Plagiarists

For those of you who were passionate about my cheapo students:

I found four altogether, and the remarkable thing was that none of them even bothered to build the most rudimentary of camouflage into their papers. Some were so lazy as to include color-altered text (from the copy-paste), and some included text properly colored but so fundamentally professional in nature that I had no choice but to Google phrasings.

The most appalling thing about this wasn't that students would freak out and swipe papers from the internet, but that they would assume I wouldn't be able to recognize NYTimes-grade writing as distinct from the half-assed and ill-written papers of my best students. I had one student who earnestly says "womans" in class turn in a paper that might have been in the running for a Pulitzer. This same student showed up for the first time the seventh week of class. Because I teach in a school that might as well be in an anime where the main characters find tentacles popping up in the basement and administrators worshipping the Devil, this isn't a major issue. As long as people rub wads of money on the financial aid reps, they can show up finals week with news copy stapled to their faces and reasonably expect an A.