\tMarking papers is exhausting because it has become a sad game of suspicion and also because I can\u2019t help being appalled at how shallow secondary education has become \u2013yes, I said secondary. First part: my second year students plagiarise from sources I can easily find and, then, they claim they\u2019re actually quoting \u2018indirectly.\u2019 Others plagiarise from sources I can\u2019t find and it\u2019s a case of their word against mine. Second part: students who have produced very weak papers in which apparently no guidelines have been followed claim they have indeed followed them and are frustrated that what they thought were good papers are actually failures. I\u2019m tired, very tired, which is not the mood a teacher needs to prepare for the oncoming semester.<\/p>\n
\tSo, dear students: when suddenly perfect sentences appear in the middle of your papers, written in a vocabulary and with a syntax that only a native speaker with a PhD would use, I grow paranoid. There should be a name for those sentences that somehow jump out of the text to stare at me and challenge me to find where they come from. I HATE wasting my time checking the internet for \u2018evidence.\u2019 All teachers do. It\u2019s absolutely necessary to learn the difference between quoting (using \u201cquotation marks\u201d and a reference for the author, book, page…) and simply copying; it\u2019s also necessary to understand that paraphrasis means repeating \u2018in your own words\u2019 what the author means, not copying without quotation marks. How come you don\u2019t know this? And how do we distinguish the cheeky, cheating students from the confused ones?<\/p>\n
\tIn the tutorials with second-year students who had failed their papers I feel increasingly sorry for them, as, one by one, they reveal the limitations of their secondary education: this is the first time they write a paper (just 1000 words long), use bibliography, are asked to quote. Many present papers with a nice bibliography they claim to have read but simply don\u2019t see that if it is not quoted I can\u2019t know how they have used it. Quotations are often dropped into the text, rather than use to support an argument they\u2019re developing. They have checked the guidelines, they tell me, read the sample essay. What can I tell them, I wonder? Read articles, there\u2019s no more guidance I can offer. Of course, we have lost 6 credits, a whole semester, in the first year with the transition to the new degree, 6 valuable credits which might have helped us teach our students writing techniques. Instead, they\u2019re taking who knows what.<\/p>\n
\tThen, there\u2019s this other matter: the furry ball in the stomach. This is what I feel I have when I must see a student who hasn\u2019t played by the rules but who doesn\u2019t understand why I\u2019m so annoyed at this. It\u2019s tense, it\u2019s ugly and I simply don\u2019t like it. And, typically, it always happens when it\u2019s too late, and the wretched paper in question has been marked, not during the semester, when I may spend my office hours doing something else for lack of visits… Wasted resources, as I said in a previous post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Marking papers is exhausting because it has become a sad game of suspicion and also because I can\u2019t help being appalled at how shallow secondary education has become \u2013yes, I said secondary. First part: my second year students plagiarise from sources I can easily find and, then, they claim they\u2019re actually quoting \u2018indirectly.\u2019 Others plagiarise […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching-tools-and-rules"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}