Sunday, April 30, 2006

i must be a moron...

in my excitement over shyboy's baseball game, i forgot to tell you about my first experience with real plagiarism.

i was reading an essay (which was turned in two days late), and i realized there was something funny about it...first off, it wasn't the student's usual writing. and secondly, for this essay, they were required to have three sources...she had twelve!! if that doesn't tip me off, i don't know what will.
so, i "googled" her topic. funny, guess what i found. yup, her essay. she had simply copied and pasted from google. i was livid...not even so much because she cheated, but moreso because she thinks i am that stupid that i simply wouldn't notice.
i confronted her about it. took her aside towards the end of class.
and i asked her: cheater, do you think i'm a moron?
cheater: no, miss anonymous. of course not.
me: okay, then why in the world would you think i wouldn't notice when you copied your essay from google?
cheater: i'm just so stupid. *insert fake tears here*
this girl knows how to work the system. she thinks she can scrounge up some tears, berate herself a little, and everything will work out for her. and with other teachers it does. i was too angry to let it fly.
she received a zero on the essay, a zero on the speech that was written from the essay, and the documentation will go in her file.

i just don't understand in this day and age how students think they can get away with things like that. really, nowadays, if they want to cheat, they're going to have to be awfully creative.
and some of them are...i've heard of students taking pictures of tests with cell phones and selling them. i've seen students share answers through myspace. i've heard of students programming things into calculators.
what happened to a good, old-fashioned crib sheet?

and because of the power of the internet, kids can share cheating strategies...i really wonder if they realize that if they can access a webpage, then we can too. oh. no. just kidding. we're idiots.

like here...

and here...

2 comments:

Ms. H said...

You gotta love the fact that, even after all the evidence to the contrary, they STILL think they're smarter than us.
tsk. tsk. amateurs.

M said...

haha, take THAT cheater! :D