Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Modern Day College Students

"I continued to google search various phrases and sentences that seemed too well crafted for the ability of my students and found out that out of 92 students, 89 had plagiarized.

The next day I ripped into them. I lectured them about how plagiarism was completely unacceptable, they would all get F's and blah blah blah, they weren't listening. And sure enough I got called into the principle's office.

The "dean" then lectured me about how I was overly harsh on the students and that they "didn't know" they weren't supposed to plagiarize. He then went on to read complaints he took in a survey from my students about my performance, one of which was a complaint about this ever so slight speech impediment I have (I cough due to allergies more frequently than the average person). I was to also let all the students write a new paper. I was dumbfounded.

I was to apologize to these students for their plagiarism. Only in a 2 year degree mill.

It was here that I realized that if I was going to keep my job I was just going to have to play ball and pass these kids no matter what. But the trick was to show them still who was boss because by this time they thought they owned me and had won. Never mind their degree would be worthless. Never mind with that kind of attitude they would get fired in half a second. In their little minds they "won" and now life was just going to bend over for them, if not the dean would always be able to save them and would bend life over for them.

But I would get my revenge. For the next class in the next semester was statistics.
"

13 comments:

Unknown said...

Maybe those idiots were too busy getting all excited over last night's episode of How I Met Your Mother or busy posting their photos on Instagram or whatever this rotten generation does for fun now. Lazy, lazy, lazy.

Unknown said...

And of course it would be one of those unaccredited degree mills! Getting your degree from a toilet paper company sounds like so much fun.

Glen Filthie said...

Ya know Captain I sometimes wonder if you have the right of it or not: there are those that rail against the education bubble and rightfully so; but then they go on to advocate the trades.

There are a pile of unemployed tradespeople around these days too...

I agree with you on mickey-mouse secondary education but some of those two year programs are still a good stepping stone for younger men.

Andrew said...

I went to a 2 yr college, Georgia Highlands, and one professor flat out told us that he didn't care if we cut and pasted our entire paper from wikipedia, haha.

Of course, once I got to the University, then all of us were submitting our papers to turnitin...

Anonymous said...

Sadly your experience is the norm in academe. Administrators often frustrate faculty who have students' best interest at heart and try to instill habits that would aid them in the real world. My observation is higher education is students and administrators arrayed against faculty.Of course one consolation is the real world will quickly disabuse them of their illusions-should they be fortunate to land a job.

Anonymous said...

Way too much laziness with respect to studying or work - where did it come from? It's not like this generation is genetically inferior, so the fault must ultimately lie with the parents/culture/upbringing.

FYI most of college is a joke now. I'm getting a worthwhile degree (physics) but I still have to take a bunch of classes on what old dead communists thought of old dead colonialists. I do wish I was joking. If someone takes 4 years of that garbage with nothing else, their brain will turn to mush.

Eric Hennigan said...

I recall in High School once, in AP English, our teacher began the class by taking the previous day's quizzes and throwing them in the garbage pail. He then proceeded to lecture us sternly about being advanced students and doing our homework.

Turned out that not a single one of us 30 students had read the material, a short story of only 10 pages or so, that the previous quiz had covered.

We deserved much worse than a stern lecture.

Anonymous said...

I am not disputing what you say. However, if you dealt with third and fourth year Hons. physics students you might be more favorably impressed.

Unfortunately there aren't many of them.

Anonymous said...

Obviously, the school was not the University of Virginia. UVA has kept it's honor code in place (I will not lie, cheat, or steal) with a single sanction (expulsion) if found guilty. UVA would have kicked out the 89 students caught plagerizing.

Then again, we got a real (useful not worthless) degree at low in-state tuition prices 20 years ago...

Paul E. Zimmerman said...

"They didn't know."

Yep, heard that one before. I bounced two 30-something students from one of my classes because both of them turned in cut-and-paste papers they found online. Never mind that one of the two had attended several other junior colleges before landing in my class, she had never heard of plagiarism before, honest! The second one I kicked out even took someone else's entire paper and changed the page citations the author gave to match the edition of the text we were using.

The VP of Instruction claimed that I acted rashly when I tossed them both out and gave both students failing grades because "I didn't ask them what happened." It was pretty damn obvious what happened, because I Googled "their" stolen papers!

The VP explained to me that she had written all of the letters necessary to make sure they kept their financial aid and that they could just retake the class at a later date and replace the grade. But what else would be the outcome? Asses in seats means tuition checks coming in, and hey there are six figure salaries to be maintained here! It's not about the quality of the product, you see, it's about maintaining the promise of what it can bring, even if you have to lie to do it.

The message I got from the VPoI was "you followed the book and those are the rules; in the future, don't enforce the rules."

So now, I don't enforce the rules. I quit.

Anonymous said...

Students complain of 'poor value for money' courses

Almost one in three first year students at UK universities say their courses are not good value, suggests a study.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22484419

Laughingdog said...

@Paul,

Your story sounds a lot like what happened a 5 or 6 years ago to professor at Norfolk State University. The rules stated that professors can fail any student that misses more than a specific number of classes (9 I think). Half the class skipped more than that, so he failed them. The Dean overrode that and denied the professor tenure over it.

Joanne Jacobs said...

Who wrote this? "Principal" is misspelled. And colleges don't have principals.