Cemetry Gates

An itinerate professor posted a satirical article for students titled "How To Cheat Good" which describes several ways in which students make it easy for teachers to catch them in the act of plagiarizing their work. In my own experience, I have witnessed most of the "tips" he describes in one form or another. I've always thought that it's a good thing that most students don't have any clue about how to plagiarize effectively so that they can successfully fool the teacher. This is because, in my experience, those students who intentionally plagiarize tend to fall into one of three general categories:

1) Those who are stupid.

2) Those who are lazy.

3) Those who are stupid and lazy.

They're stupid because they don't seem to realize how easy it is for me to track down the online sources that they plagiarized from (and nowadays, almost all of the plagiarism is done with the help of the internet--I'd be at a total loss if they were to start copying stuff from books in the library). They might be able to get away with plagiarizing from online sources if their teacher were an older individual who isn't quite comfortable or knowledgable about conducting online searches, but in my class, they should know better since I often make use of online and electronic materials in my classes.

They're lazy as a result of their tendency to procrastinate. It's so easy to just put off writing a paper one more day--one more day--one more day--until suddenly it's the 11:30 p.m. the night before the paper is due and the student hasn't done squat for the assignment. One could pull an all-nighter and get it done (and I've known a handful of students who have done this), but it's much easier to just to Google the topic or find the approprate article from Wikipedia and copy and paste from the net into Word. And thus it is very easy for me to track down.

Those who are stupid and lazy just make my life so much easier--and amusing. Once, in a lit class, a girl tried to turn in a paper that was nothing more than a couple of articles about an author cut and pasted from two online encyclopedias. She didn't even bother to change the article headings, so as soon as I read, in the first paragraph, "Williams, William Carlos (1883-1963) - " I had a hunch that something was amiss.

There is, of course, unintentional plagiarism which I often encounter in composition classes. Unintentional plagiarism is a result of the student's inexperience with the act of documenting sources. I expect a degree of unintentional plagiarism from my students, especially early in the semester, but there's a clear difference between someone who doesn't know how to properly cite a website and someone who has copied and pasted two or three whole paragraphs from Wikipedia.