Recently in my placement, we went over the issue of plagiarism with our students. We made it rather clear that both my CT and I do not tolerate it on any level. Since it won't be tolerated on the college level and we are working with seniors, I feel this is a pretty reasonable expectation to have. Why teach them bad habits if we can avoid it? Now, it is required that we deal with cases of plagiarism in certain ways. The very worst that is allowed is a zero on the assignment. Make up work is optional. We made it clear we won’t be offering make up work for any cases of plagiarized material. This is for couple of reasons.
One, it isn’t acceptable academic behavior at all. It used to be that students could be expelled for incidents like these, so the blow has been lessened significantly over the years. However, it is still grounds for expulsion in college and can put a mark on your transcript that may prevent other colleges from accepting enrollment applications. Second, it is somewhat personally insulting to the teacher to think that plagiarized work is going to go completely unnoticed. It takes a certain low amount of expectations from a student of their instructor to assume that the teacher can’t tell the difference between their own work and something clearly cribbed from another source or friend/family member.
Having told our students this, imagine my surprise this week when I run into the following scenario. I am passing out a new assignment that will be completed over a week’s times. A few students groan as they tend to do, but one in particular makes quite a scene. I ask her what is the matter and she relates that she feels the work load has been far too heavy and they have too many things to do. I remind he that they actually have no other assignments to do currently, seeing as how all of them were due already. It is here that she reveals she had not completed the project they had spent the last week on (it was due today). I asked her why, and he response was as follows: “Because I couldn’t get anyone to do it for me.”
Now, I was a little taken aback by that. Keep in mind that we just very recently went over the plagiarism issue with these students, and here I am being confronted with a bold statement that a student would not bother to complete her work unless she had somebody complete it for her (the obvious flaw there being that then -she- didn’t complete it, did she?). I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that. She was quite serious about it. Who would tell a teacher that? How could you expect to turn in any work then and have it not be looked at with more scrutiny to make sure it is yours from then on out? A better question is why show up to class at all if you refuse to do the work to pass?
I eventually told her that I didn’t feel trying to get others to do your work is a good way of going about trying to get anything done. She should try completing the assignment on her own. I was met with a series of grumbles and grunts and a flat refusal to utilize any of the day’s class time to work on the assignment she had just been given. This is bearing in mind that her complaint was about not having time to work on the assignments while being given time to work on it. I’m currently at a loss as to how I should proceed with this situation. If she continues to refuse to complete work I fear she will most likely fail the course (which is a shame for a senior to do when so close to graduation).
