more on plagiarism

Yup, Kate - no quotations, no nothing. Just a big chunk of information cribbed from a webpage and dropped in there as if the guy had written it.

The other guy who plagiarized - the one who accepted his 0 without complaint or challenge - had actually grabbed the material from a webpage he DID NOT CITE as a source. And one of the sources he cited gave me a "404 not found" error.

I really wish I could ban students from using the internet for research-paper sources except our library is small enough that it would be hard for them to find information. The problem is, no matter how much I go through my spiel on "how to assess if a source is trustworthy" there are still people who cite random personal pages (I tell them: I could write a personal page on the genetics of cancer or Harley repair or Renaissance architecture and pop it up on the internet, and that wouldn't mean I knew what I was talking about.)

At least this time I had no one using Wikipedia or Field and Stream as sources, so I guess I count that as a win.

It's such a temptation to drop the papers altogether - they take a long time to grade, the students complain about them, it puts me in a bad mood when I find one that's plagiarized or that makes me wonder about the literacy level of the writer - but it's important. The fact that I get bad papers tells me I need to keep doing it, need to keep giving students that experience. Because, honestly, a lot of our students go into careers where they will be writing white-papers or short summaries of things and I don't want someone to go "Whoa, X University is really screwed up if they're graduating people who write this badly!"

***

Also, I have to take my taxes in to the post office today to send off my pound (plus) of flesh for the year. Thanks to some investments that did better than expected, I wind up owing more than a month's take-home pay between the Feds and the State.

I always think of the person who enclosed about 8 ounces of (dead) bees with his form one year. I guess he was arrested but still. I don't like the fact that it takes a great deal of time (plus the know-how to interpret some of the more arcane instructions) to fill the forms out and then having to send in more money.

With the state taxes it's even worse because at least with the Feds I can comfort myself by thinking, "Well, at least this helps pay for national defense" or "Well, in a roundabout way this is paying for part of my 88 year old aunt's Medicaid." But with my state taxes I get a distinct feeling that there's just this big toilet in the basement of the state capital, and all the money we send in gets flushed down there, feeding the giant maw of some monster standpipe. And that this happens while our bridges crumble and the legislature makes noises about "we might not be able to pay teachers this month" and other things.