I Hate Plagiarizing

No, the answer is to not let them in if they do not meet the standards. Why should POM or any other teacher (unless it's an ELL or ESL course) have to suffer through this? Why don't those students get themselves up on the language before attempting this type of course? It's not fair to them, the teacher, or the rest of the students.

Example:

When my daughter was in Grade 4, she came home with a 0/52 in a science test. I was shocked. When I met with the teacher, he explained that she'd been off for 3 days with the flu and had missed the review. I asked to see the handouts, notes, or book she could have been studying while at home and he advised me that his class was 90% ESL and there were no reading materials because they couldn't read. Now, is this fair? Certainly not! She's an English-speaking Canadian citizen whose parents have paid school taxes for n years and is entitled to an education. That's why I moved her to French Immersion - if nobody speaks the language, then nobody bloody well speaks the language! We all start from Zero. She did very well, I'll add.

Edit: And I'll add that UBC has an English entrance test, as well as an exit one (or they used to). I remember geology students having to take the latter several times before they could graduate. So it's not just about non-English speaking students. It's about whether you're deemed capable of communicating in written form.

Some languages, like Bulgarian, are the same now as in Shakespeare's times. Can you imagine what Shakespeare would be like if it was very familiar to us ? But Shakespeare introduced old words so that people would talk about his plays. The whole obsession with grammar and syntax and especially pronounciation comes from the USA teaching large numbers of immigrants how to speak English. Old English has very little emphasis on vowels, whereas English in the Americas is vowel accentuated.

As for French, English is closer to Old French than modern French. All languages evolve or die.Mugger (Northern India), assassin (Arabic), boomerang (Aust Aboriginee), Tai-fun ( Chinese), Buffalo ( North Amer Indian) and too many to list let alone all the expressions, particularly from Naval Origins for the colonies - between the devil and the deep blue sea - all combine to grow the language. We probably have more nouns then any other language because we stole most of them.

I prefer to ignore the conventions of writting "proper" English in order to write the way people talk and also to provide spoken emphasis. There is a good reason to learn grammar, and that is it provides one with the ability to construct less ambigious sentences. But the method of communication should never handicap good communication. It is not an end in itself.

Sentence diagramming isn't done any more and hasn't been done in the Catholic school manner for many years. The system used by Montessori schools, which relies on symbols, still is.

As for "outlining and sentence diagramming," the curriculum demands learning to write an essay.

Nope, just you.

There are many urban legends about languages remaining unchanged over the years and they are legends.

So you wrote:


Then you wrote:


So, is Bulgarian dead?

My students took their final today. In the past, I have skimmed their finals. Today, I did not. I know that only one will pass.

Twelve students registered for the class and 8 saw it out to the end. One was a native speaker.

My "work area chair" taught two sections of the same class. She finished the semester with 17 students. Two were native speakers of English. She had a plagiarism problem with three students.

The native English speaker ?

Yes. His is not an original mind. However, he is a student who came to the community college exhibiting preparation for higher education. His essays are meticulously outlined and organized.

I generally read successful essays out loud but anonymously. Most of the class members want to know who wrote the essay and each student selected as an example, with one exception, wanted the acknowledgment. During the spring semester, the selected student earned an A from me and an A on the departmental final. The others photocopied his work and imitated (not plagiarized) it to everyone's benefit.

What happened this time, is that three of the foreign born students, the brothers from Lebanon and the student from India, all of whom have original minds, adopted the American student's organizational methods. I should say that those three are looking toward careers in engineering and computer science and the structured approach suits them.

I have it on the authority of a Bulgarian Lecturer in Bulgarian (Language and History). Where is your source for it being an urban legend ?
It has to move over for English, so I would say it should start adapting or it doesnt look good.

Many languages have English words in them, esp where technology is concerned. Most scientists if they want to be widely read publish in English. Trade is done in English with English contracts.

The three students I would describe as having original minds do not have a sufficient grasp of English to write coherent sentences. The Lebanese brothers have sophisticated vocabularies. I had the Indian student for the introductory course in the fall. The finals in developmental writing are not administered in the classroom but in the learning center which I believe is done to make 'policing' of the writing process more efficient.

While I did not take the class to the learning center, I put the information into the syllabus and on the class website. I also wrote it on the board at the beginning of several class sessions and told the class verbally when and where the final would be held.

The Indian student did not show up at the learning center but went instead to the classroom where he sat by himself for 90 minutes. Why he did not go the registrar's office to inquire as to where the class was is beyond me. However, this meant that he had to repeat the introductory class, which I feel was to his benefit.

He write significantly better than he did in the fall and he is more willing to ask for help than he was then. What I find interesting is that he often describes situations and things for which he does not know the English word. About 90% of the time, I was able to supply him with the proper term.

His failure to show up for the final illustrates the sort of frustration that my colleagues and I feel. Short of calling each student the morning of the exam, what can we do? Presenting the information repeatedly in four formats is more than enough.

I should say that for the 50 minute classes that meet 3 times/week or the 75 minute classes that meet twice, I did not prepare a lecture. First of all, this is a skills class and lecturing should be secondary. Secondly, the grammar needs of the class members become apparent only after an essay or two. This summer's group, for example, did not write sentence fragments, so I never addressed them. They did have more difficulties with English verbs than the previous classes I taught. I have to be flexible.

Anyway, the summer sessions cover three weeks work each week. I feel that the administration ought not to open these sessions to non-native speakers unless those students are made to understand that the summer session will serve as an introduction and that the class will have to be repeated during the fall when four months can be devoted to the material.

Because summer classes are 3 and 1/ hours long, I began to use prepared lectures. I also adapted the SPED technique of writing each element of the class in the corner of the board in order to re-enforce what we were to accomplish.

People say Canadian French has remained unchanged since Europeans settled here. It is a groundless statement. When I said it was an urban legend, I was being flippant because I have heard those statements made vis a vis several languages and they are just not true.

Look what you wrote: Many languages have English words in them, esp where technology is concerned.

Are you having a "duh" moment? The incorporation of English words is a change! If there is a change, said language can not be as it was during the age of Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's language is early Modern English and the designation of early modern is applied within the nearly identical time frame to most European languages including Bulgarian.

You also seemed to miss that my statement, "So, Is Bulgarian dead?" was the third line or synthesis of a syllogism for which quotes from you formed the thesis and antithesis.

The Buick LACrosse is still a poplar car in Quebec, even though its name literally means " the Jerk off"

There are many languages where you can read books written 500 yrs ago and they read like they were written today. In English, that same 500 yrs took it all over the world where it stole words and adopted phrases, changed pronounciation and formal learning methodology. I said nothing about Canandian French and I dont see how it contradicts what I said about Bulgarian, which is also true for most Eastern European languages. The threat of invasion did a lot to force suspicion of outside ways, whereas English was the conqueror and was confident about accepting new words, some taken in as a slur on the original speakers.
Are you having an arrogant moment ?
To me that is a desperate attempt to link two unconnected things by superficial appearance.

Then what you seem is not what happened. I answered it.

I heard back in the day that Camaro meant "loose bowels."

Plain . .
I am going to suggest that this "problem" is going to increase.

You are going to see more foreign students who have one kind of academic talent (probably in math or science) but must demonstrate the most difficult area of English language expression: writing.

Perhaps some staff time needs to be spent on this issue. What are the needs of these students? I am going to suggest that prounciation and understanding of English idioms will top their list. Creative writing will be low priority.

This class is not creative writing but essay writing, as I have said before. It is the sort of writing that is an integral part of the college experience as the essay question is a better gauge of student knowledge than true/false questions or multiple choice tests, which encourage students to guess.

While some high schools have dropped research paper requirements, or, at least eliminate such requirements for lower tier students, I believe that garnering facts, putting them together to support an argument and being able to communicate them to an audience is not just an academic skill but a life skill.

It also seems that teachers no longer use copywriting symbols to correct student papers and do not require students to write drafts which are corrected.

The problem with many foreign students . . . and with American born students who goofed off through high school and then in their late 20s or early 30s, now more mature and in need of greater challenges or more money or both, who enroll in a community college . . . is that they have never been corrected.

I took a tip from my daughter, who teaches Spanish and French, and I highlight certain classes of mistake. Blue is for sentence fragments while orange is for run on sentences. Pink is used for spelling errors or poor word choices. Green is for mistakes in verb tense and yellow is for when the subject and predicate do not agree. On the first day of class, I talk to my students about this system. I also outline it completely in the syllabus and again in a separate sheet devoted to grading that is known as a rubric.

In fact, the demand that all highlighted areas of any piece be rewritten is printed in bold face in the syllabus. During the summer session, one student, a young woman who came to class in very neat work clothes, continually refused to correct her work. I told the entire class several times that the purpose of rewriting a paper is not to give me a clean copy full of errors but to help them learn what their problems are and how to avoid them.

As time was short in the summer session -- we did three weeks work in one week -- I told my students that I would not grade their first draft for the first two of the four planned essays. I would return the work to them with highlighting and commentary and they were to correct it and return it to me. She never corrected her work, but simply retyped it. She was angry at having earned 41 points out of a potential 100 on her second paper and marched down to guidance.

The counselor asked for the course syllabus. The counselor told the student the professor clearly stated that sudents are to correct the highlighted errors.

Unless one corrects their mistakes, one is doomed to repeat them . . . time after time.

I am going to volunteer at a theatre company so that I can see live theatre. The woman in charge of assigning ushers has taught at NYU where she said plagiarism is the freshman disease. I was at a party last night where a woman who received her doctorate from Yale said that new grad students in the science at Yale are sometimes caught plagiarizing.

The finals were checked and my students did much better than I anticipated.

Only two failed: the plagiarizer and the woman who refused to correct her mistakes. That woman put the least effort into the class of all the students.

The plagiarizer's younger brother passed with a C. Of the six that passed, four received a grade of C or C-. One passed with a B+ but he was a native speaker. He also influenced three other male students to use his outlining methods and was a great help to the class.

Another student, a young man for India, who has made terrific progress with his English during the 2009-2010 academic year, passed with a B-. I can not tell you how pleased I was with that grade. He worked so hard and it was only during this term that he was able to ask for specific English words, words that he could define or describe.

I use what I think of as group teaching. I find that writing grammar exercises does less for adult learners than working the exercises in a group. It also cuts down on paper usage. Most importantly, it prevents their mistakes from being re-enforced. For example, if we are working on "comma splices," a mistake I had never heard of prior to taking this job, we do the exercises together. Chances are, if one does not understand a concept, s/he is not alone. By working on exercises together, we can discuss why a sentence or word or punctuation mark is right or wrong.

We also work on writing topic (thesis) sentences as a group. I use either the white board (which seems to work better) or a projected word document. We might start with a topic in the book or with one I create. i then ask students for a basic sentence and what follows is utilitarian but dull sentence. We keep improving it until the entire class is happy with the sentence. I believe this encourages each student to fully examine his own writing and to revise what he writes. Besides, how many students take a corrected exercise seriously? When we work together, they learn more.

It is true that in each class, one student rises to the top. In each instance, this has been a student with a great work ethic, a logical mind or both. The other students are more likely to follow the example of a peer and that is good.

Hi,
I would like your opinion as you are a teacher yourself...
I am a graduate student and I accidentally sent my professor (via online submission) information that I copy and pasted from a website we were supposed to go to for an assignment. What happened is that I never went back through the document and actual did the assignment/discussion.
She brought me to her office and we discussed how I should receive a zero for the assignment which I agreed with, but on top of that she believes that I have plagiarized the assignment that I did not even complete! I am being submitted to a Professional Misconduct Committee and on top of that I am an Honor Council Member for my graduate school. It was a stupid mix-up and now I am at risk of expulsion because of absent-mindedness.

I would like advise on how I should go about convincing the Misconduct Committee that I did not intend to steal nor not credit anyone's original works?

(slm1211 started a new topic on the subject here:)

http://able2know.org/topic/163639-1