Welcome To My Hell

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
-- Mark Twain

...to understand that "no late papers will be accepted," means no late papers will be accepted?

I'm still getting e-mails from students asking me if they can hand in their papers because their computers crashed. So why are you telling me now and not when they were due? Ugh.

The one problem with teaching history is that term papers are an unspoken requirement. Most professors I know give one long term paper that's due sometime in the last month of the semester. Teaching at a community college, I've found that students not only bitch and complain about 10-15 page papers for a survey class, they tend to write horrible papers that would have been fine as a five page paper, not a fifteen page one.

Instead, I give two 3-5 page papers that relate to each other in some way. If I break it down, I don't get the horrid "I wrote a 15 page paper in the three hours before class" type of paper. Yes, I still get the ones that were obviously written at the last minute, but at least these are shorter.

So now, I'm in the phase of having all six of my classes hand in the first of their term papers. These are your standard history research papers. This is also where I weed out the ones who make my life a living hell.

Both of the schools I teach at have accounts at Turnitin.com. While this site is not perfect, it is a godsend for history teachers. How often have I read a paper that resembles an A paper from a student at Harvard that has the name of my barely passing student on it? Now, I can find out where and when my students are plagiarizing papers without me taking a trip to the library to check their work against the books listed in their bibliographies.

I realize that most students (at least at my colleges) do not realize what exactly plagarism is. Therefore, I put links to guides on my website and I always spend some time going over the reasons why they should put their papers into their own words. I have heard too many horror stories over the years of people being forced to retake entire courses and in some cases losing degrees. The key thing I do tell them is I will catch them if they attempt to plagiarize their entire papers. But do they listen to me? Of course not. Without even really examining any of the papers, I have already caught three students who got their entire papers from a web source. One of them was from those "purchase a paper" websites. God how I hate those. Do they actually think that by changing one or two words that they'll get away with it? Ugh.

What is worse is that I'm required by school policy to report these students to the VP of Student Affairs and the head of my department. This means the kid gets a file and if it happens again, they get kicked out. I do not like doing this but if the student gets away with it now, what's to stop him/her from doing it again in the future? Sometimes I enjoy being a bitch but this is one of those times I do not.

If this is how things are starting off, I am already dreading the other 200+ papers. I have a feeling it's going to be a long week.