The essay my student plagiarized nearly word for word (and seriously, when you’re a C student, at least disguise your plagiarism!) came from a sample essay in a book about how to win college scholarships. And the subject was No Child Left Behind.
I mean, my brain’s circuits fried with all the irony (oh fine, it may be pop irony instead of literary irony, but still it’s stronger than coincidence) in those two facts. No, child, you will not be winning scholarships to college with plagiarized writing. You will be left behind.
Damn shame, too. Good kid.
I seriously don’t understand how we can go over summary, quotation, and paraphrase for HOURS and students still don’t use quotation marks for words taken from another source “because it’s paraphrase.”
NO IT’S NOT. The SOURCE may have paraphrased, but YOU did NOT.
*tearing out my hair*
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Update: Have fixed typo in title. Now am considering live-blogging Meltdown to Baldness 2010. Ugh.
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Those faint screams are the sounds of me checking my students’ sourcework.
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I must speak a different language when I teach. It’s the only explanation for a couple of these research papers.
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It’s really only three out of twelve papers (and two of those weren’t my students in ENGL 101) that are so awful, but they’re THAT AWFUL. (And this is one benefit of teaching at the pen: my students will never know I liveblogged my hairloss.)
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I think the key here is to not read all the good papers first. Stupid, stupid planning.
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Remember copyediting? That was a nice, stress-free career with regular hours….
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The delusions are getting stronger.