Coffee heat rising

education

How we teach our children to cheat, lie, and steal

by

Why do college students plagiarize? Why do they cheat on their assignments? This is something that has always bamboozled me.

After all, they cheat no one but themselves. When you pay to attend classes, it’s your money (or Mom and Dad’s) that you’re shelling out for the privilege. When you cheat to wangle yourself a grade you don’t deserve, you end up paying for something empty, a course that does not do for you what it is advertised to do: furnish your mind. It’s like going into a furniture store, buying a chair, and taking home one with rotten wood and no stuffing—on purpose!

Probably the main reason is the idiotic and corrupt grading system. Grades debase education. They function as a monetary system through which students are “paid” to perform. Grades are the currency of the classroom. And like money, they are the root of much evil.

Students are so greedy for high grades that, like a loan officer in an unscrupulous financial institution going after the gold, they readily compromise ethics and common sense to get them. They steal or buy content for their papers, present it as their own, and then are surprised that anyone cares when they get caught.

Once nabbed, these rip-off artists produce a fine array of predictable excuses. The most common is “it was inadvertent. I didn’t know I couldn’t just copy that and stick it in a paper with no acknowledgment.” The best is “what a coincidence!”

Yes. I actually had a student tell me, after she turned in a paper she had copied from a government pamphlet right down to the heads and subheads, that it was an amazing coincidence that her paper consisted of the same, exact words as some federal information specialist’s. Wonders never cease.

One reason I have students collaborate on group papers (in addition to the obscene overenrollment that makes it impossible to read papers from every individual) is to circumvent plagiarism. If you organize the group well—with at least one A student and at least one B or another A student—you usually end up with one or two people who are too smart to plagiarize and at least one who is too scared. Then of course you have to create an assignment that is so individual there’s no way to find an identical paper on a term paper site or in a fraternity’s file cabinet.

Didn’t work this semester, though. For the first time in recorded history, I received a plagiarized group effort. When I called the little darlings on it and asked why I shouldn’t flunk all six of them in the course, they wailed that they didn’t mean to do it.

Understand. These are university juniors and seniors who claim they don’t know any better than to cheat. To cheat themselves, let us say.

Hey, if it’s only themselves they cheat, why do we care? Why do we care, dear future employers of these fine folks?

Here’s my response to the young things:

You claim that the copy-and-paste effort you turned in was inadvertent (we didn’t mean to highlight, copy, and paste passages of someone else’s work, slap them together unacknowledged, and call it a paper). I suppose anything is possible. Some people don’t mean to get into their cars when they’re three sheets to the wind and weave off down the highway. Others don’t mean for a T-bone steak to leap off the Safeway’s meat counter into their purses. Many a mortgage lender didn’t mean to fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars to borrowers who had no believable means to repay the loans and did not understand the concept of “variable rate.” Could be. I suppose.

It’s odd, though. Yours is one of thirteen collaborative groups in this course—eighty students. None of the twelve other groups had any problem with this issue. Where the other seventy-four students used source material, they cited it. Matter of fact, they seemed a bit smug about demonstrating that they’d gone to the trouble to google their subject and actually read something about it. It suggests that people who have reached the elevated rank of university junior or senior might be expected to know what plagiarism is (it’s a very simple concept, related to the idea that T-bone steaks ought not to be permitted to jump into your purse).

Then we have the nature of the paper itself. Six people are in your group. But the magnum opus is only five paragraphs long. This means we have six people who could not bring themselves to write one paragraph each. Whoever did manage to crank out a few words couldn’t quite work up enough energy to write her own words, or to acknowledge the source of the words she lifted somewhere else.

This suggests the paper probably does not represent the work of six people—possibly a couple of people said they would do this assignment and a couple more said they’d do the next one. That’s fine. However, the point of collaborative work is for everyone to at least look at the thing. If two people wrote it and four other people read it, then at least one of the four people should have noticed that it contained no documentation, that it is oddly brief, and that it goes nowhere. It contributes nothing to an argument: all it does is regurgitate. And since a proposal tries to persuade, well…leaving the argumentation to the last minute risks the possibility that no persuasion will ever appear and the proposal will end up being a report, not a proposal.

So, intention or no intention, much is wanting here.

Plagiarism is a reason to fail a student in a course. Not only can you fail the student, you can flag the grade so that it appears in the person’s transcript as a failure by reason of dishonesty.

However, if I try to flunk six students out of my course, I will wish I’d never thought of it. Failing even one student can lead to an enormous hassle. They appeal, they go to the dean, their parents go to the president or the board of regents. Failing six would create a hideous nightmare. I would end up in front of a committee explaining how I designed my course, how I built the assignment, what I expected, what they produced, what everyone else in the class produced, how I know they plagiarized, why the ripped-off passages are plagiarism (no joke!), why plagiarism is not a good thing, why all six of them should be held responsible for one plagiarized paper, and why I dare to think young adults who steal copy from the Internet deserve to fail the course.

For $3,500? Divided by four and one-half months: for $778 a month, less taxes, less deductions? For take-home pay of $440 a month, I should put myself through the tortures of the damned? Not bloody likely.

Instead, I proposed to forgive their crime if they shovel out the Augean stable: They’re to read five documents on plagiarism and on techniques of collaborative writing, editing, and revising-four of which have been posted on the site since the start of the semester-and create a 60-item exam on the material, with the correct answers.

This will get them out of my hair and, should my sanity ever lapse again to the extent that I agree to teach another online course at GDU, will provide a well of questions for an exam on the subject.

But trust me: that lapse will never happen. This incident reminds me why I burned out on teaching five years ago. It’s a good reason to seek another line of work.

Comments at iWeb site:

5 Comments

Mrs. Micah

Wow. I know Micah hates grading, especially freshman papers. And every year, there’s plagiarism (which is fascinating because he makes them write papers about a song or movie…depending on the semester and how it relates to specific course topics. secondary literature is optional and it’s really not writing a paper on hamlet or something common). Anyway, he hates it too, but has only failed one student for it. The rest he’ll just fail the paper, give a stern lecture, and make them write a new and non-plagiarized paper for the 2nd version (he always does a rewrite assignment).

Fortunately it’s something like 1 student per class.

Did I ever tell you my college mentor’s way of putting it? “Grading papers is like holding urine in your mouth.” Yeah.

Thursday, April 24, 2008 – 03:00 PM

vh

There are ways to discourage the practice. Assigning group projects is one. Wily crafting of the assignment is another.

But nothing works 100 percent.

Some faculty no longer care. When the subject of plagiarism comes up in Faculty Senate meetings, many of those present argue that it’s not worth worrying about, and that threatening to flunk a student for this particular form of cheating is an overreaction.

I dunno. Personally, it leaves me thinking there’s just gotta be better ways to make a living.

Thursday, April 24, 2008 – 03:10 PM

BeThisWay

How sad, for everyone.

It’s not hjust about the student, though.Thatstudent is going to be a (hopefully) contributing member of society.

Makes me wonder how deeply cheating really affects our society.Did the doctor about to perform my surgery cheat his way through med school?

Shudder.

Thursday, April 24, 2008 – 04:00 PM

Rachel @ Master Your card

I could never understand why students did this either. I guess they are just too lazy to do the work or leave it too late but surely no one gets satisfaction out of a grade that they did not earn themselves …or do they?

Friday, April 25, 2008 – 02:38 AM

vh

If grades are money, why wouldn’t one get satisfaction out of an unearned grade? Aren’t we all thrilled when we win the lottery or wangle a bargain? There’s not much difference.

Many undergraduates are not in college for the learning experience. They’re jumping through the hoops we require of young people before they can get a decently paying job.

Universities, clinging to the outdated idea that they’re in the business of educating minds rather than providing vocational training, demand that students fulfill gen-ed requirements, courses in writing, math, and cultural literacy. Few students see much value in these courses, and many highly resent having to take them.

It’s only to be expected, under those circumstances, that students would try to get through the hoops with the least amount of effort possible. As a culture, we don’t do a universally good job of transmitting ethical values to young people, and that is reflected in their inability to see plagiarism as a very serious issue.

Friday, April 25, 2008 – 05:07 AM

Should college students have to study personal finance?

by

One of the groups in my Writing for the Professions classes is proposing, as their semester project, that the university offer a course in personal finance and require it for all incoming freshmen.

No, they don’t know about this blog.

It’s an interesting idea, made more interesting by the fact that so far the students haven’t shown they know how deep the problem really is. They’ve given no indication, for example, that they know the average student loan indebtedness of a typical young college graduate, or that they know how much credit card debt the average undergraduate student racks up. Apparently they just feel a general angst about the whole issue.

Frankly, I think a required two-semester course in personal finance would benefit students a lot more than the commonly required freshman composition.

I say that as one who would be put out of work by the absence of required writing courses.

A person who has not learned how to express himself adequately in his native language after 13 years of schooling is not going to learn it in two reluctant semesters. Such a person is not interested in writing, can not and does not read or write, and is not even faintly interested in doing so. Freshman comp, by and large, is a waste of time. It’s a waste of time for the students who can’t write, and it’s a waste of time for those who can. Neither category of student profits by sitting in a class that reiterates material that should have been learned years before. Freshman composition as a required course should be abolished.

But a personal finance course would benefit almost every student who took it. And it would benefit the society at large: widespread formal training in personal finance skills would reduce indebtedness and improve savings rates. If, over the past two decades, college students in general had been taught the basic facts about mortgage lending, for example, we might not have the real estate crisis to deal with, or at least not to the extent we see-more people would have been savvy enough to avoid wacky mortgage instruments.

I can envision a two-semester course: in the first semester, the principles of budgeting, credit, mortgage lending, and how banks work; in the second, a wide-ranging view of saving, investing, and real estate.

It would be a lot more useful than freshman comp. Bet most of the students would keep their textbooks, rather than selling them back to the bookstore for a few pennies.

That alone would tell you something.

Comments from iWeb site:

squawkfox

I WISH college taught applied personal finance skills. It’s unbelievable to me how we can go though life studying calculus and physics and yet never study how to buy a house or how to invest for retirement. Perhaps start earlier in school? Studying personal finance in high school is an even better idea!

Thursday, April 17, 2008 – 09:24 AM

vh

Back in the Dark Ages, the California school system required that girls take three semesters of home economics and boys take three semesters of shop to graduate from high school. You had to take a year of the stuff in junior high and then a semester in high school.

It was obnoxious because it assumed that girls were bred up to be good little wives and boys would make themselves useful by changing oil in the car and doing light carpentry around the house. The home ec courses mostly were about sewing and cooking foodoids that came out of boxes. But the high-school semester had units on smart consumer buying, how to find out about products, how to compare prices and quality, and household budgeting.

Nevertheless, I knew absolutely nothing about mortgage lending when, thirty years later, I bought my first house as a single woman. When I was a kid, it was assumed the man would deal with deal with those matters, so there was no reason to trouble a girl’s pretty little head.

Really, there’s no good reason a grown woman–or a grown man–should go into a complicated transaction that will leave her or him indebted for thirty years without some knowledge of what it all means. A high school kid is capable of understanding this stuff. Yeah: it ought to be introduced to them.

Stealing from the students

by

The Great Desert University has put the eefus on my scheme to earn enough to pay off the Renovation Loan by teaching a couple of sections of excruciating undergraduate literacy courses each semester.
First, pleading penury, the West campus canceled all 2008 fall courses taught by adjunct faculty (part-timers).

Next, the administration announced that henceforth tenure-track faculty will be discouraged from teaching in summers and intersessions. Instead, adjunct faculty will teach those sections.

Why?

Consider: if you’re full-time faculty, GDU has to pay you a percentage of your salary for each summer course you teach. When I was on the teaching faculty, I earned over $4,000 for teaching a summer section; today, with the raises in pay I would have experienced during the past five years, they’d have to pay me around $6,000. But as adjunct? I earn $3,500. Without the Ph.D., an adjunct gets a munificent $3,200. So, you see the motivation.

Moving on, the next fiat announced that all on-line courses henceforth will have no enrollment caps!

Understand:

* The National Council of Teachers of English recommends that college writing courses enroll no more than 20 students per class.

* I personally did a study comparing two concurrent sections of Writing for the Professions, each with 30 enrolled students, with identical syllabi, one on-line and one face-to-face, and discovered that the online section required exactly twice as many hours to prepare and teach as the in-class section (“Parallel On-Line and In-Class Sections of ‘Writing for the Professions’: A Practical Experiment.” Educational Technology and Society, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2000).

At GDU, Writing for the Professions . . .

  • is one of two courses that fill the upper-division literacy requirement (the university has more than 64,000 students!)
  • is required for the global business major.
  • is required for the post-baccalaureate teaching certificate.
  • fills a requirement for the B.A. in English education (i.e., the undergraduate teaching certificate).
  • fills a requirement for the accounting major.
  • fills a requirement for the social work major.
  • is the course to which upper-division students with substandard writing skills and with learning disabilities are referred.
  • is a recommended course for students whose first language is other than English.

Every section offered on-line fills within days after the course schedule is published, leaving students begging for overrides.

All of which is to say that demand for the course is huge, students by and large loathe it, and half of them would kill to get into an online section that at least doesn’t make them traipse to campus and spend three hours a week sitting through a class they don’t think they should have to take in the first place.

apr5hellIt is, in short, a demonic course from Hell.

Removing the caps for on-line sections means any on-line section will enroll upwards of 100 students. Possibly LOTS upwards. Think 200. Think 300. In a writing course!

Well, thanks to GDU having “accidentally” double-enrolled the two sections I agreed to teach this semester, I have 80 students right now. But at least I’m being paid to teach the equivalent of four sections.

What this new policy will do is require FAs to teach possibly twice that many (possibly more) students for one-fourth of the pay. Yes. In a five-week summer session.

There’s only one way anyone dumb enough or naïve enough or desperate enough to agree to any such arrangement could possibly survive: cheat the students. Deny them anything even resembling “education.” The sole way you could cope would be to have every single assignment be a group project, so that instead of 100 or 200 papers to grade per assignment, you’d have 20 or 40.

I do group projects right now to cut down the workload. But I start with two or three individual assignments, so that I can identify the strongest and weakest students and so the students have an opportunity to get some one-on-one instruction. Reading the last raft 80 papers of drivel damn near killed me. The next five papers will come over my transom in the form of five group projects, each on average six or eight pages long. Let’s say the average length of papers handed in for these next five assignments is seven pages. That comes to FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE PAGES (count’em: 525) of copy in which verbs don’t agree with subjects, facts are wrong, words are used incorrectly, paragraphs are incoherent or nonexistent, logic is tortured, grammar is even more tortured, punctuation is wrong in every way imaginable. And on and on.

That’s for 80 students, divided into 15 groups. Five hundred twenty-five pages of bad copy to read, analyze, think about, comment upon understandably, and try to explain how to fix, in one month. That follows the two individual papers they’ve written so far (about 320 pages), coming to a total of 845 pages to process over the semester, in addition to three online quizzes. That’s more pages than War and Peace! And Leo Tolstoy this bunch ain’t.

Imagine the workload for a class of 200 “writing” students. Even if you made every assignment a group project, the number of hours required to cope with the tsunami of careless, toss-it-away, don’t-give-a-damn copy would reduce your $3,500 pay to well below minimum wage.

Better to greet customers at Walmart! At least most of the customers want to be there.

And indeed, what on earth would be the point of enrolling in such a course? The only point is to get a rubber stamp in your transcript so you can proceed through to your rubber-stamp degree in accountancy or social work or global management, a meaningless degree if ever there was one. To say nothing of the vacant teaching certificate that ensues from courses like this.

So it is that one of the great universities in the land (as it would style itself) defrauds its students, exploits part-time faculty, and makes a joke of what America calls education.

Artwork: Gustave Doré, Illustration no. 34, Divina Commedia (L’inferno)