I was reading discussion forum responses and almost universally there was a line that was very like "this is stilted unnatural writing but broken up with casual phrases to make it harder to google"

and I was like "NONE OF YOU WROTE THESE WORDS"

but I couldn't peg anyone

I finally found it

and I am fucking delighted

/RETROACTIVELY GIVES OUT A BUNCH OF 0S

/READS EVERYONE THE RIOT ACT

students!!!

I pulled the reading at random out of an old textbook not realizing that it was something that had a bunch of quizlets

I was rushing through and went "eh that's fine" even though I know that the first thing students do when they're trying to not read is google the title and look for an essay to copy

I get it a lot when I teach comp2, to the point where I've learned to recognize the internet study guides without needing to google suspiciously

usually the comp1 stuff is too varied to be homework standards, but this is what I get for not doing my due diligence early on

hopefully once you pull them once and they know you too can google, it will... stop

oh it won't

I have no expectations, and I'm sure that some of them have been doing it all semester

pfft

it's just that in a semester where I'm reading 125 responses to the same reading, it sticks out when dozens of them copy in the same way

LIKE!

"“The Men We Carry in Our Minds” title is probably referencing men's view on male since men in society have a role that they play, they’re practically trapped within that role based on their social work class."

that's the opening to one

and then the person who responds to that same post starts off

"The title "The Men We Carry in Our Minds" I believe referenes to what males think men should be in society. How men should be able to do all the hard work and should always be a role model, to be strong physially and mentally."

IT FEELS WEIRD but I couldn't pin it down

it was kind of an uncanny valley similarity

same concepts, same structure, but like run through google translate and then back into english

finally found the original here What is the main idea of the men we carry in our min...

"In his essay “The Men We Carry in Our Minds,” Scott Russell Sanders explains his perspective on the relationship between gender roles and social class in both men and women. Sanders argues that individuals create opinions and prejudices about the gender roles of men and women based on their own personal experiences."

that's the original

and I suddenly understand where students kept writing insipid "in society" versions

they don't understand what social class means and just replaced it with "society is bad"

hunting for plagiarism is like "this looks like someone took something insightful and beat it with Stupid"

yeah like not only did you not read the reading but you also didn't quite grasp the point of the thing you are copying

if they understood the reading they probably would have just done it

it was 3 pages

I couldn't make the assignment more Baby

What's hilarious is like... they probably put in almost as much effort to plagiarize as it would have taken to just write the thing

P MUCH

like if you're going to be like "ok I'm going to take that but change the words" just... write new words?

LIKE you can do three pages in an hour, easy

Especially if it's double-spaced

oh no it's three pages of READING

only 300 words of writing

OH ffff that's even worse

its frustrating because you seem like the sort of teacher who would be very open to a student coming to you for help

nelsonlaugh.jpg

like if they really didn't understand the reading

yeah I'm a bleeding heart

especially if they come to me all weepy faced

like I have a whole project in this one student who seems pretty deep on the spectrum. He does NOT understand the assignments and keeps handing in things that aren't even essays. So I keep trying to be like "no seriously WE NEED TO HAVE A CONVERSATION I don't want to fail you D:" and he keeps just walking out at the end of class

I've sent him emails, I've written him notes and handed them to him, I've offered to meet online and only talk through chat so he wouldn't have to speak out loud or be intimidated by my voice

NOTHING

I have no idea if he even understands how badly he's failing

I care so much about fixing his situation that he's starting to make cameos in my dreams and tbh I do not want that

that sounds very frustrating

I hope you are able to get throuh to him

or I won't and he'll just fail

I only fail people who don't submit work and even then I usually end up doling out like 10 Fs in a class of 25

it's a weirdly normal attrition

and I usually see them hanging around campus years later so they probably just retake the class with someone else

I still get a little heated when I see this one guy who I failed for plagiarizing on his final paper. He got loud about the situation and did that big guy thing where he stood very close to me and made me take in the size difference between us

it's the only time I really felt threatened while I was doing my job

and he's fine and I'm bothered by that

urgh

man its wild though, like at my uni if you got caught plagarising you were out, no passing go etc I still occasionally have stress dreams where I'm like DID I CITE EVERYTHING I USED CORRECTLY????? and I haven't written essays in like ten years

im sorry you deal with so much!!

it's okay! That's the job

and I have a hardass policy like that on paper but it feels bad to kick people out

GOD YEAH my college was basically zero tolerance on plagiarism so I probably ended up citing like 50% more stuff than I really needed to out of an abundance of caution...

I like to at least give them the chance to throw a sob story at me

and there are some poor schmucks who think they did actual research or were just clicking around the internet for inspo

so especially in cases like these where there was some rudimentary rewording made, there's a chance that people legitimately thought they were doing their homework

Bummer that you had to do it but that does take some skill XD

"there are so many things that mens goes through a lot, but in my won option and understand women goose worse than mens in our society i know some people might things that woman don't have much to do they just stay at home with kids an watch them. because that what this author thinks woman do not have much to do since they staying at home."

I mean OUCH this one's rough but at least it's obvious they wrote it themselves

It does suck to care more than the student but :/

Yeah, at least those are their own thoughts

i remember being taught in middle/high school a variant of "if you take what the author says and you rephrase it in your essay, using your own words, that isn't plagiarism" so it's interesting to see here that it is actually

that's actually a sticky situation for a lot of students tbh. paraphrasing is a thing! paraphrasing needs to be cited though

but its not paraphrasing to put the same ideas in the same order, swapping out the vocab

that's not "your own words" as much as it is someone else's words wearing a different hat

I usually spend like 20 minutes breaking down paraphrasing techniques to students who find the entire thing very frustrating, so it's a very common confusion

but when the question is "what do you think," tbh I fond it offensive that anyone is hitting Google in the first place

yeah back when I was teaching, under the rules I had to grade by, this was teeeeeechnically not considered plagiarism but it was considered lazy

yeah I wouldn't hang a "you fail for the course" on something this soft? but it's definitely worth a "im not going to give you credit for completing this assignment that is mathematically insignificant to your gpa" and a stern frown

yeah. "this isn't gonna fly, do better"