Week(s) 30-3: Something old, something new, something borrowed, someone's screwed
OK, so maybe my workaday stories aren't filled with the raw life-or-death excitement of, say, one of basric's yarns. But that's not to say that my day job doesn't entail its own occasional thrills. For instance, sometimes my gig takes me sidelong into amateur-hour detective work... primarily in situations that involve student plagiarism.
Sure, there's the usual stuff you hear about in our digital era: undergrads pulling things wholesale from Wikipedia, etc. That kind of stuff doesn't happen all that often, particularly these days... or at least, they don't happen so often in my field.
Given the tweaky, somewhat esoteric nature of the material I teach, there's not a lot of useful stuff on Wikipedia for my "poor" students. What little pertinent info can be found is often laughably inaccurate. Thusly, even if a student steals something from Wikipedia and gets away with the word-theft, it's not likely to be very useful to them in classes like mine, earning them huge, red "WHAT? UM, NO"s in the margins with resultant drastic grade reductions, barest minimum.
Besides, it's not likely that they will get away with something so obvious and egregious, even if a prof doesn't have time to check Wikipedia themselves. We have stuff like TurnItIn now-- a pricey online database for educational institutions, designed to "catch" plagiarism through direct content comparison. You run your student papers through TurnItIn, and it will tell you if anything in a given paper looks familiar vs. something it's seen before.
The undergrads these days are pretty terrified of TurnItIn. They know we feed most everything through it now. Since they can't see what we see, they assume TurnItIn is omniscient. It's not even close, and it doesn't really take too much to sneak something past it. If it's something they pulled down from Wikipedia, even if they changed a few words here in there... of course they're totally screwed. But if they could see what kind of stuff TurnItIn misses, they'd be a lot less scared.
I've also been careful to specifically mention the fear of undergrads. Even in our days of TurnItIn, catching foul play is still typically done the old-fashioned way-- through common sense. I've certainly had my share of brushes with undergrad plagiarism, everything from copying exam answers off a classmate's desk to turning in papers that were obviously stolen wholesale from published texts found in the library... right down to complex scanned diagrams from published papers that no undergrad would be capable of generating on their own. In perhaps the most interesting undergrad case I've encountered recently, I caught a student plagiarizing extensively from her own father's age-old dissertation.
But all of these undergraduate tales pale in comparison to the many, sordid, often incredibly ballsy academic-integrity crimes that my graduate students have committed over the years.
The thing with graduate programs, I think, regardless of your specialty: There are usually maybe 2-5 US-based programs that you'd want to consider as guaranteed career-makers in your field, perhaps another 10-40 that are workable and worthwhile options. The rest-- and there are always a lot more programs to choose from-- are programs that you would only consider if you were truly desperate.
For instance, you-- a newly-minted alumnus of some four-year program-- might plan to go on to a Ph.D., for some ridiculous fucking reason. But you quickly find that no "real" program will take you, due to deficiencies in your undergrad coursework, lack of demonstrable readiness for a real grad school, some other problem.
Thankfully, the master's degree sits directly between your old undergraduate problems and your "real school" terminal-degree goals. Go pursue a master's at one of the hundreds of backup "stepping stone" options, where you are welcomed with open arms as a raw revenue source, and you just might start to look a little better on paper when it comes time to start hitting up "real" doctoral programs.
Administrators at such "stepping stone" grad programs just want bodies, and sizable tuition checks to go with those bodies. With no academic rep to preserve, they expect faculty to just push grad students through, merit or graduate-level readiness be damned. The only thing they care about: maintaining the word of mouth to keep generating more bodies-- "I got my degree here with zero effort and just $50k, you can too!"
Here, I'm going to start sounding a little like a xenophobe, and I have to assure you that I'm not. But there's just no avoiding it: In at least one program in which I've done my time, we primarily landed foreign students from both sides of the pond, students who were unable to go straight away into a good grad program because their past schooling abroad meant nothing in the States. They needed our program as a cash-for-degree, no-questions-asked stepping stone so that they could go on to a "real" DMA or Ph.D. program Stateside.
We had lots of Eastern Europeans who were only conservatory-trained, meaning they didn't have any academic background equivalent to a four-year college degree, and/or even the ability to speak English with any degree of fluency. We also had lots of folks from SE Asia with similar problems.
While we ran a reasonably tight admissions ship on the undergrad side, the school's hunger for grad-student revenue was such that we didn't even require a TOEFL (a standardized test for ESL students seeking admission to postsecondary programs, demonstrating that you can at least sort of function in an English-speaking academic environment).
Translated (no pun intended): My job in this program often involved teaching semi-challenging graduate-level material to students who, by and large, not only lacked the prerequisite schooling to understand the material under discussion... they often lacked the ability to understand anything I was saying aloud to them.
You can imagine that this kind of thing was particularly fun when it came time for the class to do group presentations, or-- worse-- hand in written papers.
It's pretty well-known / oft-discussed among academics that some Asian cultures seem to have a different take from ours, re: the concept of intellectual property / credit where credit is due.
I have found time and again that this isn't an issue in good graduate programs, because the incoming students at good graduate programs already understand where the line is drawn, regardless of where they're from. However, it's certainly an issue in stepping-stone programs like the ones I've taught in, where admission standards basically don't exist.
Some of my most interesting problems with plagiarism came from otherwise-well-meaning Asian students who didn't seem to know they were doing anything wrong. They'd be assigned to do a presentation on an article, and they'd stand up there and just read everything directly from the article aloud-- badly. I had to hand out a written explanatory "warning sheet" explicitly condemning this practice in just about every grad class I taught.
Sometimes, that still wasn't enough. The students couldn't understand my written-out, in-very-basic-English explanation re: what we consider plagiarism vs. critical thought, because they couldn't speak or read English well enough to comprehend my warning sheet. Then they'd go up there and still insist on the ol' Books On Tape Of The Damned routine. I'd have to stop them mid-presentation and give them an F.
Other times, they seemed to get what I'd written in my dire warning about the practice of reading straight off the page-- but they also seemed to be missing the point.
Example: I had one Asian student who was assigned to present an analysis of a piece on Monday, and came to my office on Friday in a state of raw panic. As it quickly became clear that she had no fucking idea what she was doing, I basically handed her her entire presentation, told her exactly what she needed to discuss, went over her existing notes with her and told her what was wrong and/or right, sat there at the piano with her, pointing directly at this feature and that feature-- stuff that she, of course, was supposed to be doing on her own.
A particular term came up during our private consult... a term which was universal freshman-level stuff, and which had to be discussed in any analysis of this work. It wasn't the first universal freshman-level concept my graduate student didn't know or comprehend, but she had a really hard time getting this concept, and she could tell that it was important for her presentation's success.
She had me explain this term/concept to her over and over. I spent half an hour explaining a 60-second concept, demonstrating it at the piano, showing her its manifestations in the work in front of us, and making up additional examples on the fly. It wasn't pretty, but I was 99% sure that she finally had it when she left.
Sunday afternoon, less than 24 hours before her presentation, I get an email from the same student asking me to explain the same concept yet again. After all of my remaining hair falls out, I'm only too happy to oblige. She receives a polite, very clear, four-paragraph email from me within twenty minutes, re-explaining just the basic concept itself, not discussing its connection to her assigned work-- because we've already been through exactly where it occurs.
On Monday, during her presentation, I am stunned to hear all four paragraphs of my email come out of her mouth, verbatim, as her lone explanation for the "troublesome" concept at hand. I am particularly stunned because a) she fails to make / synthesize any connection to the work she's presenting, kind of the whole freakin' point; b) she is staring full-stop into the eyes of her classmates as she does this, and isn't reading off of anything.
In the 20-odd hours since I responded to her final clarification request, she has memorized my entire 500-word email word for word. She has done this, of course, because I've told them-- in the interest of stopping what amounted to plagiarism in the article presentations-- that they can't read extended chunks of text directly off a written page.
Needless to say, I was never cited... although I'm still surprised she didn't end her extended performance with my traditional email signature.
Another similar tale is much simpler: An Asian student who had already been caught plagiarizing large chunks of text in papers-- not only in my class, but in at least two other graduate courses besides-- turned in a final paper that made absolutely no sense. I could see that it was trying to make sense beneath the surface. The arguments I could scare up with great effort from the surface-level word-soup were both irrelevant to our course and well beyond her demonstrated argument-constructing abilities.
Bottom line, the whole paper read like a six-page-long spam email, no joke. I read it over and over, and just couldn't figure it out.
I called her into my office to explain how she'd written her paper and to see if I could get a handle on her thought process, to see if there was anything here we could salvage.
Without shame or hesitation, she immediately told me her entire "process" for writing the paper: She had found a lengthy Chinese text online, ostensibly on the piece she'd chosen-- granted, one that was more like performance / liner notes than anything to do with our meatier course activities. She'd copied the whole damn thing, pasted it into Google Translate set to "English," and dumped the result straight into a Word document. She'd not even attempted to clean up the English output of Google Translate. Three minutes, aaaaand done!
Not one word or thought in the paper was hers... and despite the fact that this was her third semester in a Stateside grad program and at least her fourth run-in with the academic-integrity police (with two such run-ins in my course alone), she just couldn't understand why I was objecting to what she'd turned in.
Well, at least I now understood why the thing read like one long spam email.
I have lots of other plagiarism stories about past Asian grad students, some of which are not nearly so "innocent" (word to the wise: never allow foreign students to use electronic translation devices during exams)... but I will now turn my not-xenophobic-I-swearta-God eye to the Eastern European faction.
These folks clearly knew what plagiarism was from a Western perspective. They just didn't give a fuck. Straight out the conservatory, where all of their classes revolved around performance technique and feeeeeeling, they'd come to the States and received a rude awakening: not nearly all of their classes in grad school were going to be so mindless. And they were usually visibly bitter about their newfound academic requirements.
Of course, we were just going to shovel them through these classes practically as a pure formality, given the unwritten administrative mandate that none of us could do much about. But these students were still just outright pissed that they even had to go through the motions of things like "reading" and "writing"... in a graduate program, why, of all the noive. Accordingly, the bad apples among these students would do just about anything to get out of the work-- which usually involved hilariously transparent attempts to steal absolutely everything from other sources.
I have lots of really great stories about the foiled efforts of various Eastern Europeans to short-circuit the system. In the interest of time, I'll stick to just one particularly memorable winner from this demographic.
She was an instrumental performance major who was generally very nasty in disposition. She had already been caught pulling whole chunks of things from published texts and submitting them as part of papers due in my class. Adding to her troubles, she had totally ignored my stated attendance policy and would miss two or three weeks of class at a stretch, finally turning up again at her exclusive discretion in an incredibly subtle "GOT MARIJUANA?" t-shirt. In case you missed the shirt's message, it also came emblazoned with a silkscreened pot leaf the size of Peoria.
Listen, again, I have absolutely nothing against partaking or those who do so. Hell, I will openly admit (here, anyway) that I still do so myself on occasion. But to be a grad student ostensibly working toward a professional career, wearing un-missable advertising for your favorite herbal remedy, after three weeks of being MIA for everything that's gone on in a course required for your degree, may just send the message that you're not quite ready for prime time.
With or without pot-lifestyle garb, this student quickly found herself on the ropes in my course, basically past the point of failure at the midterm due to missed classes and even more missed work. She was on the verge of being thrown out of the program based on her past academic fuck-ups (an unusual situation for our grad students, as they could usually get away with murder), and my course would be the final straw.
When I informed her of her imminent failure via email, she came to my office and had a suspicious about-face in terms of personality. This visibly mean-spirited woman whined, cried, ever-so-sweetly begged for a second chance.
Knowing that I'd be hearing from a dean who would probably override me anyway if I didn't grant her this last-ditch wish, we came to an agreement: Come to class, every class for the rest of the semester, do all the work, and don't plagiarize anything else. If she would "achieve" all this, I'd agree to wipe out her prior attendance record and/or find ways for her to make up the papers she'd already failed due to obvious plagiarism.
Seemed pretty damned fair to me.
She still missed a few classes at the very end. I turned a blind eye. She slept through half the classes she managed to attend and gave some absolutely horrible fucking presentations in the process. I let it slide, because at least she turned up to give them. Then she turned in her final paper. Wow... in some ways, particularly in terms of grammar and structure, it looked awfully good.
I looked at the Word headers (something, by the way, that doesn't really work with the newer versions of Word, much to my chagrin). Someone else's initials were in the header, and I saw a creation date six months prior to the start of my class.
I ran it through TurnItIn-- and got a 100% match for another student paper that had been turned in at our very same school.
Here's where the detective work had to begin. In the case of a "shared" paper, TurnItIn only reveals the name of the submitting institution. It doesn't tell you the name of the matching student, the name of the professor, or the name of the course. I was in a relatively big program, with twenty other full-time faculty members and about three times as many adjuncts. I didn't know very many of the adjuncts.
A few clues told me that this might have been a paper written for a piano literature course. This helped. I told a dean what was up, and asked him to help me track down the faculty members behind any such courses. I sent it to them. None of them recognized the paper.
We expanded our search to a couple of marginally related courses, and suddenly got the name of an adjunct I'd never heard of. When he finally replied, he thought it looked familiar. A couple days later, he had tracked it down: It was a paper submitted just the past spring by another Eastern European student who had already graduated with her MM.
Who knows how much of the rest of this is true, but I'm inclined to believe the "victim's" final side of the story, based on what I know about the characters of all involved.
My marvelous student had allegedly emailed our alumnus and given her a sob story about how I was being so cruel in grading her papers, what with her being ESL and green from the conservatory scene and all. She wanted to see if the alumnus had any example papers that had received good grades so that she could "loosely model" her paper after its construction and hopefully do better next time.
The alumnus nicely sent her this "demo paper" with the innocent assumption that she would simply serve as a role model, not a ghost author. She was visibly shocked and appalled at the result. She could have had her life ruined too, obviously. There would've been pretty good chances of that at programs with a bit more integrity than ours.
My student had to have premeditated all of this many weeks in advance. Their proposed paper topics were due a month before the final deadline. Knowing full well that I'd already caught her plagiarizing twice, and having been told explicitly that a third such "effort" would be the end of her, she went ahead, grabbed this paper from her old friend under totally false pretenses, proposed its topic piece as her topic, and then simply grafted her name to the thing when the time came.
At the risk of sounding truly xenophobic, I swear to you that all of the following is true: When I called my student into my office to tell her she'd been caught, she still tried to beg and cry her way out of it. She even briefly tried to claim that she'd written the paper and her alumni friend had stolen it, although we both knew she'd need a time machine for this to be true.
When I shut all of this down, telling her she'd received her last chance and blown it in spectacularly yet characteristically nasty fashion, her tearful demeanor instantly changed. She stood up and placed herself in the doorway of my office, stared directly at me with eyes totally blank, quietly uttering what sounded for all the world like a thirty-second-long "traveler" curse, stopping just short of spitting on my office floor. Then she left without another word.
My student got tossed out of the program, and damned if she didn't totally deserve it. The dean sent the email off the same afternoon. So far, I have not experienced any significant deaths in my family nor found any tumors... although my house did inexplicably catch fire not long after that. Worth mentioning.
Sure, there's the usual stuff you hear about in our digital era: undergrads pulling things wholesale from Wikipedia, etc. That kind of stuff doesn't happen all that often, particularly these days... or at least, they don't happen so often in my field.
Given the tweaky, somewhat esoteric nature of the material I teach, there's not a lot of useful stuff on Wikipedia for my "poor" students. What little pertinent info can be found is often laughably inaccurate. Thusly, even if a student steals something from Wikipedia and gets away with the word-theft, it's not likely to be very useful to them in classes like mine, earning them huge, red "WHAT? UM, NO"s in the margins with resultant drastic grade reductions, barest minimum.
Besides, it's not likely that they will get away with something so obvious and egregious, even if a prof doesn't have time to check Wikipedia themselves. We have stuff like TurnItIn now-- a pricey online database for educational institutions, designed to "catch" plagiarism through direct content comparison. You run your student papers through TurnItIn, and it will tell you if anything in a given paper looks familiar vs. something it's seen before.
The undergrads these days are pretty terrified of TurnItIn. They know we feed most everything through it now. Since they can't see what we see, they assume TurnItIn is omniscient. It's not even close, and it doesn't really take too much to sneak something past it. If it's something they pulled down from Wikipedia, even if they changed a few words here in there... of course they're totally screwed. But if they could see what kind of stuff TurnItIn misses, they'd be a lot less scared.
I've also been careful to specifically mention the fear of undergrads. Even in our days of TurnItIn, catching foul play is still typically done the old-fashioned way-- through common sense. I've certainly had my share of brushes with undergrad plagiarism, everything from copying exam answers off a classmate's desk to turning in papers that were obviously stolen wholesale from published texts found in the library... right down to complex scanned diagrams from published papers that no undergrad would be capable of generating on their own. In perhaps the most interesting undergrad case I've encountered recently, I caught a student plagiarizing extensively from her own father's age-old dissertation.
But all of these undergraduate tales pale in comparison to the many, sordid, often incredibly ballsy academic-integrity crimes that my graduate students have committed over the years.
The thing with graduate programs, I think, regardless of your specialty: There are usually maybe 2-5 US-based programs that you'd want to consider as guaranteed career-makers in your field, perhaps another 10-40 that are workable and worthwhile options. The rest-- and there are always a lot more programs to choose from-- are programs that you would only consider if you were truly desperate.
For instance, you-- a newly-minted alumnus of some four-year program-- might plan to go on to a Ph.D., for some ridiculous fucking reason. But you quickly find that no "real" program will take you, due to deficiencies in your undergrad coursework, lack of demonstrable readiness for a real grad school, some other problem.
Thankfully, the master's degree sits directly between your old undergraduate problems and your "real school" terminal-degree goals. Go pursue a master's at one of the hundreds of backup "stepping stone" options, where you are welcomed with open arms as a raw revenue source, and you just might start to look a little better on paper when it comes time to start hitting up "real" doctoral programs.
Administrators at such "stepping stone" grad programs just want bodies, and sizable tuition checks to go with those bodies. With no academic rep to preserve, they expect faculty to just push grad students through, merit or graduate-level readiness be damned. The only thing they care about: maintaining the word of mouth to keep generating more bodies-- "I got my degree here with zero effort and just $50k, you can too!"
Here, I'm going to start sounding a little like a xenophobe, and I have to assure you that I'm not. But there's just no avoiding it: In at least one program in which I've done my time, we primarily landed foreign students from both sides of the pond, students who were unable to go straight away into a good grad program because their past schooling abroad meant nothing in the States. They needed our program as a cash-for-degree, no-questions-asked stepping stone so that they could go on to a "real" DMA or Ph.D. program Stateside.
We had lots of Eastern Europeans who were only conservatory-trained, meaning they didn't have any academic background equivalent to a four-year college degree, and/or even the ability to speak English with any degree of fluency. We also had lots of folks from SE Asia with similar problems.
While we ran a reasonably tight admissions ship on the undergrad side, the school's hunger for grad-student revenue was such that we didn't even require a TOEFL (a standardized test for ESL students seeking admission to postsecondary programs, demonstrating that you can at least sort of function in an English-speaking academic environment).
Translated (no pun intended): My job in this program often involved teaching semi-challenging graduate-level material to students who, by and large, not only lacked the prerequisite schooling to understand the material under discussion... they often lacked the ability to understand anything I was saying aloud to them.
You can imagine that this kind of thing was particularly fun when it came time for the class to do group presentations, or-- worse-- hand in written papers.
It's pretty well-known / oft-discussed among academics that some Asian cultures seem to have a different take from ours, re: the concept of intellectual property / credit where credit is due.
I have found time and again that this isn't an issue in good graduate programs, because the incoming students at good graduate programs already understand where the line is drawn, regardless of where they're from. However, it's certainly an issue in stepping-stone programs like the ones I've taught in, where admission standards basically don't exist.
Some of my most interesting problems with plagiarism came from otherwise-well-meaning Asian students who didn't seem to know they were doing anything wrong. They'd be assigned to do a presentation on an article, and they'd stand up there and just read everything directly from the article aloud-- badly. I had to hand out a written explanatory "warning sheet" explicitly condemning this practice in just about every grad class I taught.
Sometimes, that still wasn't enough. The students couldn't understand my written-out, in-very-basic-English explanation re: what we consider plagiarism vs. critical thought, because they couldn't speak or read English well enough to comprehend my warning sheet. Then they'd go up there and still insist on the ol' Books On Tape Of The Damned routine. I'd have to stop them mid-presentation and give them an F.
Other times, they seemed to get what I'd written in my dire warning about the practice of reading straight off the page-- but they also seemed to be missing the point.
Example: I had one Asian student who was assigned to present an analysis of a piece on Monday, and came to my office on Friday in a state of raw panic. As it quickly became clear that she had no fucking idea what she was doing, I basically handed her her entire presentation, told her exactly what she needed to discuss, went over her existing notes with her and told her what was wrong and/or right, sat there at the piano with her, pointing directly at this feature and that feature-- stuff that she, of course, was supposed to be doing on her own.
A particular term came up during our private consult... a term which was universal freshman-level stuff, and which had to be discussed in any analysis of this work. It wasn't the first universal freshman-level concept my graduate student didn't know or comprehend, but she had a really hard time getting this concept, and she could tell that it was important for her presentation's success.
She had me explain this term/concept to her over and over. I spent half an hour explaining a 60-second concept, demonstrating it at the piano, showing her its manifestations in the work in front of us, and making up additional examples on the fly. It wasn't pretty, but I was 99% sure that she finally had it when she left.
Sunday afternoon, less than 24 hours before her presentation, I get an email from the same student asking me to explain the same concept yet again. After all of my remaining hair falls out, I'm only too happy to oblige. She receives a polite, very clear, four-paragraph email from me within twenty minutes, re-explaining just the basic concept itself, not discussing its connection to her assigned work-- because we've already been through exactly where it occurs.
On Monday, during her presentation, I am stunned to hear all four paragraphs of my email come out of her mouth, verbatim, as her lone explanation for the "troublesome" concept at hand. I am particularly stunned because a) she fails to make / synthesize any connection to the work she's presenting, kind of the whole freakin' point; b) she is staring full-stop into the eyes of her classmates as she does this, and isn't reading off of anything.
In the 20-odd hours since I responded to her final clarification request, she has memorized my entire 500-word email word for word. She has done this, of course, because I've told them-- in the interest of stopping what amounted to plagiarism in the article presentations-- that they can't read extended chunks of text directly off a written page.
Needless to say, I was never cited... although I'm still surprised she didn't end her extended performance with my traditional email signature.
Another similar tale is much simpler: An Asian student who had already been caught plagiarizing large chunks of text in papers-- not only in my class, but in at least two other graduate courses besides-- turned in a final paper that made absolutely no sense. I could see that it was trying to make sense beneath the surface. The arguments I could scare up with great effort from the surface-level word-soup were both irrelevant to our course and well beyond her demonstrated argument-constructing abilities.
Bottom line, the whole paper read like a six-page-long spam email, no joke. I read it over and over, and just couldn't figure it out.
I called her into my office to explain how she'd written her paper and to see if I could get a handle on her thought process, to see if there was anything here we could salvage.
Without shame or hesitation, she immediately told me her entire "process" for writing the paper: She had found a lengthy Chinese text online, ostensibly on the piece she'd chosen-- granted, one that was more like performance / liner notes than anything to do with our meatier course activities. She'd copied the whole damn thing, pasted it into Google Translate set to "English," and dumped the result straight into a Word document. She'd not even attempted to clean up the English output of Google Translate. Three minutes, aaaaand done!
Not one word or thought in the paper was hers... and despite the fact that this was her third semester in a Stateside grad program and at least her fourth run-in with the academic-integrity police (with two such run-ins in my course alone), she just couldn't understand why I was objecting to what she'd turned in.
Well, at least I now understood why the thing read like one long spam email.
I have lots of other plagiarism stories about past Asian grad students, some of which are not nearly so "innocent" (word to the wise: never allow foreign students to use electronic translation devices during exams)... but I will now turn my not-xenophobic-I-swearta-God eye to the Eastern European faction.
These folks clearly knew what plagiarism was from a Western perspective. They just didn't give a fuck. Straight out the conservatory, where all of their classes revolved around performance technique and feeeeeeling, they'd come to the States and received a rude awakening: not nearly all of their classes in grad school were going to be so mindless. And they were usually visibly bitter about their newfound academic requirements.
Of course, we were just going to shovel them through these classes practically as a pure formality, given the unwritten administrative mandate that none of us could do much about. But these students were still just outright pissed that they even had to go through the motions of things like "reading" and "writing"... in a graduate program, why, of all the noive. Accordingly, the bad apples among these students would do just about anything to get out of the work-- which usually involved hilariously transparent attempts to steal absolutely everything from other sources.
I have lots of really great stories about the foiled efforts of various Eastern Europeans to short-circuit the system. In the interest of time, I'll stick to just one particularly memorable winner from this demographic.
She was an instrumental performance major who was generally very nasty in disposition. She had already been caught pulling whole chunks of things from published texts and submitting them as part of papers due in my class. Adding to her troubles, she had totally ignored my stated attendance policy and would miss two or three weeks of class at a stretch, finally turning up again at her exclusive discretion in an incredibly subtle "GOT MARIJUANA?" t-shirt. In case you missed the shirt's message, it also came emblazoned with a silkscreened pot leaf the size of Peoria.
Listen, again, I have absolutely nothing against partaking or those who do so. Hell, I will openly admit (here, anyway) that I still do so myself on occasion. But to be a grad student ostensibly working toward a professional career, wearing un-missable advertising for your favorite herbal remedy, after three weeks of being MIA for everything that's gone on in a course required for your degree, may just send the message that you're not quite ready for prime time.
With or without pot-lifestyle garb, this student quickly found herself on the ropes in my course, basically past the point of failure at the midterm due to missed classes and even more missed work. She was on the verge of being thrown out of the program based on her past academic fuck-ups (an unusual situation for our grad students, as they could usually get away with murder), and my course would be the final straw.
When I informed her of her imminent failure via email, she came to my office and had a suspicious about-face in terms of personality. This visibly mean-spirited woman whined, cried, ever-so-sweetly begged for a second chance.
Knowing that I'd be hearing from a dean who would probably override me anyway if I didn't grant her this last-ditch wish, we came to an agreement: Come to class, every class for the rest of the semester, do all the work, and don't plagiarize anything else. If she would "achieve" all this, I'd agree to wipe out her prior attendance record and/or find ways for her to make up the papers she'd already failed due to obvious plagiarism.
Seemed pretty damned fair to me.
She still missed a few classes at the very end. I turned a blind eye. She slept through half the classes she managed to attend and gave some absolutely horrible fucking presentations in the process. I let it slide, because at least she turned up to give them. Then she turned in her final paper. Wow... in some ways, particularly in terms of grammar and structure, it looked awfully good.
I looked at the Word headers (something, by the way, that doesn't really work with the newer versions of Word, much to my chagrin). Someone else's initials were in the header, and I saw a creation date six months prior to the start of my class.
I ran it through TurnItIn-- and got a 100% match for another student paper that had been turned in at our very same school.
Here's where the detective work had to begin. In the case of a "shared" paper, TurnItIn only reveals the name of the submitting institution. It doesn't tell you the name of the matching student, the name of the professor, or the name of the course. I was in a relatively big program, with twenty other full-time faculty members and about three times as many adjuncts. I didn't know very many of the adjuncts.
A few clues told me that this might have been a paper written for a piano literature course. This helped. I told a dean what was up, and asked him to help me track down the faculty members behind any such courses. I sent it to them. None of them recognized the paper.
We expanded our search to a couple of marginally related courses, and suddenly got the name of an adjunct I'd never heard of. When he finally replied, he thought it looked familiar. A couple days later, he had tracked it down: It was a paper submitted just the past spring by another Eastern European student who had already graduated with her MM.
Who knows how much of the rest of this is true, but I'm inclined to believe the "victim's" final side of the story, based on what I know about the characters of all involved.
My marvelous student had allegedly emailed our alumnus and given her a sob story about how I was being so cruel in grading her papers, what with her being ESL and green from the conservatory scene and all. She wanted to see if the alumnus had any example papers that had received good grades so that she could "loosely model" her paper after its construction and hopefully do better next time.
The alumnus nicely sent her this "demo paper" with the innocent assumption that she would simply serve as a role model, not a ghost author. She was visibly shocked and appalled at the result. She could have had her life ruined too, obviously. There would've been pretty good chances of that at programs with a bit more integrity than ours.
My student had to have premeditated all of this many weeks in advance. Their proposed paper topics were due a month before the final deadline. Knowing full well that I'd already caught her plagiarizing twice, and having been told explicitly that a third such "effort" would be the end of her, she went ahead, grabbed this paper from her old friend under totally false pretenses, proposed its topic piece as her topic, and then simply grafted her name to the thing when the time came.
At the risk of sounding truly xenophobic, I swear to you that all of the following is true: When I called my student into my office to tell her she'd been caught, she still tried to beg and cry her way out of it. She even briefly tried to claim that she'd written the paper and her alumni friend had stolen it, although we both knew she'd need a time machine for this to be true.
When I shut all of this down, telling her she'd received her last chance and blown it in spectacularly yet characteristically nasty fashion, her tearful demeanor instantly changed. She stood up and placed herself in the doorway of my office, stared directly at me with eyes totally blank, quietly uttering what sounded for all the world like a thirty-second-long "traveler" curse, stopping just short of spitting on my office floor. Then she left without another word.
My student got tossed out of the program, and damned if she didn't totally deserve it. The dean sent the email off the same afternoon. So far, I have not experienced any significant deaths in my family nor found any tumors... although my house did inexplicably catch fire not long after that. Worth mentioning.