All the cool kids are doing it.

This one comes not from me but from a colleague who told it to another colleague, from whom I heard it today. So some of the finer details may be absent or wrong.

A student turns in a plagiarized research essay for the second-half composition course taught by Charlene*. (Students in Charlene's classes have to submit all essays through turnitin.com, plagiarism-detection software, so this particular student has known all semester she will have to do this.) Turnitin reports that the student’s essay is about 65% plagiarized—clearly unacceptable and grounds for a failing grade.

So Charlene gives the essay a zero, in accordance with her syllabus and the department policy. This week, the student barges into Charlene’s office and demands that Charlene grade the essay because the student wants to know how many points she needs to pass the class. Charlene politely responds that she will not grade the essay because it’s plagiarized. (I presume by this point that 1) the student has already received her essay back and 2) C. has previously gone over what plagiarism is during class. In any case, the student is responsible for knowing what it is.)

The student then bursts out, “Fine, next semester I’ll get an instructor who doesn’t care how much we cheat!” And storms out of the office.

This, sadly, is not an exceptional case where I teach. In this case, not only is the student incredulous that the software caught her, but she also doesn't understand (or care) that it's thievery and dishonesty, not to mention laziness. There's a chance she honestly didn't know she was cheating, too.

Last summer a student of mine appealed his final grade of F. He too had received a zero on his research essay and had similarly plagiarized, and this was a point of disagreement between us: what the word means. I don't use Turnitin, but from my cursory Google searches, I figured he had lifted 75-80% of the essay directly from other sources without proper citation, and I explained this to him. His counter was that he'd never been told by any other teacher that it was wrong to plagiarize.

Unfortunately, I believe him--to an extent.

Naturally, a student doesn't like to be "accused" of plagiarism. It indicates intent to deceive, plus it probably feels like a personal attack. A student once told me to my face he didn't plagiarize passages even after I'd given him printouts of the exact passages he'd plagiarized!

But several of my students, I think, just never learned how to do it correctly in high school, or never even wrote a research essay in high school. They don't understand why it's wrong. Or, they know it's wrong and still do it, and just want to see if they can get away with it. This is the kind of "catch-up" we teachers have to play at this place.

As for the student above finding a teacher who won't care about how much she cheats...she may just find one, sadly. But that's for another time, with much more whiskey than I have now.

*name changed