Oh joy, student evaluations are in!!1! Time for me to find a comfortable chair, get a glass of wine, and settle in for an evening of honest reflection and thoughtful critique. Right? Right?
I'm smirking so hard right now that I might need elective surgery to have my snicker gland removed. That probably reflects a major personality failing on my part, but at this point, it's difficult for me to take many of the comments seriously. Much has been written on the relative worthlessness of most student evaluation models, so I won't belabor those views here. But I will say that this feedback mechanism doesn't do much for the graduate TA population.
That's not to say that there isn't anything to learn from these evaluations. Far from it. Many (if not most) students have a legitimate perspective on how the course could be improved, but it gets crowded out by more pressing concerns. We distribute this paperwork in the last week of class, when everyone's so stressed out that they just want to complete the form as fast as possible, get the f**k out of the classroom, and grab more coffee before working on something more important. Moreover, until this moment, few instructors have asked their pupils to think critically about the class's structure or its role in developing a skill set. Should we be surprised when the only note on the comment card is a chicken-scratched "too much reading"?
As a TA, my pedagogical world is not as wrapped up in these evaluations. The critics who matter most--or at least have the most direct influence on my academic life--are still the professors. Especially in courses with no discussion sections or labs, a majority of students may never have any direct contact with me, other than blast emails to the entire class or comments on their assignments (which may go unread more often than not). But this past semester, even though I ran lecture for two weeks while the good doctor was out of town, a disappointing number of students still left the "rate your teaching assistant here" section completely blank. At best, I was a benignly negligent presence in the back of the room; at worst, I was a powerless stooge, not to be taken seriously.
Actually, at worst, I was seen by a few as a detriment to the whole experience. I've been a TA long enough to know not to take it personally, and to not let it bruise my self-esteem too much. As this class's prof--a genuinely good guy, who supports his underlings--said to me today, this is just student entitlement run amok. (Are you sensing a theme from my last post? Hmm.) They don't like the grade they've earned, so they blame the teacher. In a semester where a dozen participants were caught plagiarizing, I shouldn't be surprised that a couple of bad eggs lashed out by filling in the "1" bubble for every category on the Scantron.
There have been classes (nay, entire years) when I've been profoundly unsure of my performance. There have been faculty members who have totally undermined us teaching assistants in front of the entire student body. There was one girl whose only feedback was to write the word "MESS" in that "rate your TA" box. There have been kids who've gone over my head and complained to the professor about me. This is just what happens sometimes, especially if you throw high parental expectations, professional school aspirations, and teenage hormones into the mix. And we're told by more experienced instructors not to take these reactions to heart. Some professors will just be clueless about the way they're treating you, and the students are too wrapped up in their adolescent narcissism to see you as a human being. So we all learn to simply dismiss their negative statements.
This is definitely not a healthy approach, for anyone. The instructors are conditioned to reject pessimistic comments, since they so often stem from knee-jerk, emotional reactions to poor grades. The students rarely put the time into crafting a constructive response, given their other concerns; and at this point, it's too late for them to reap any benefits from such reflection. (And doesn't it make more sense to have mid- and end-of-semester evaluations? We have to alert the dean's office if any kid is failing the course by midterms--so shouldn't we be alerted if the course itself is failing?) For the TA--given the dearth of any feedback about his role--the evaluations only hold an anthropological interest. It's a study in power dynamics, anonymity, and futility.
There has to be a better way--and this hypothetical "better way" should include a process for soliciting my opinions. Do I have criticisms of this course? Naturally. But as a liaison between the undergrads and the faculty, it's not always clear to whom I should express them. Do I agree with the guy who comes in to complain that the lectures are unstructured? Do I sympathize with the teacher's dismay over the test scores? It's both, more often than not. I see myself as an advocate for both the students and the professor, talking up each side to the other. I don't "have" a side. I'm a double-agent without an agenda, other than to get through another semester without screwing anything up... and maybe get a few nice evaluation comments for my teaching portfolio.
May 18, 2011
May 9, 2011
Better Living Through Self-Assessment
Another semester has just wrapped up, with the usual giant, uncelebrated push to get everything done. It's the time for mutual assessment: I slap a number on each student's performance, and they fill out course evaluation sheets. It's a woefully unproductive system for pretty much everyone involved. But now that the final grades are in, I've had a moment to consider what advice I'd give these kids as they go forward in their academic lives.
Here's what my comment card would say:
... About School in General:
So, again, why don't I tell my students what I think they should do (or what they should avoid)? Part of it, I'm sure, is that I don't feel like an expert. My life is just as much of a mess, and just as self-defeating as any. Plus, I don't want to come off as a bitchy know-it-all. I spent too many of my middle school years with that reputation. Coupled with the fact that I'm only a few years older than most of my students, these factors do not contribute to my status as a wise sage for emulation. Yet, in actuality, I do wish some of them would model that insecurity, just a bit: looking back over my list of gripes, most of them stem from the strong sense of entitlement exhibited by many students. It's not that I want to quash confidence or self-reliance--quite the contrary--but maybe those qualities should be earned through a little humility.
Now I'm going to go to the gym, until I've earned that pint of Ben & Jerry's in the freezer. Coincidence?
Here's what my comment card would say:
... About School in General:
- There's a big difference between being the teacher's pet and being a grade-grubber. The former can be a really good thing, for the student's performance in the class and for the teacher's sanity--hey, at least there's one kid who cares about what's going on. The latter just pisses us off.
- It's so easy to be the positive kind of teacher's pet. Come to office hours--just once, even--and for God's sake, raise your hand when the professor asks a question. This lack of responsiveness from a classroom has never made any sense to me: why are you or your parents paying fifty thousand dollars a year, if you're not going to participate in your education? Why wouldn't you want to get credit for having an answer? (I've rarely known an instructor to subtract points for an incorrect guess; he's just happy someone spoke up at all.) Silence can be really demoralizing for the teacher, and detracts from the overall quality of the course.
- If you are going to complain about your grade on any given assignment, there are ways to do it that could actually score you points with your professor, rather than making you seem like a self-centered, entitled harpy. Above all, do not go in there with the expectation that your grade will get changed, unless it's attributable to a simple math error. Instead, ask for more detailed feedback about your submission, and for suggestions on how to improve your performance on the next assignment. Give your instructor advance notice that you'd like to meet with her, and bring the original copy with her comments. You'll have a much more productive conversation if you don't ambush her.
- Accusations of unfairness drive me absolutely insane. I'm sure there really are teachers out there with a grudge against particular students, but those are surely the exceptions. Especially with essays, I get a lot of complaints along the lines of "I stayed up all night writing this/I worked really hard/so I deserve an A!" I'm sorry, but at the college level, the "volume" of effort just doesn't factor into a submission's grade--at least, not as much as it does at the high school level. As college instructors, under most circumstances, we can only gauge the quality of the final product; high school teachers tend to reward effort more, since they're so refreshed to see any real engagement with the material, even if the conclusions aren't particularly insightful. Do I care that you worked on this paper for hours on end? Yes. Does that automatically mean I should boost your score? No--not unless it paid off with some thoughtful, well-argued writing. (Sometimes I ask these complainants if I should lower the grade of naturally talented writers who manage to dash off an excellent essay in half the time.)
- Read the feedback on your papers. Read the feedback on your papers. Read the feedback on your papers! If I see the same sorts of errors on all of your submissions over the course of a semester, your grade is never going to improve. It may, in fact, get worse.
- If you get an A-, just shut up about it.
- Unless you're attending an explicitly religious college or seminary, you may be asked to leave some of your faith-based assumptions at the door. That doesn't mean you have to stop being a believer inside the classroom, but you'll get a lot more out of the experience if you situate your arguments within the academic context of the course. Learning a new perspective on the material--even if it doesn't totally jive with what you're used to hearing in worship services--might just add more depth to your convictions. Yes, I know this assumes the endorsement of a multicultural, quasi-secular, critical thinking stance; but that's what liberal arts educations are for, by and large. If you don't like it, at least you'll be more familiar with what many non-believers are thinking.
- Some religion professors will be more than happy to let you use personal interpretations, experiences, and anecdotes as evidence in certain kinds of assignments; others will not. When in doubt, look closely at the course syllabus and essay prompts--and then ask the instructor. Always make it clear that they are your own beliefs, and recognize that they may not apply to everyone.
- Avoid sweeping statements about what "Christians think" or what "Buddhists believe." No one can possibly know what all persons belonging to a faith feel about any given topic, even if it's something that seems totally fundamental. People are just too varied and unique and contradictory. If you're going to offer generalizations, acknowledge them as such--and provide some sort of evidence or justification. The more nuance, the better.
- I joined Facebook back when it was still "The Facebook." It only had twelve schools. It had fewer than a million members. I know how to use it--and many of your instructors will, too. Don't put anything on there that you wouldn't want me to see. This seems rather basic, but I can't tell you how many students are caught asking for extensions when they've been "sick" [read: partying].
- Teachers and students are engaged in a professional relationship, and everyone's interactions should reflect that. Some instructors are chummier than others--I definitely go out of my way to appear approachable and empathetic--but any time I'm speaking with a student, I'm doing so in my occupational capacity. I've gotten the habit of using appropriate language in all non-personal correspondence, and I wish others would learn to do the same. That means proper capitalization, spelling out full words and sentences, and a limit of one exclamation point per statement. I do think there's a time and place for the occasional expletive; some students need to be shocked now and again, and it can go a long way to establishing a good rapport.
So, again, why don't I tell my students what I think they should do (or what they should avoid)? Part of it, I'm sure, is that I don't feel like an expert. My life is just as much of a mess, and just as self-defeating as any. Plus, I don't want to come off as a bitchy know-it-all. I spent too many of my middle school years with that reputation. Coupled with the fact that I'm only a few years older than most of my students, these factors do not contribute to my status as a wise sage for emulation. Yet, in actuality, I do wish some of them would model that insecurity, just a bit: looking back over my list of gripes, most of them stem from the strong sense of entitlement exhibited by many students. It's not that I want to quash confidence or self-reliance--quite the contrary--but maybe those qualities should be earned through a little humility.
Now I'm going to go to the gym, until I've earned that pint of Ben & Jerry's in the freezer. Coincidence?
May 6, 2011
The Market-Driven Life
In an earlier post, I mentioned that few--if any--students take my classes because they're interested in the topic. Instead, they've signed up for it to satisfy a university requirement. This is probably a lament for many instructors of introductory courses outside the hard sciences (and, I daresay, for some within that field as well). Let's face it: 100-level humanities classes at big universities are generally not designed for anyone who actually plans to pursue that major.
I'm not saying they should be. At my undergraduate institution, they seemed specifically engineered to weed out students who weren't invested in the subject: unless you really wanted to be there, you were going to hate it. This had obvious benefits and drawbacks. It helped keep departments lean and elite, but it also meant there was a deep divide within the student body. Feedback must've seemed bipolar: many evaluations of professors would be vicious. "Oh my God, Prof. So-and-So is sooo mean, he never gives A's, there's so much reading, yadda yadda." Meanwhile, the kids who were interested sometimes hero-worshiped those instructors, since they treated us like real, thinking people. We got to learn a subject in depth, without catering to the lowest common denominator, which had never been the case for us before. So this kind of class design philosophy made for a palpable divisiveness, and drove most students to stay within our academic comfort zones.
The department I'm in now has taken a different tack, but I can't say that it's better. Our administrators have faced the reality that hardly anyone is going to pursue a bachelor's degree in such an unprofitable discipline as religion. At best, we're going to remain a boutique field, tempting the odd international relations sophomore to complete a minor. A devout School of Communications or Health Sciences student might dip into a class on the Bible, since she always meant to read it more. That's about it. And these demographics have a pronounced effect on our course syllabi.
I'm not really talking about the upper-level offerings that cater to our few dozen full-time undergrads (and are always cross-registered with graduate seminars, to pad the roster). Our faculty often come up with wonderful workshops on Maimonides or the Ramayana or women in Islam. Rather, the 70- to 200-person intro classes--the surveys of Eastern or Western religions, or scripture, or history--see the most impact on their design. They can't possibly gear the entire enterprise around the 1.3 students who might take another religion course, who might go on to use this information again in some other academic setting. So compromises are made.
I've seen how the sausage is made. The Ph.D. candidates in my department have to sing for their supper, earning our keep by teaching, as TA's or writing program instructors. One of our funding commitments is attendance at monthly pedagogical seminars; a different faculty member comes each time, to talk about how he or she conceptualizes each intro course. A recent seminar leader described the necessary balance between giving the students what he wants to give them (basic critical thinking tools) and giving them what they want (namely, memorizable facts about Christianity, with maybe a few juicy tidbits about Islam thrown in). In practice, this is what that balance looks like: accommodate their desires when there's no good reason not to, and only hammer home the one other thing that's most important to you. There just isn't time in a fifteen-week semester to do anything else effectively.
I'm not sure yet what that "one other thing" would be in my class, when I get to design my own syllabus in that long-off future. Too many scholarly issues are too important to me. I suppose it would be crafting thoughtful arguments... but would that leave enough time to give them the raw information to argue about? On the flip side, I know I have a tendency to get caught up in the details. (I think this is common among former English majors, who were told over and over again of the value in "close reading.") Would I spend too much classtime pointing out all the little nuances of Psalm 139 or Sura 9, rather than reminding them of the big picture? I just don't know yet.
In the meantime, we instructors are left to suss out what sorts of things the students want to know, and to present that material in an easily-digestible format. (If a little critical thinking comes up along the way, so much the better, but we don't expect it to happen often.) And these kids want to learn things, not abstracts: information that can be written on the board or in a PowerPoint presentation, with bullet points and vocabulary lists. They want to know things like:
A big part of me--the part that likes being mistaken for an authority, the part that likes having a few dozen trusting minds look up at me--wants to give them those facts. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that: critical thinking doesn't do much in a vacuum. But if "telling students the facts" is the main thing a class is designed for, then we're giving the unknowledgeable too much power in setting the agenda. Should students' desires be taken seriously? Yes. Undoubtedly. But higher education should aim beyond lists of dates and dictates, and should expect us to dedicate our scarce classtime to imparting knowledge that can't be easily learned from a PowerPoint.
Unfortunately, as I suggested in my last post, much of the time I can't trust that students will do the work. Reviewing old material has become the focus of most class meetings. This suits the philosophy of my department just fine: it's better that everyone masters the basics, rather than leaving some behind while a few flourish. And I guess I'm okay with it.
I can't help myself. I wish more young people were interested in becoming well-rounded, informed citizens. If they were, my job would be so much easier--they'd ask better questions and do the reading and bring new ideas to the table. Maybe they are interested, and I just don't see it; or maybe I'm expecting too much of eighteen-year-olds, who probably also have jobs or internships or hours of labwork each week. I don't know. I just see a lamentable, perhaps dangerous lack of deep curiosity about subjects outside their more lucrative majors.
Part of my role in the university is to help mold these kids into the kinds of thinkers I hope they'll become. But if our classes kowtow to what those teenagers want, rather than what we want for them, then what is the likelihood of that happening?
I'm not saying they should be. At my undergraduate institution, they seemed specifically engineered to weed out students who weren't invested in the subject: unless you really wanted to be there, you were going to hate it. This had obvious benefits and drawbacks. It helped keep departments lean and elite, but it also meant there was a deep divide within the student body. Feedback must've seemed bipolar: many evaluations of professors would be vicious. "Oh my God, Prof. So-and-So is sooo mean, he never gives A's, there's so much reading, yadda yadda." Meanwhile, the kids who were interested sometimes hero-worshiped those instructors, since they treated us like real, thinking people. We got to learn a subject in depth, without catering to the lowest common denominator, which had never been the case for us before. So this kind of class design philosophy made for a palpable divisiveness, and drove most students to stay within our academic comfort zones.
The department I'm in now has taken a different tack, but I can't say that it's better. Our administrators have faced the reality that hardly anyone is going to pursue a bachelor's degree in such an unprofitable discipline as religion. At best, we're going to remain a boutique field, tempting the odd international relations sophomore to complete a minor. A devout School of Communications or Health Sciences student might dip into a class on the Bible, since she always meant to read it more. That's about it. And these demographics have a pronounced effect on our course syllabi.
I'm not really talking about the upper-level offerings that cater to our few dozen full-time undergrads (and are always cross-registered with graduate seminars, to pad the roster). Our faculty often come up with wonderful workshops on Maimonides or the Ramayana or women in Islam. Rather, the 70- to 200-person intro classes--the surveys of Eastern or Western religions, or scripture, or history--see the most impact on their design. They can't possibly gear the entire enterprise around the 1.3 students who might take another religion course, who might go on to use this information again in some other academic setting. So compromises are made.
I've seen how the sausage is made. The Ph.D. candidates in my department have to sing for their supper, earning our keep by teaching, as TA's or writing program instructors. One of our funding commitments is attendance at monthly pedagogical seminars; a different faculty member comes each time, to talk about how he or she conceptualizes each intro course. A recent seminar leader described the necessary balance between giving the students what he wants to give them (basic critical thinking tools) and giving them what they want (namely, memorizable facts about Christianity, with maybe a few juicy tidbits about Islam thrown in). In practice, this is what that balance looks like: accommodate their desires when there's no good reason not to, and only hammer home the one other thing that's most important to you. There just isn't time in a fifteen-week semester to do anything else effectively.
I'm not sure yet what that "one other thing" would be in my class, when I get to design my own syllabus in that long-off future. Too many scholarly issues are too important to me. I suppose it would be crafting thoughtful arguments... but would that leave enough time to give them the raw information to argue about? On the flip side, I know I have a tendency to get caught up in the details. (I think this is common among former English majors, who were told over and over again of the value in "close reading.") Would I spend too much classtime pointing out all the little nuances of Psalm 139 or Sura 9, rather than reminding them of the big picture? I just don't know yet.
In the meantime, we instructors are left to suss out what sorts of things the students want to know, and to present that material in an easily-digestible format. (If a little critical thinking comes up along the way, so much the better, but we don't expect it to happen often.) And these kids want to learn things, not abstracts: information that can be written on the board or in a PowerPoint presentation, with bullet points and vocabulary lists. They want to know things like:
- What religion are Chinese people?
- Who wrote the Bible?
- What do Muslims think about America?
- If Jesus was a real person, then why don't Jews believe in him?
- Are Mormons Christians?
- Who's the Buddha?
- Scientology's a cult, right?
A big part of me--the part that likes being mistaken for an authority, the part that likes having a few dozen trusting minds look up at me--wants to give them those facts. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that: critical thinking doesn't do much in a vacuum. But if "telling students the facts" is the main thing a class is designed for, then we're giving the unknowledgeable too much power in setting the agenda. Should students' desires be taken seriously? Yes. Undoubtedly. But higher education should aim beyond lists of dates and dictates, and should expect us to dedicate our scarce classtime to imparting knowledge that can't be easily learned from a PowerPoint.
Unfortunately, as I suggested in my last post, much of the time I can't trust that students will do the work. Reviewing old material has become the focus of most class meetings. This suits the philosophy of my department just fine: it's better that everyone masters the basics, rather than leaving some behind while a few flourish. And I guess I'm okay with it.
I can't help myself. I wish more young people were interested in becoming well-rounded, informed citizens. If they were, my job would be so much easier--they'd ask better questions and do the reading and bring new ideas to the table. Maybe they are interested, and I just don't see it; or maybe I'm expecting too much of eighteen-year-olds, who probably also have jobs or internships or hours of labwork each week. I don't know. I just see a lamentable, perhaps dangerous lack of deep curiosity about subjects outside their more lucrative majors.
Part of my role in the university is to help mold these kids into the kinds of thinkers I hope they'll become. But if our classes kowtow to what those teenagers want, rather than what we want for them, then what is the likelihood of that happening?
May 5, 2011
The Case of the Unwitting Plagiarist
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.
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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