered to begin and given very little opportunity to voice their opinion.

Neither group ate any of the cookies, but the group that was given a voice also happened to give a more sustained effort on a boring computer task. The second group grew listless and despondent, performing poorly on the same task.

It may look messy, like you’re negotiating with an angry mob or standing before a military tribunal or firing squad, but I think we’ll get more out of our students if we gave them a voice.

-Bill

When I was in college, I remember making a couple misspellings that Microsoft Word's auto-correct would never catch. Someone told me that you could add those misspellings to Word's Proofing Options and then it would catch it. When I looked at it, the mischievous side of me thought, "hey, I could do this on a friend's computer and have a word like 'the' replaced with a word like 'stupid' or 'butt face'... that would be hilarious!" 

Well, long story short, I never had the guts to actually mess with someone like this, but when I became a teacher, I started grading papers digitally and found myself writing the same statements over and over again, despite the fact that each of the students' writing was quite different from one another. I then remembered my idea for a prank and thought I could use it for good!

Here is a picture to give you an idea of how this works. First you open MS Word and click on the icon in the upper left of the window. Then, you click on Word Options at the bottom.

Once you're there, you can go to Proofing, which will open up the following menu (see below).

You want to click on AutoCorrect options, and that will give you a menu like the picture below. If you select a paragraph of text beforehand, then it will automatically populate the field as seen below. For example, I wanted to be able to say: 

In wh-clauses, do not invert the subject and the auxiliary:
Correct: "I didn't know what I should do."
Incorrect: "I didn't know what should I do."

So I typed that into a comment box, selected the text, then went to Word Options --> Proofing --> AutoCorrect Options. I then typed in that I want MS Word to replace "whc" with this paragraph (the code you select doesn't matter, as long as you can remember it--I chose whc for wh-clause). You can see this below:

Anyway, I've found this helps me make digital comments faster if I am grading a set of essays that have the same errors. The best part is that this is entirely customizable, so you can easily remember the codes since you are the one making them, however, since you might be forgetful (like me), then you can create a cheat sheet like this in an another file:

It's funny when I think back to the first time I started grading digitally. It was actually from two reasons: first, the frustration that came from handwriting the exact same statement was too annoying for me, and second, when I would grade revisions, it was difficult to see exactly what the student had changed (if anything--sometimes one additional sentence or a font change would make it hard to follow my previous comments and see if they were taken into account in the revision). Making the comments digitally made it easier to track changes.

Every semester I learn something new about grading digitally, and I'm always looking forward to any new ideas you may be using. Feel free to leave a comment below.

Have a good one, and good luck out there!

-Bill