Student Plagiarism

I was up until 4:00am on Thursday grading student's papers. I found over 13 incidents of plagiarism on top of the 3 students that I found originally. I just typed lines from papers into a google search and viola. I've read my students' papers before and I'm aware of their skill level in writing. I knew they didn't write those papers. Please!!!! They weren't even slick about it. With some of them I could have just typed in the subject and hit the "I'm feeling lucky" button on the google search. They used the first source in google. Most of (if not all) students' research was internet based. I was stunned. Floored. Bummed out. Disappointed.

Then the next day I had to write out grades. Jeremy and I have got to figure out an open source administration software system for the school cause I can't do this handwriting out grades stuff. It's archaic. I just want to do things on a computer and export shit. I'm far too lazy to sit there with a pen and write shit out and then white out shit when I mess up.

After all the grades had been written out I had a student come to me at 3:30 to ask me what her grade was. She was one of the plagiarizers. I said that she got no credit and an F cause her shit was plagiarized. She said that she didn't plagiarize and got all these resources from the library. I said that she got it off the internet and she replied that she didn't even go to the internet. I said "shall I show you?" She said yes and then I typed a line into the google search. Ta-Dah!!! Verbatim. She continued on saying it wasn't from the internet. I guess the person on the internet must have copied her paper and then put it up on the website. Those devious internet authors. Then I showed her another section of her paper that was verbatim from a text that we read in class! That wasn't cited either in the bibliography. Shit we read that in class, I'm not going to recognize that one???

There were some students that had low skills but they tried to write a paper and I recognized that they did write things themselves. Those students I gave grades based on what they were trying to say and do. There were some students that plagiarized work but they cited sources in their bibliography so I gave them the benefit of the doubt and thought maybe they didn't know how to do citations. Then there were the students that plagiarized, didn't put cite the sources they used in the bibliography, and wrote other sources down that they got their work from. Those students were trying to put things over on me. The student that came into my room fell into the latter category. This really bummed me out too cause I like that student. In fact I liked a number of the students that plagiarized work. I know that much of this isn't an attack on me. Part of this is kids being lazy, part of it is kids not having the skills, part of it is kids trying to put one over on me. I think the thing that really bothers me is that they didn't even plagiarize from a book. I would have trouble with that one cause I wouldn't go to a library to find out. But the internet... that's too easy.