One word: pla­gia­rism. I spend a great deal of time at the begin­ning of the semes­ter, on the first day actu­ally, talk­ing about it, explain­ing it and mak­ing sure my stu­dents under­stand my pol­icy, which is: If I catch you will­fully try­ing to fool me by pass­ing off some­one else’s work as your own, you will fail for the semes­ter, no sec­ond chances. I lec­ture in excru­ci­at­ing detail – with more than a few exam­ples of stu­dents who were pass­ing (one was even get­ting an A) whom I failed because I caught them will­fully pla­gia­riz­ing – about why I take it per­son­ally when some­one tried to do this: because it means that he or she thinks either that I am stu­pid, that I won’t know the dif­fer­ence between her or his writ­ing, which I have been read­ing all semes­ter, and the professional-grade writ­ing that stu­dents inevitably hand in when they pla­gia­rize, or that I don’t care enough about my job actu­ally to pay atten­tion to the work that stu­dents hand in. I repeat this warn­ing sev­eral times dur­ing the semes­ter, with a shorter ver­sion of the same lec­ture, espe­cially when I assign any paper that involves even the small­est amount of research. I even tell my stu­dents how I am going to catch them. Most pla­gia­rism these days involves stu­dents cut­ting and past­ing stuff from the web, and if it’s on the web, I tell them, Google can find it. “Please,” I ask them, “don’t put me in the posi­tion of hav­ing to fail you. If you are hav­ing prob­lems with an assign­ment, come talk to me. As long as you are some­one who has been com­ing to class and doing the work – even if you’ve been get­ting D’s – I’d rather work some­thing out (an exten­sion, what­ever) to make it pos­si­ble for you to do the work than to fail you for plagiarism.”

Inevitably, though, there are stu­dents who don’t believe me or who think they are smarter than I am, and this semes­ter is no excep­tion. I have caught three pla­gia­rists in my Tech­ni­cal Writ­ing class, and it’s really piss­ing me off. First, the assign­ment they pla­gia­rized – writ­ing a set of instruc­tions, a descrip­tion and a process analy­sis – while not nec­es­sar­ily easy, is not hard to do well on if you take the time to do it right. Sec­ond, two of the stu­dents were clearly pass­ing; one of them was on his way to get­ting a B. (The other would have ended up with a D+ or a C, depend­ing on how he did on his final paper.) Third, the remain­ing pla­gia­rist does not have Eng­lish as his first lan­guage, and so the work he’s been hand­ing me has not only been sprin­kled with the kinds of gram­mat­i­cal errors one would expect from some­one writ­ing in his sec­ond lan­guage; even when his writ­ing was gram­mat­i­cal, it had a slight “accent” that betrayed his coun­try of ori­gin. So what did he hand me? A gram­mat­i­cally per­fect descrip­tion of a light bulb, as if I wouldn’t notice the difference.

All three of them are going to fail for the semester.

And now that I have vented, I am going to bed. I need the sleep.