I Need All the Plagiarists to Stay After Class
We’re going to have a little chat
The first time I encountered plagiarism was when I was student teaching. A student copied paragraphs from different articles and pasted them together into a horrible monstrosity, not unlike Frankenstein’s monster, a disjointed collection of thoughts that he tried to pass off as his research paper.
I gave him a zero and called his mom. She was angry — at me. “Can’t you at least give him partial credit for his effort?”
“I really didn’t see much evidence of effort,” I said.
Over the years, I encountered many such students. Some were better at it than others . For instance, one girl knew enough to change every fourth or fifth word — to evade the program I ran papers through to check for plagiarism. But I still caught her because I could tell they weren’t her thoughts. I tracked down the original and confronted her.
Eventually, I quit involving parents. Most of them sided with their darling little cheaters. How dare I ask their children to do their own writing! What kind of teacher actually expects students to learn? Gasp!
These cheaters are still among us, out here in the real world.
I joined Simily a couple of days ago. It’s a new platform, similar to this one, but with more of a bent toward fiction. No one seems to be policing it. The Terms of Service, hidden in a tab at the bottom of the page, state that you can only post content that’s yours. Evidently, someone either didn’t read the Terms of Service (shocking!), or the owner of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate has a Simily account. The Sherlock Holmes stories are all on there.
People are also just willy-nilly putting articles on, then tagging them as whatever genre floats their boat. There’s a mystery/thriller story called “We Should All Play in More Land…According to Science!” I skimmed it. It really is just an article about the health benefits of being outside. There was no mystery involved — not a single murder or chase scene. How disappointing.
This is the sort of behavior that makes the teacher in me want to tell people to stay after class. We need to have a little chat — and may God have mercy on your soul.
Thank you for listening to me vent. I was super excited when I discovered Simily, but now I’m just disappointed. The cheaters of the world are already ruining it. My guess is their mothers would defend their actions.
