How Dumb Do They Think We Are?

It happened more times last year than I can even recall, but I clearly remember the first time. I was grading a paper and came across a sentence that surprised me. It just didn't fit in with what I had read up to that point. I was surprised partly because the sentence made proper use of the word "implacable," whereas in the paragraph before, the student had used an abstract noun ending in "- ship" as a verb. Twice.

I read more and found more seismic shifts in the writing style. Magisterial paragraphs were followed by inane ones; syllogisms gave way to circular logic, and back again. I picked one suspect sentence, entered it into an Internet search engine, and in milliseconds, I found it - word for word, punctuation mark for punctuation mark. It turned out much of the rest of the paper had been plagiarized from the same document.

I deduced that the student had also performed a "find-and- replace" function on one key word in the document to make paragraphs that were on a different topic seem as if they were on the topic I had assigned.

Did this cheeky twerp think I wouldn't notice? For an hour after I found the paper's origin, I could only sit in my office and stew, comparing the paper to the Internet version again and again and determining that, at most, one paragraph was entirely original to the student.

My anger then turned into self-questioning. What did I do to this student to deserve such an insult? How had I failed as a teacher, to make the student think that stealing someone else's words was acceptable?

Since I was a new assistant professor, I...