The last ten days have really done a number on my outlook for the future. Not my own personal prospects--those are always in doubt--but the way things are going for today's students. In a nutshell: they're going nowhere, fast.
No big surprise there. My expectations for their performance have diminished with every passing semester. I may see improvement in my own approaches, mostly forged by mistakes I've made or by observing other TA's, but my standards seem to crumble a bit more with every fresh round of assignments. More and more A's are going to work that only cover the most basic essentials, while C's and D's plumb increasingly profound depths of underachievement. Total failure is reserved for those special occasions when nothing is submitted.
I was told this would happen: my advisor warned me, the first time I taught for him. Advanced grad students nodded at me with solemn, knowing faces when I expressed my doubts. The school administration announced it during my one (one!) day of instructional training. "Oh yeah," all these voices said. "You'll be appalled. This is supposed to be a good school, but these kids don't know anything, and most of them don't care."
After three years as a TA for a major university in Massachusetts, I've accumulated a lot of depressing stories to illustrate this phenomenon. I'm sure I'll get around to sharing many of them. But for now, for today, I just need to say something about what's been going on among my students in the last week and a half. It's the Great Big Bête Noir of professional educators: plagiarism. I've seen it before. It's nothing new. Any teacher worth his salt will tell you that it's an Important-capital-I Issue, it's ruining higher ed in this country, it's a damn shame. But few, I'd venture, have experienced it on such a massive, flagrant scale as I have recently.
I'm not going to go into particulars right now--these students have a right to some privacy. But it speaks to a deeply problematic trend, to my mind, that nearly a dozen teens thought it perfectly acceptable to pass off others' work as their own. Either in whole or in significant part, almost a fifth of my students copied information directly from various websites for our last assignment, without citation. It got to the point where the professor in charge felt the need to make several announcements to the entire class about it. There were a lot of glum expressions and hunched bodies.
Cheaters, I can handle. They know they've done something wrong. They come to your office, polite and almost wordless. They're so grateful when you show them any mercy at all. (For administrative reasons, we decided to prosecute formally only the worst offenders.) Maybe it's cynical to feel as though this academic fraud is "normal," but at least it fits into my worldview: some people will always take the easy way out, even when the consequences for getting caught are dire. Some will always do what they can to get ahead. I can wrap my mind around that. We're trained to think that immoral behavoir works sometimes: evil corporations and corrupt politicians thrive right up until the dam breaks, while nice guys finish last. I can label those instances of outright plagiarism as straightforward, garden-variety deception. But no, the ones that trouble me most--the ones that settle in the pit of my stomach and tickle the part of my brain that worries about Society As a Whole--are those cases when a student doesn't think she did anything wrong.
Those are the students who were failed by their high school, and who are being failed by my university, to some degree. How does an eighteen-year-old get accepted to a competitive college without knowing the basic rules of attribution? How does he pass his freshman writing course? I fully acknowledge that there are some fuzzy lines--maybe you're not sure if the course textbook needs to be footnoted, or information from lecture. Or what if my roommate and I talk about the assignment, and so we happen to turn in very similar papers? These are legitimate questions, yet many students don't think to ask until it's too late and suspicions arise. But even these situations are not what trouble me, not really. It's when an indignant junior confronts me right after class to argue that "You never told me I needed to cite my sources!" or when a bewildered sophomore wonders why I'd want to know what she thinks, when other, smarter writers have said it so much better. Those are the times it takes all my self-control not to facepalm right in front of them, or not to grab them by the shoulders and shake them while screaming, "Demand your tuition back from the bursar! You're not getting a good enough education for forty grand!"
I'm probably part of the problem. After all, if we only report a few of the worst cases to the Dean, will the others think there are no real consequences for this behavior? Some of them may have even been caught before, but the other professors decided to be merciful too. Part of the issue, from my perspective, is that I'm "just the TA"--I don't design the assignments, or decide what gets covered in class about citation, or what the fallout from cheating will be. I'm just the one who discovers the offense and tells the professor; I'm just the messenger. To the student, I'm the bad guy who gave them an F. To the professor, I'm the bearer of bad tidings. It's an uncomfortable role.
Surely, you may be thinking, I must also have examples of students exceeding my expectations. If my standards are so low, then there have to be cases where someone went above and beyond. And yes, of course there have been engaged, thoughtful young men and women in my classrooms. I'd go so far as to say most of my students have probably been quite smart, or at least willing to work hard--just not in my class. As a humanities instructor in an ever-more market-driven world, the overwhelming majority of people who sign up are there to fill a requirement, and will never take another course outside their field again. They're here to cross that prerequisite off their list. To get an easy A. To take a class that won't strain their otherwise heavy workload. Maybe, maybe one will decide she liked it enough to register for another course in my department next semester--but only maybe. You can't count on it.
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