Plagiarism
Yep. I have a side job, besides the rich life of a writer. I’m an Associate Professor of English, and I’m grading Shakespeare papers right now.
So far, I have two plagiarized papers, and it’s just disheartening. I know students get into trouble or get backed into a corner and turn to Google to find a paper, but it’s cheating. As a writer, I would not want to have my academic articles or pieces of Brownie Fix represented as someone’s work other than my own. There’s a lot of sweat, tears, and even blood in those pieces. No joke.
Writing is hard, but you just can’t take the easy way out. At some point, you’re going to get caught. I just hate it that I have to turn in the copied papers.
In some instances, it seems that it would take longer to actually copy the piece and change around the wording so that it does not look plagiarized. Really? Just write the paper and take the grade. There are not any perfect papers. Good Lord. Brownie Fix had tons of typos in it, and that was when it was published. It’s fixed now, by the way.
Anyway, I have some more papers to grade, and I’m really hoping that I don’t run into any perfect papers because that means those papers have been through copy editors, professional copy editors. I want students to get help and have people look at their papers, but when it is written in an academic style and not their own voice and flawless, then that is an issue.
I really enjoy teaching literature, but I really dislike grading papers because I don’t want to run into students who copy papers. I know that it’s inevitable, but I get disheartened about it. When that happens, I just have to turn my attention to the students that really want to learn and be in school. That’s a good thing.
