A Mixed Bag

[kat_lair]

***

I have marked 15 essays today. I want to cry. The two are causally correlated.

***

In other news, I have finally bought a new laptop. And by that I mean, the same laptop I have now except the newer version. It should be here soon. Yes, it was emotionally painful

Comments

[citrusjava]

15! That sounds like a very good reason to cry.

[kat_lair]

3 of those went straight to the plagiarism panel.

[citrusjava]

*Wow*. That's a lot! And sounds like so much hard work to deal with.

Wishing you all the American sitcoms you like.

[kat_lair]

The number keeps gorwing as well, it's 5 altogether now of studens who, as a colleague put it, 'have some questions to answer'. Depressing.

[citrusjava]

Oh, *wow*! That is depressing.
And it sounds like they're not even be doing it very well, if so many of them are getting caught! ;)
Seriously, that's really disturbing, though.

[kat_lair]

Unsurprisingly the programme director has hush-hushed all but worst offender as 'poor referencing'. I'm doing a lot of deep breathing to keep calm and professional whilst registering my disagreement about the whole thing.

[citrusjava]

*shocked*
That's horrible! I didn't know that sort of thing was happening!
How infuriating to find all of those, and have it all hushed up!

[kat_lair]

It's one of those potaTOH poTAHto things, but what is infuriating is the discrepancies between programmes (I teach across several) as I've just taken a student through plagiarism procedures for far less than these on another programme. Anyway, yeah, something I'll be pushing for the department to address.

[citrusjava]

Good for you!
And I get it, it can be so different...
I wonder whether that sort of thing keeps happening around me and I'm not even aware of it. I know I was offered a job writing seminary papers for an organized business selling papers to students...

[kat_lair]

The thing is, we can't even catch people for the kind of cheating that involves buying papers specifically written. None of the students we catch have been that devious about plagiarising and I think for most it's about laziness/lack of time/not understanding referencing conventions/not understanding the topic enough to even start to summarise the information in their own words. We use Turnitin which is essentially a text matching software which will highlight stuff copied from websites, journal articles etc. It's obvious as all fuck when someone's taken something verbatim or with only minumum of changes.

[citrusjava]

So sloppy! If you're going to cheat, at least make an effort! ;)
Students should at least run their own papers through that software and correct accordingly.

[kat_lair]

They all have an opportunity and are strongly encouraged to do just that. But only a fraction do.

[citrusjava]

That is just depressing.