Paper Chase: Cheating In College

My students must submit their papers to a little jewel called “SafeAssignment.”  It’s a nifty program that scans the web, including paper-mills, and detects plagiarism.

Plagiarism is rarely a problem in my classes, since I typically have students bring their research and then I oversee them hammering it into quotations, paraphrases, and summaries.  But now and then a student whose relatives will be dying all semester misses those classes and has a crack at beating the system.

I just bagged a plagiarist, who will receive a zero without the chance to re-write the paper.  Nice try, honey: next time just do the work.

This forum at the Chronicle is worth reading for the humor alone, especially when somebody asks for information about cheating at four in the morning: “im very urgent to know.”   I’m not sure he ever did realize he was asking a lot of professors for help beating Turnitin… The responses are hilarious.

Redemption Breaking Rules

Now and then in grading essays, a shadow gets thrown over your day.  This is the one that will sit with me for the rest of the morning.

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Grading Essays: A Guide To Detachment

I stare at this page as though it were some strange scripture, as though this moment mattered more than all the others I'll see today.

And I'd like to say that I wrote the right thing at the end, some jewel of insight or some aphoristic healing thing that would transcend the inevitable grade of "D" that the paper was going to earn.  But really, it just came to this...

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