eeeee-gads

Well, in my second class (a lab) this morning, I had:

1. couldn't get the demonstration microscope to turn on
2. one of the young women - coming down with a stomach bug from the kids she works with at a local day care - throw up in the trash can. (I tried to be sympathetic without getting too close to her. I have to travel tomorrow. I do not want my Spring Break to be a week of throwing up. I already washed my hands AND used antibacterial goo on them [tho' if it's a virus that will do little good] and I'm going to go home and pound down a couple of those Dannon yogurt drinks that claim to enhance your immune system.)
3. One of the guys dropped the stapler - it was an accident - and it shattered into about 10 pieces.
4. One of the students unhappy with how the "grader" (not me; we have a grader for the class because I am already teaching it as an overload) graded her paper.

So it's been an unpleasant morning. (I wound up carrying the trash can out to the dumpster, at arm's length, and closing my eyes while I tied off the bag and tossed it in. I have a squeamish stomach at the best of times and even THINKING about throwing up makes me a little nauseated).

And now, I have papers to grade.


****

Almost done.

Found one (of fifteen) that was partially plagiarized from the internet (took off a third of the points; I think that's about fair - it was about 1/5 of the paper that was cribbed). One paper was almost entirely plagiarized and from sources the papers author had not cited. (Yup...power of Google, folks. Type in a suspicious-sounding phrase and see what you get back.) He gets a 0 on the paper and he's lucky there's not more penalty...this is someone who is taking the class for a second time and I think (IIRC) he pulled a similar trick on his paper the first time. Durr. Or maybe he just plagiarized the sources he CITED last time and thought I'd not check...and this time got sneakier.

To be fair - I chose at random two "unusual sounding" phrases out of every paper and ran a websearch on them. It was only his paper and that other one that kicked anything out - and a lot of the other papers, it was pretty clear the students wrote them; some of them talked about personal experience with the topic and it was totally plausible that they had had it.

I hate playing cop but I admit deep down there's a tiny satisfaction that Google-boy isn't getting away with his shenanigans. (Here's a tip for would-be plagiarizers: don't choose sites that "sound smarter" than an average college undergrad. And for the love of Pete, don't plagiarize sites with complex jargon. That's just a red flag. Or rather - would-be plagiarizers, totally ignore what I just said. Plagiarize from sites that sound, like, rilly rilly smart, because your prof will be so dazzled that she won't possibly check your sources! And include lots of jargon, preferably jargon your prof might not know! And don't define it or anything! Yeah, yeah, that's the ticket...)

None of the papers were GREAT but most of them were not terrible. So I guess that's a little success.