Where pirates all are well-to-do

I’ve been grading papers. Lots and lots of papers. This really has been the academic week from hell. I had about thirty ten-page papers to grade to return tomorrow (I think I spent about twenty hours on them, finally finishing today), I have a presentation to give in class tomorrow, for which I’m taking a break from preparing, I have two ten-page papers due Thursday (although I think I’ll get an extension on one), and I have a conference presentation to give in Virginia on Saturday. I spent all weekend working, and I still have a couple more days in which I should pretty much spend all day working.

I’m very tired. I haven’t slept as much as I usually do, and it’s catching up to me.

Tonight I led a music rehearsal for our G&S concert. Women’s chorus. We rehearsed the women in Act I of Pirates (From “Is there not one maiden…” to “Poor wand’ring one”), and the Act I Finale of Ruddigore, and “Bridegroom and bride” from Gondoliers. Sopranos are weak on the top notes, but everyone’s enthusiastic and they were coming together pretty well. And I was actually decent. I could hear which lines were wrong when, and I was engaging and fun and I think people enjoyed themselves. Go us. Now if we just had some men…

I spent the morning and afternoon finishing grading the metaethics papers. Most of them were pretty decent — a lot better than the papers I graded in an introductory course last year. But God, they were taking *forever*. Most of the papers were good, but not all of them. I gave several C’s. And one paper was pretty severely *bad*. I didn’t know what to make of it.

The paper was quite a bit shorter than it was supposed to be (5 pages instead of 8-10), and reflected some deep confusions (subjectivism is *not* a kind of anti-realism OR a kind of non-naturalism, and Moore and Stevenson were definitely not subjectivists). It was also confusing to read. The girl who wrote it seemed to be jumping around from point to point, and I had a difficult time understanding what she had in mind.

I spent the better part of an hour trying to figure out what a person would have to be thinking in order to produce a paper like this. At a couple of points, lucidity broke through, which suggested to me that she sort of understood some of what was going on. If I could figure out where she was going wrong, I could figure out how to help her write a better paper next time. I wrote some detailed comments, then tried to figure out the appropriate grade. I emailed Jamie, the professor, and told him the situation, and how I was having difficulty trying to figure out what grade to assign. Since I’m sort of new at this, I asked him to look at the paper in question.

I brought the paper by his office today, and he read it. Those of you with more experience in academia/teaching may have already guessed what happened next. Jamie squinted at one of the difficult-to-understand-in-context paragraphs I’d puzzled about, then turned to his computer and called up Google. Seconds later, he found the 1963 article she’d lifted the paragraph from. Within the next hour, he found uncited quotations from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and from a Rochester grad student’s dissertation, as well. We found about half of the text of her paper throughout those three sources.

Plagiarism. I didn’t realize this sort of thing actually happens. I mean, I read about how to catch it and everything, but I failed to actually accept the fact that some of my students might be trying to pass off others’ work as their own. At first, I just felt dumb for not having thought of it myself. I know better than that. All the signs were there. Next time someone tries to pull one on me and is this obvious about it, you better believe I’m going to catch it.

And then my emotional focus turned away from my failure to catch a plagiarizer, to the perpetrator herself. I never knew I’d feel this way about this sort of situation — but I found myself *angry* with her. Like, more than a little. I don’t know the girl at all — I don’t even know which face in class is hers. For all I know, she’s the amazingly hot blonde who sits on the left in the third row from the back. All I know is her name and that she submitted a plagiarized paper for me to grade. I feel betrayed.

I’m a good TA for the students. I explain things very well, and I’m responsive and quick and detailed when students ask me questions via email, and everyone leaves my office hours a lot clearer than they came in. They thank me for it and tell me so. I’ve also been going beyond the call of duty with these papers. I didn’t *have* to spend as much time working on comments as I did. I think I probably wrote about an average of 500 words of comments for each person. That’s like a two-page paper for each of the thirty students. I care about turning these kids into better philosophers, and when they submit something to me, I’m going to scrutinize it and work to understand it and put in a lot of time and energy to figure out what’s going on in it and help them out.

I think it’s an ok system. I think the university is one of the greatest achievements of civilization. But apparently, there are students at this world-class institution who only care about getting course credit and getting by. About them, I say: “Boo, those students!” And I also say, “I disapprove of those students!” (See the difference, there? The former is an expression of emotion, and has no truth-value, and is about the students. The latter is a factual statement, and is true, and is about me. Seriously, this distinction is not that hard to understand.)

I’m not proud of myself for being upset about this. Don’t get me wrong, I do consider it to be righteous anger, and I think it’s completely justified, but I know that there’s probably a narrative that tells her story from a sympathetic point of view. But seriously… turn in a late paper. Or drop the course. Or come talk to me in my office hours and ask me to explain the concepts to you and help you to write a good paper. Hell, turn in a *bad* paper, if you have to, but make it your own. It makes me sad that she didn’t do those things, apparently because she didn’t want to. It makes me curious why she did it. I assume she’s done it before.

It out of my hands now. Way out of my hands. It’s even out of Jamie’s hands. He sent the stuff to the dean of academic integrity or whatever it is. I guess that person knows how to handle it. I just know I’m glad I don’t have to confront her about it. And life goes on, but different. From now on, whenever I grade a paper, I’ll be looking for clues that it has been plagiarized. And that pretty much sucks.

In other news, I have a First Date Thursday, and I’m more than a little excited. So far, I like Tara a lot. I’m getting nervous because she seems too good to be true.