“open door
light from
to go
to go
on and on”
this is MINE ! ! ! !
USAJon

And to be clear, I’ve learned how to not let the quality of my teaching suffer from my semesterly load. But yes, grading does have to become streamlined.

When I used to do face-to-face confrontations, I usually got some version of stonewalling. These days, I just google the sources (or let turnitin do it for me), write up the honor violation paperwork, and email the student *after* the charge is filed. Mind you, this is on papers that are supposed to have gone through a drafting, revising, and conferencing process, and I don’t penalize anything short of wholesale theft of a single text at the draft stage; they just have to do it over again if they want to pass the class (I teach writing, so learning citation is part of the class; though they’re supposed to have some knowledge of the basics, a few show no sign of prior training). But on the final version (usually papers that I never saw in draft, or saw in extremely fragmentary form), I throw the book at them — or, rather, fill out the necessary forms and gather the documentation with a certain amount of mumbling under my breath at having to spend several hours of what would otherwise be vacation this way, but not a lot of passion. It does get easier, LadyTraveller; my first case — which basically had to go before an honor board because the student in question was unwilling to accept my authority, insisting instead that I yield to his perception of the results of a philosophical discussion he had with another (male) professor about ownership of ideas — had me tied up in knots for a while, too. Now it’s just part of the routine — unwelcome, unpleasant, but not really upsetting (except for the occasional case of an otherwise good student doing something stupid at the last minute).

@Paul: I sympathize, I really do. I’ve done 5-5 as an adjunct, and have a 4-4 (plus two in the summer) full-time but non-tenure-track gig now. But, speaking from that experience, and considering what you have admitted are the consequences for the quality of your teaching, perhaps you ought to consider another line of work? As long as you’re doing the work of 2-3 people for barely the price of one (I assume you’ve taken on that much work because that’s what you need to make a living), none of the institutions for which you work have an incentive to hire full-timers at a salary which would allow them to do basic things like hold students accountable for doing their own work.

As someone said in a blog comment a few weeks ago (exactly where, I can’t remember), in the case of higher ed, “occupy” may mean “leave.”

Not only that but unless they are a new teacher they have read lots of term papers too.

When the teacher realizes “I’ve read this before” it’s just a matter of figuring out where.

Paul: 1) your load is astonishing. I don’t know how you do it. 2) H is right. It usually takes less than a minute to find the source. You could always give yourself a 2-minute limit. If you can find it in 2-minutes, great! If not, you find other things to grade down.

Paul, it’s really not that time- or labor-intensive to track down a plagiarist’s source. Because plagiarists are by definition lazy, usually the plagiarized source will be at the top of a Google search that will take you all of 0.43 seconds! Perhaps you need to think more creatively about making plagiarism-proof assignments. In most classes, I don’t ask students to write open-ended term papers on subjects of their own choosing. I force them to write on a particular subject and to use specific combinations of primary and secondary sources, and I never assign the same question & set of readings twice.

Then again, I have a 2-2 teaching load, so I can stay on top of this stuff. But people like Dr. Crazy & Tom have 4-4 loads, and they stay on top of this stuff, too.