It’s the end of the semester, which means I’m in for a week or so of sturm und drang (for the untraveled and unworldly, that means storm and stress in German [I know a lot about languages and stuff]). I’ve already had to handle breathless students on the verge of a meltdown and the perpetually perplexed who just can’t turn in their paper on time because they’re unable to find my office after sixteen weeks of classes. What are they supposed to do when that happens? I mean that’s nobody’s fault. I’ve also had to field several requests to guarantee a certain grade before I even calculate them. Since students don’t usually get to request the grade they’d prefer to take home that might sound presumptuous, but these students all assure me that they would only ask such a thing because they have good reason to, usually that they’re graduating this or some future semester and just have to have a certain grade in my class. And they’re always quite flexible; it’s not as if they’re asking for an A, just a B or B minus, unless of course they really want an A.
Most of all, though, the end of the semester means grading papers, which in turn means keeping constant vigil for punctuation that undergraduates don’t use, complex sentence constructions, tongue-in-cheek asides, and for nuanced interpretations of identity politics in the Balkans, any of which signals the Big P. Nobody escapes scrutiny. I assume everyone’s trying to make a sucker out of me. I might sound like Torquemada keeping everyone under a veil of suspicion like this but when you get accustomed to a certain style of communication, departures from the barely literate just cry out that something is amiss. I also have a long history with plagiarists in my classes. I don’t know if cheaters just run amok on campus or if I seem like the soft-headed simpleton who’ll let anything past, but these plagiarists think they can play me like a violin.
I already have three confirmed cases of plagiarism and one more suspected with another twenty five or thirty papers to go. So now I’m stuck with the dilemma of what to do with them. And it’s a real dilemma, you know the kind with two equally bad alternatives. I can turn them in to the university people and have to deal with the paperwork and legal procedures and all the efforts to keep the cheaters from suing for slander, or I can just deal with it myself by failing them, which doesn’t necessarily give them the greatest disincentive to cheating again in the future. Exhibit A is one of the plagiarists I handled unofficially two years ago and has now turned up in a colleague’s class doing it all over again. A while ago I pledged to turn everyone in but that was before I was facing the prospect of setting up three “mediated discussions” in a non-threatening environment of equals to mutually come to an agreement on the appropriate action to take.
