Copy Cat

Weekly classroom Experience

I was going to write about a class I had with my business students on presentation techniques that went pretty well, but then I had a university student blatantly plagiarize a midterm essay, so I thought that would be more interesting to blog about in terms of making some kind of moral decision in the classroom. My first reaction to the paper was, “Oh, google translate.” But as I read through the paper, I noticed it was too good for google to handle so I did some searching and found a Chinese website that had her answer word for word (she is Chinese btw). I couldn’t tell what kind of web page it was, so I had to make certain that is was a copy. I enlisted some translation help and found out that is was indeed a sight giving answers to essays on English topics. As it happened, the student had messaged me several times making sure her paper was okay. I first decided to ask her if she was sure she wanted to hand this copy in as her final draft. She said yes, which was expected, but then said that she had ‘worked so hard’ on it. Here, I had to make a decision, whether to follow my instinct (something akin to burning her at the stake) or to expose the situation to her and get her reaction. I messaged her saying that I know she copied it and that she should write another essay, a fairly lenient judgment in my opinion. She insisted that she had only emailed it to her sister in China to check it, but after I explained how I knew, she finally came clean and said she was ashamed. So in the end, I told her she had to write another essay by the weekend (what a saint I am). This goes against school policy and probably all that is right and decent in the notion of honest education, but in the end I made a judgment to give her another chance. In my perfect world, I could have sent her packing, but I think I had to weigh out my effort in bringing this up with superiors at the university, my responsibility as an employee under school policy, and what possible outcomes might arise from the situation. I hope I chose wisely.