A few times since I've started teaching I've had to give a talk about plagiarism. Apparently it's not frowned upon here to copy and paste someone else's work and pretend it's your own. A couple clear signs to me that someone has plagiarized are:
1. The use of words that I have to look up to understand.
3. The actual website address accidentally copied into the text.
In my teenager class this week I had a new plagiarism detection siren go off -- two girls handed in the same exact essay about the Jonas Brothers (apparently they are some teen rock band). It wasn't that one girl copied the other girls paper, they both copied wikipedia. They literally had 95% of the same article from the website.
Today, before I handed back the papers, I gave my class a lecture about plagiarism which went basically like this: "If you study abroad and your parents pay tuition -- let's say $40,000 -- and you plagiarize, you will be thrown out of school and your parents will lose their money." This got all of the students attention. As you can imagine $40,000 is a lot of money here.
At the end of class I handed back everyone's essays. I handed the two plagiarizing girls their essays last and said, "Look I know you copied this but what I'm most upset about is that you lied to me when I asked you if you copied this on Thursday (NOTE: When they handed me the paper I immediately knew they hadn't written it and asked them straight up, "Did you write this?" They both said yes.)." One of the girls looked at me and said, "I didn't copy this. My brother did it." So the question is, which is worse: having your sibling do your homework for you OR turning in material you plagiarized yourself?
5 comments:
I think what's worst of all is having a totally uncool teacher!!!
Yeah. Narc.
In my Pre-Int 3 class I asked them to write a short story. I gave them a list of titles to choose and base their story on that title. One man in my class chose the title, "The Housewife" and "wrote" an essay about the Jewish-American woman's role as a housewife.
You have no idea. Plagiarism is a HUGE PROBLEM in the NYC middle school that I teach in. Kids copy and paste from websites and don't even bother to change the font style so their papers are composed of multiple fonts. Last year I had a sixth grader with a D in my class write a science fair paper explaining centripetal force using complex vector formulas involving the squaring of the radius ... and his father knew he had done this and defended his son when I called home.
As an aside, while Noah and I don't frequently post, we are truly enjoying reading your blog. Our thoughts and prayer are with Hayden.
At least the girls knew who the Jonas Brothers were! They are the hottest boy band since the Beatles, though they definitely can't come close. You have been out of the country too long. Don't you get People Magazine in Vietnam?
You have to give the girls some credit they even had someone else do the work.
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