It is the week before dissertation submissions, and all through the house not a sound is heard save the frantic scurrying of students trying to finish their 10 credit major papers. I have had some draft papers that are painstakingly footnoted to perfection, and others, well, they are a bit footnote-lite because they were hoping I’d not notice that all the good bits were pasted straight from the web.
This has been a bit of a problem in recent years, but this term is has become a significant waste of my time. I’ve had essay drafts where, in one run of 8 pages, about 7.5 pages were pasted straight from Wikipedia and the only things to student himself had written were the sentences used to link the quotes together – quotes which were covered with the flimsiest traces of footnotes but not enclosed in quotation marks. Did they think I wouldn’t notice?
It is easy to spot these culprits – the copied sections are usually only parts of the essay that are free from spelling, grammer and style errors. When you have struggled though an introduction that is so badly written that you desperately want to write in the margin something like ‘When did you start to learn English as your second language?’ and then suddenly you hit a run of 3 paragraphs without a single error, well then you get suspicious. Pick a distincitive phrase, google it and hey presto – the first hit is usually wikipedia, but sometimes you get other places – UN or other official websites.
I have no problem with students using material off the web as long as it is done properly – I had one draft that must had had 200 footnotes, and everything is properly quoted and cited and it is clear what is supporting evidence and what is the students own argument, which is what I need to see so I can grade the student’s performance.
The annoying thing about the bad one’s though is how many of them submit their drafts (a draft is a requirement) but never come to get them back. Since I’m not always in my office over break, I have them in envalopes on the door of my office for people to pick up. Each one represents a hour or two of careful reading and comment writing on my part and yet some of them have been sitting there for three weeks now, uncollected, effectively saying ‘Frankly, Mike, we couldn’t give a damn’
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