ramble through the bronx

Saturday, December 17, 2005

Yes, Virginia, there is an eCheat.com

Thursday afternoon I was grading a student's paper and couldn't make heads or tails of it - it was incredibly awful. (this isn't the student I was complaining about before, with the plagiarized draft). It was a page too short, poorly argued, and had no works cited or bibliography. It was also completely irrelevant to our class, and further, the student had never cleared the topic with me. Already poised to give it a "D" on its own "merits," I decided to check if some of the introduction was plagiarized. I googled the first sentence, and found the whole essay online...

... on a site actually called eCheat.com. Priceless.

I present, for your amusement (the other graduate student teachers and I were laughing so hard we were crying), the last three questions of the site's FAQ:

Isn't the point of this site to help students cheat?
No, eCheat was created to provide a reference for students writing papers. The essay format is the most logical structure for conveying information, or a particular viewpoint in a concise manner. For more on this subject please refer to our Terms of Use.

Can I use this site without plagiarizing?
Yes! If you read essays to better understand a subject or to get essay topics you aren't committing plagiarism. You're only committing plagiarism when you copy someone else's work without citing it. All of our essays have an automated tool for properly citing our essays in the major bibliography formats (MLA, APA, Chicago).

If I turn in one of these essays as my own will I get caught?
Most likely not. Most teachers are not very perceptive. However if you are caught the penalties may be severe. If you copy other people's work often you will impair your ability to do complex assignments and will end up hurting yourself. Don't allow the school system get in the way of your education.

So there, my friends. Don't let the school system get in the way of your education. But you probably won't get caught. (I love the qualifier "OFTEN" -- "if you copy other people's work often you will..."). Hilarious.

The story, believe it or not, gets better. I write to the email address the student had emailed me from before, asking him to come to my office either that day or after his exam on 9.30 Friday morning. I hear nothing back. He's not there for the exam Friday morning. I (reasonably enough) figure that he knows the gig is up and is just going to accept a failing grade.

After the exam, I check my email and see a couple emails from students who missed the exam & wanted to write the exam with my other section this Tuesday the 20th; I grudgingly say yes. I would have refused had I gotten their emails before they missed the exam, but fuck it, they may as well just write it on Tuesday. The official Fordham policy is that professors can't schedule make-up exams for students, or let students write exams at any time other than the official time for their section, but this rule is pretty much never enforced.

Then I see Plagiarist's email, sent from another email address than the one I'd emailed Thursday:

From: [email address I've never seen@aol.com]
To: janedryden@gmail.com
Date: Dec 16, 2005 1:36 AM

Hi Ms Dryden its [student's first name]. Im Sorry i did not notice sooner but my english teacher scheduled his final for me at 9 00 friday morning because i am leaving wednsday to go back to my hometown for Christmas. Is there anyway i can take this test at a later date before finals are over?
-[student's first name]

So... this kid wants to leave early for Christmas, and so arranges with his English professor to write the English exam early, and only notices at 1.36 am that there's a conflict, and so figures that mine is the exam he can reschedule?!?

The kid's totally going to fail; even if he writes the final and gets 100% on it he'll still just get 49% in the class; but the last thing I need him complaining about is that the only reason he failed is that I didn't let him write the final. So even though I'm perfectly within my rights to not reschedule his final (he should have shown up for it!), I write him back:

Did you get my email to your other email account? Please come in and see me this afternoon, or make an appointment to see me Monday. I'd like to talk to you about your paper. I'd also like to talk to you about the class.

When you come in we can discuss the possibility of you taking the exam with the other section on Tuesday.

He responds, asking to make an appointment for Monday, and saying "and is there a problem with my report? because i know I forgot a work cited.."

Of course, I would love to see his works cited. It would be one work: the eCheat site.

So, I have an appointment with this kid Monday at noon. I wonder what he's going to have to say for himself. I wonder if he'll bother appealing? The whole thing is annoying, since I now have to fill out a report to the Dean so this kid will have a big red P for plagiarism on his record FOREVER. (Well, actually, they don't really take it that seriously. Nothing bad will happen to this kid. Fordham would never turn down his parents' money.)

Basically done grading papers, and now I have one section's exams to grade before I get the next round on Tuesday.

Oh, and Josh is organizing a birthday party for me tonight. Yay!!!

jane 11:59 AM [+]

Grading again...

Ah, yes, grading 70 papers, and then on Friday I get 35 exams, and then on Tuesday I get 35 more exams. Grading-tastic. here's a soupcon:

Aristotle also points out a way that we humans are in fact bound by nature. Aristotle quotes himself, "Man is by nature a political animal (Aristotle)".

Isn't it nice of that Aristotle to quote himself so pithily?

jane 4:46 PM [+]

Snow Day!

All campuses of Fordham University are closed today, Friday, Dec. 9, 2005, due to inclement weather. Information updates will be posted as necessary online and as recorded messages on the University's emergency phone numbers at (1800) 280-SNOW (7669), and (212) 636-7777. Information updates about athletic events scheduled for today will be recorded on the 2RAM Hotline at (718) 817-2RAM (2726).

Yay!!

jane 11:43 AM [+]

I hate plagiarism

And even more than plagiarism, I hate when students play dumb.

Sure, send me your draft Wednesday night, so I can look it over. Then send me an email the next morning (today, Thursday), asking me if I've had a chance to look it over yet. I get both emails today, and figure I'll look over your draft. Quickly, I begin suspecting that the turns of phrase are not yours. After googling for a bit, I discover that substantial chunks of your paper, including most of your conclusion, are cut and pasted from at least three different websites (including Wikipedia). With no quotation marks. Just cut and pasted. Sentence for sentence, comma for comma (you have changed a couple of semi-colons).

I email you back, saying I've looked at your paper and it's unacceptable. I ask you to please rewrite your paper, citing sources. I say that it's an interesting topic, and you don't need to throw it all out, but please do it properly. What I don't say explicitly is that I am showing you mercy, you fucking plagiarist.

You have the gall to write back and say, but I don't understand, Professor, what did I do wrong? You say my topic is interesting, but I have to rewrite it? But I was going to cite everything properly once you'd looked over the draft. Surely drafts are just drafts! Everything between the sources is my own! Really!

I scream, call my roommate over to witness this nonsense, pour myself another glass of wine. I restrain the urge to FAIL YOU NOW, which I entirely have the right to do, and instead write back:

[Name concealed],

Even in a draft, you should have quotation marks around the quotes that you use. Further, I'm having difficulty telling what are your thoughts and what portion of your paper is drawn from your sources. For instance, most of your concluding paragraph is a quotation, rather than being you summing up what you have managed to show:

You: [student's conclusion]
Internet source: [oddly enough, exactly the same words]

[Student's first name], this is your CONCLUSION. You shouldn't need to draw from other sources to help you write your very own conclusion. Further, when looking through your draft, I shouldn't have to guess at what is your own contribution and what is something you've drawn from another source. If you haven't clearly shown me (through quotation marks & accurate citing) what's yours and what's not, then how am I supposed to evaluate your draft?

Best,
Prof. Dryden

Does that seem fair?

Bloody plagiarist.

Let's see what she hands in tomorrow morning. Yup, that's when the paper's due.

jane 8:41 PM [+]

ABD

All but dissertation. Just finished the proposal defense. They gave me the thumbs-up -- and of course a whole host of concerns, questions, objections, etc., that I'm going to have to deal with. But those are OK. I have the thumbs up, and they've signed the paperwork.

off to grab dinner with some folks, then go drink!

jane 5:15 PM [+]

The NYU graduate student strike

...is now in its 24th day, and the administration is threatening to hold striking students' stipends for next TWO semesters if they keep striking. Since the National Labor Relations Board (not a great entity, under the Bush administration) ruled a year and a half (two years?) ago that grad students at private universities couldn't unionize (they were students, not workers), these administration threats are not illegal.

Debate between Michael Palm, the head of the grad students union and a philosophy professor, Paul Boghossian, representing the administration -- Boghossian is a smart guy, very well known in his field (he clarifies some of his points down in the comments section, linked below).

And comments by various folks about what all this means -- interesting stuff, especially coming from the perspective of having been an undergrad at U of T, where UT and York alternated strikes every year or so.

One of the commenters writes:

But Boghossian is certainly wrong to claim that the students aren't workers. These students are doing work that the university does need in the gra.d scheme of things. More than that, if the students are striking, that indicates to me that they either need or truly feel that they deserve more than they're getting. Graduate students are not children, and I'm sure they take their work(indeed, their livelihood) very seriously. $19,000 is a lot of money. About twice what I'm getting in my program. But, NYC is a very expensive city. Between rent and virtually everything else costing much more than elsewhere, I'm sure $19,000 isn't worth much.

But graduate students can eat dust for a few years and come out better in the end, right? Not really. Graduate students are generally in their mid-twenties to early thirties. These people have families. They need money to live, money to save, and benefits to support their partners and children. And, at least in philosophy, it's not a rigorous 2-3 year ordeal. It's a rigorous 6-7 year ordeal. That's an awfully long time to eat dust and pray for good health and fortune. My partner and I have decided it would be foolish to have a child while in graduate school. But many people aren't willing to put their life on hold for 7 years. Why should they? 7 years is a long time. Some people want a family and an academic career. Do we really want to exclude them? Academia could miss out on a lot of brilliant people that way. Still others enter graduate school with one or more children, already. Are the doors of education to be forever closed to these people?

(Selfish reason I care -- I just want to say -- with their previous contract, the NYU grad students got a $19,000 stipend PLUS benefits. I have a $17,000 stipend (it was $15,000 when I got to Fordham, because I had a special fellowship; my friends/peers were making $12,000) and no benefits. New York is freaking expensive. I want the NYU kids to win, for private universities everywhere. Not that I think a union is necessarily the best move for Fordham (that's a long story), but if conditions at the other private universities keep going up, Fordham ultimately has to follow.)

(Non-selfish reason I care -- well, justice. And to stick it to the Bush-appointed NLRB.)

Oh -- addition -- here are some comments from Benjamin Hellie & Jessica Wilson, two new philosophy professors at University of Toronto at Scarborough (how lovely that they have a blog).

jane 9:36 PM [+]

My dad really is losing it

He's been sending me & a couple of his friends endless links to new comments on articles in the Globe and Mail, Ottawa Citizen, Toronto Star, and so forth. Sometimes the papers don't put his comments up, such as this letter to the editor at the Montreal Gazette:

>From: alexander dryden
To: letters@thegazette.canwest.com
Subject: Zillions of dollar$
Date: Sat, 03 Dec 2005 22:03:48 -0500

Dear Gazette,

I think it's absolutely wonderful that tens of thousands of lunatics should
descend for two weeks on Montreal with nothing to do but celebrate the End
of the World, and spend zillions of dollars doing it.

I have seen it before -- the spending of zillions of dollars -- but not the
celebration of the End of the World that accompanies this Kyoto thing ...
what is it ... this LIE that carbon dioxide etc. etc.

it is a lie. It is a nonsense. Every single piece of scientific fact --
fact, not hypothesis -- fact, not pre-programmed computer-model premise --
completely and absolutely shows that all this Kyoto so-called "science" is
... a scam.

Yes. A Scam -- a deliberate attempt by Maurice-Maurice Strong, best friend
of Prime-Moron Pinocchio (sp?) Martin to get western countries to give
zillions of dollars (with Strong and friends collecting commissions) to the
third-world's murderous dictators (including China), whose leaders would
have to do nothing at all -- except pay their commissions to Strong et al.
and get extremely. very rich.

If the Gazette has not done its journalistic duty in exploring this story,
I recommend that it publish this letter, with some wee sentence that says
it's upholding the freedom of speech -- however weakly.

Best regards for a newspaper I once respected,

Alex Dryden
Ottawa

So that's a little c razy -- but this one, I think, shows my dad actually falling off his rocker -- (it starts from the bottom of an email to me and some of his cronies)

PS: here's another one, with refernce to a money-laundering "job-offer" from Workopolis, jointily owned by the GliberalMail & TurdStar, sent to the RCMP:

--

I have wished a couple of times, including this time, to inform you of what
I think may well be a "scam" -- or, indeed, in this case, an
institutionalized form of money-laundering.

Your (i.e., the RCMP's) Web site is completely, absolutely and utterly
incapable of handling such information.

Is the RCMP still working in the Trudeau days? Has it regressed, but not
recovered from the cretin days?

Is the RCMP really, seriously, honestly interested in getting info. on crime
over its Web site?

Frankly, I doubt it.

If you want such information as I have, or if you want some REALLY SERIOUS
ADVICE about how to do your info. job properly, please reply.

((PS: Whoever receives this note should be assured that the msg. and its
time of transmission has been copied to a number of other recipients,
including some of a political nature.))

So, that's a little bizarre.

In other news, I've been looking at student drafts. Oh my....

jane 6:03 PM [+]

Dorothy Allison quote

I'm putting together my lecture for tomorrow, which is using the first two essays in Dorothy Allison's book Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1994). That said, I'm also procrastinating on actually writing the lecture, so I'm rereading the other essays in the book. Thought I'd share this tidbit (from p. 150 on Skin):

When straight people wear their tolerant expressions, I am reminded of Baptist Sunday school sermons from when I was a child in South Carolina. The preacher would talk about hating the sin but not the sinner, a line that has since become a cliche, btu one that even back then I did not trust. I remember watching his face, shiny-pink and stern, and knowing that he did not make any such distinction. It was like the conversation I had with a relatively mild conservative lady from Houston. She was looking at the table of feminist journals I was selling and looking at me with the most awkward expression of polite distaste.

"I know," she said, "you must be a fine young woman, and you think you can't help yourself." Her face was very patient, very Christian. "But my dear," she concluded, "I will always think your life is a tragedy."

I couldn't help myself. I leaned forward and deliberately touched her, taking her hand. "I understand," I said. "And it's sad. That's just what I could say to you."

jane 6:58 PM [+]

YES!!!

I got my first email from a student who's now interested in philosophy. I feel so excited and happy! She's thinking of majoring, and now wants advice as to what kinds of job prospects it offers (she mentions law and teaching, and wants to know if there's anything else). Anyway, I'm going to think a bit before I write her back -- I feel as if she's taken the philosophy bait & now I should reel her in to majoring! -- so I want to make philosophy sound, you know, promising.

Any advice?

Oh, and I also got a new comment on Rate my professor.com (and, for the record, I removed the one that Someone Who Will Remain Nameless posted -- it was the last thing I needed up there with Stalker Boy around!)

jane 5:13 PM [+]