Plagiarism and Other Complaints

Image Source: Centre for Instruction & Research Technology

I went to bed at around 4 AM  – sitting up all night reading through 40 research papers. The grades had to be in before students start logging onto the university grade system this morning. About 10% of the students committed full on plagiarism, which is actually an improvement from last year’s 25% (when I worked until 5:30 in the morning to get all the papers graded in time.)

I’ve had two students contact me so far wondering why they got such low final grades – both of them plagiarized their final papers. They can be thankful that they merely got 0% for their papers; at my Alma Mater, students caught to have plagiarized could face expulsion. I told my students numerous times not to even consider plagiarizing, as I will give them 0%. I guess this 10% did not take me seriously. I have little sympathy.

One paper that really drove me up the walls—and it wasn’t even a plagiarism case—had most of the sentences starting without capital letters. The informality of sms-texting and emails are causing tremendous harm to the ability of people, especially the younger generation, to write properly. I found the paper absolutely disturbing to read. It is not that I’m anal about syntax (although I’m a little more conscious of it as an English lecturer); but good grief!, if you are going to hand in a research paper you should at least get your basic punctuation in order; and there is nothing more basic than starting a sentence with a capital letter!

Just one more week of admin and then my vacation starts. I’m counting the hours. I definitely need some time away to find my zeal as a teacher again. Luckily the holiday is quite long and I have a number of things on my agenda. I’m sure I’ll be all excited again once the next semester starts. For one, I won’t be teaching Research Methodology again. The class is being replaced with something else and the skills will be incorporated into other classes, which make much more sense for me. Next semester will also be a much more relaxed one.