Taking the pledge

No, not that pledge. I am not sure there is ever a good time for temperance and sobriety, but the eve of a new semester isn't it. I refer to the Academic Honesty Pledge, which (as of this semester) all students taking a course in my department are supposed to sign.

I dunno. I do believe in academic honor codes, and I think students should experience rituals that reinforce them every so often. It's how I came up: both the Beloved Alma Mater and the University of Basketball were old-school Southern gentlemen's universities, and as problematic as that heritage is in some respects, they did know how to impress upon students that the honor code was a Big Deal. But I kind of think that a culture of academic integrity has to come from the students, not imposed on them from above; and I doubt that one department, without institutional backing, can do much to create that culture.

I also suspect that to make an honor code really stick, you have to trust your students enough to let them be the enforcers -- and I'm not sure anyone at my institution does. (Misnomer U. began as an old-school Southern ladies' university, you see, a heritage that comes with a strong tradition of in loco parentis. While both of my alma maters have had a student-administered honor court since time out of mind, I can't really imagine the young ladies of prior generations at Misnomer being allowed to run anything of the sort, given everything else I've heard about the Old Days. And the paternalistic attitude still persists, even after coeducation; I was rather shocked, in my first year, to learn that dorms here have curfews.)

And I wonder, too, if we can sustain a culture of anything, considering how many students transfer in or drop out and are only on campus for a year or two. And how many of them live off campus and show up only for classes. So many of our students inhabit a different world from the one where I went to college, and where I taught as a grad student, and I don't know yet what that world looks like.

But it's a start, I guess, and it means that the students in our classes this semester will at least be aware that the university has an honor code. And maybe that's something.

Courseblogging: Occasions of Sin

Am halfway through the second set of papers: close reading of an early modern poem ten to forty lines in length, no interpretative or critical sources allowed, use of the OED highly encouraged. Two plagiarism cases so far (well, three, but the third one plagiarized a single sentence that wasn't even germane to her analysis, and once you get into single-sentence stuff, I'm inclined to dock the grade and move on rather than go through the hassle of filing a full report). I am disappointed, but not especially surprised; that is, in one case I'm both surprised and disappointed by WHO turned out to be a plagiarist, but not surprised that there were plagiarists. I mean, if you Google, say, "death be not proud poetry analysis," you WILL find many, many examples of what you are looking for. And as Angelo says in Measure for Measure, we are all frail.

There's a school of thought that says you're not supposed to give assignments like this. If you go on the Chronicle forums (which are a hotbed of judgmentalism, but somehow I can't tear myself away from them), you will find lots of people who will tell you that if you don't craft highly specific, unplagiarizable assignments that are unique to each class, you're just asking for trouble. As my older, Catholic-schooled relatives would say, you are giving students an Occasion Of Sin, and part of the moral responsibility is yours if they fall.

I don't agree. For one thing, I don't believe there's such a thing as an unplagiarizable assignment. (In my very first lit class, back at the University of Basketball where the Honor Code had teeth, I came up with a paper topic that I thought was unique -- "imagine you've invited two of the playwrights we've read this semester to dinner at your house and write a dialogue between them" -- and one kid STILL plagiarized. I doubt that anything will discourage the truly determined.) I'm also not convinced that it's a good idea to design your classes around the possibility that students will cheat. They probably will, but it gives the cheaters too much power.

Also, it seems to me that if the assignments are too specific, it's less likely that students will be able to transfer the skills they learn to their other classes. (I wonder if this is why the conferences I held last week involved one student after another telling me they'd never had to write a poetry analysis paper before. The simple, generic assignment that allows students a fair amount of latitude to make their own choices seems to have fallen out of favor.)

Still, I'm feeling a touch of nagging guilt; I have to remind myself that several of the other papers are excellent. At their best, the students picked poems that they liked and had a lot to say about, and a couple of them told me in conference that they were surprised at how much they were enjoying the assignment. (A few of them even chose to write about poems that they weren't required to read, since I told them they could pick any poem from the anthology if it met the requirements for the assignment -- it will give me a break from endless papers on "Death be not proud." Yay for people discovering Herbert and Vaughn on their own!)

I do think I need to do more scaffolding and really teach students how to focus closely on language, although this may not be feasible if I'm teaching two large-ish sections again; I'm not sure a short OED assignment plus class discussion are enough to prepare them for a longish analytical paper. One of the students showed me a cool color-coding method one of her high-school teachers had taught her; it involved identifying patterns of words and highlighting the ones that fit together in different colors. I might try this next time around.

Failure

I think one of my students is going to fail the Shakespeare course. This is a new and upsetting experience; that is, of course I've flunked students before, but they have always been students who were actively complicit in their failure -- the ones who stopped coming to class, or didn't turn in assignments, or turned in a Wikipedia entry as their term paper and didn't even have the wit to claim they wrote it.

This student is legitimately trying. She's also woefully unprepared for an upper-level Shakespeare class and has no clue how to write an academic essay. She managed to scrape by with a D+ on the first paper, since she made a good-faith attempt to follow the guidelines. The second paper, which was supposed to be a summary and response to a critical article, was massively plagiarized, but it wasn't an Internet cut-and-paste job; it was the sort of plagiarism students commit when they don't really understand what they're reading and therefore haven't the foggiest idea how to paraphrase or summarize it. You know, "The author talks of how the subject is interpolated into a preconceptualist paradigm of reality. Also, he say that promotes the use of the posttextual paradigm of reality to deconstruct hierarchy."* That kind of plagiarism.

I highlighted the plagiarized passages on the first page, explained why it was a problem and told her that she would need to add quotation marks and citations or else paraphrase thoroughly, and advised her to focus on putting the parts of the essay she did understand into her own words and not to worry about trying to paraphrase stuff she didn't. And I gave her a week to rewrite for a maximum grade of C. (Honestly, I would be shocked if the final version earned a higher grade than C in any event.)

She said she wasn't very good at English, and the last time she'd taken a comp course was in 1992. Holy fuck. I don't know who advised her that taking an upper-level Shakespeare course would be a good idea. (She is a "general studies" major, which is Misnomer U.-speak for "this student started off in a preprofessional program but wasn't able to pass the qualifying exams; in theory, they are supposed to be taking a study skills seminar and getting some intensive advising, but it doesn't seem to be working in this case.)

I don't know if I did the right thing by giving her a second chance. I'm not sure there is a right thing to do in this situation (it is too late for her to drop the course now, and I don't think she would drop in any case because she said she needs another English course to graduate in December). On the one hand, this is very, very clearly not a student who intended to plagiarize, and we're meant to be educating students, not penalizing them for not already being educated, yes? On the other hand, it's just as clear that she hasn't come close to mastering the academic skills graduating seniors are expected to master, and almost certainly will not master them in the next few weeks. I'm putting this as if it were an academic problem, but of course it's a human one, too. It seems like a cruel cat-and-mouse game to lead a student on for almost two decades, taking her money and pretending to give her an education in return, and at last offering her a nearly meaningless degree. And yet it seems equally cruel to say no, you're not going to graduate after all, we know you tried your best but sometimes that's not good enough.

Ugh. I don't know what to do in situations like this.

* This is not an actual quotation from the essay; I made it up with a little help from the Postmodernism Generator. But you get the idea.