Comments on: Time spent grading student essays.

By: I pity the fail!

I pity the fail! — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 07:52:50 +0000

This class is terrible! They make a lot of bad cohices.

By: J

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 21:23:48 +0000

(From a 45 year old college student) I have been involved in the business community for 25+ years. Now I am back finishing something I started 27 years ago. Why does every college class contain a requirement that essays or “papers” be the norm to learn? Is there no learning done if information is studied and then tests are administered? Work? Not to be redundent but at my age, I have more than enough to keep me busy. I want my degree and I will finish. In my view the requirement of essays in the college world could be considered a lazy instructor who does not want to spend time on teaching material and preparing tests.

By: ...

... — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 21:02:25 +0000

and misspell random words!yay!

By: wchurchill

wchurchill — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:19:24 +0000

This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.

By: Aurora

Aurora — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:17:30 +0000

What really sucks is when you have been given a “group” project where one of the members decided to copy something they googled word for word. Invariably, they are the one who when you set 10:00 deadline so that you can have it finalized by midnight send it to you at 12:01, so you can spend the rest of the night rewriteing their sections. (Note for any spelling or grammar errors: Chemistry Majors are not supposed to be able to write coherent sentences)

By: Zig

Zig — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 02:04:22 +0000

Don’t bother using spell check though, that is always your “cohice”.

By: SDB

SDB — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 22:24:30 +0000

As a HS English teacher, I can answer you. Because when we receive plagiarized work, or sometimes, no work at all, our supervisors threaten our jobs if we don’t pass the student responsible since his or her parent threatened to sue the school.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:06:04 +0000

How did they make it out of high school? That is what I really want to know.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:03:29 +0000

You obviously don’t work at an R1 institution.

By: Remilo

Remilo — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 01:08:05 +0000

you fail at spelling “choice”

By: KLF

KLF — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:32:53 +0000

I hate to burst YOUR bubble, but at the University that *I* work at, student evaluation scores ABSOLUTELY count on your tenure application process. I had to summarize them all and even provide quotes from the written portions. The overall course scores are also used in a very complicated spreadsheet that we must complete at the end of every year, determining a “workload score”. The higher the score, the harder we must be working. Or so the administrator that designed the form thinks.

Cheating = failing in my classes. No second chance, no discussion. And they back us up, very simple. We use Blackboard extensively in all our courses, and have a module called SafeAssignment installed on it. We can create assignments that students must submit electronically so they can be evaluated by SafeAssignment. It’s not perfect, but it does a pretty darned good job. We don’t even have to do any Google searches, it does it for us.

By: doh

doh — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 22:23:42 +0000

So completely untrue; college professors who are active in their fields tend to write a small hanful of encyclopedia articles; anything BUT common knowledge.

Unless you meant an encyclopedia written by one or two guys. Which wouldn’t make sense to purchase.

By: Taylor

Taylor — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 04:32:54 +0000

“font cohice”? If you’re going to make fun of compositions, please be correct. That’s original content, too

By: *actual english prof

*actual english prof — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 22:41:15 +0000

* Just because I teach English doesn’t mean I can spell…

By: atual english prof

atual english prof — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 22:39:30 +0000

I hate to burst the self-esteem bubble that has obviously been painstakingly nurtured around you, but student evaluations do NOT count toward tenure; no university makes money or gains prestige from internal self-assessments–tenure comes to those who publish and make a name for the university in the academic community.

As for why many students manage to get away with plagiarism, it likely has to do with the professor being tired of turning academically dishonest students in to an ineffective remediation process: that student’s tuition, room and board money is far too valuable to lose, and so nothing ever improves.

Besides: plagiarism doesn’t hurt us… it only hurts you. I find failing students to be much more effective than turning them in; since money is the governing factor, I can at least make your parents pay for the course again.

By: cTo

cTo — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 21:26:52 +0000

Yeah my uni uses it. I once turned in a paper that was my own work, and panicked when it came up as 20% copied. Turns out it was just registering the works cited sources as copied from other papers.

By: cTo

cTo — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 21:19:28 +0000

LOLE I once had a group of frat-boys turn in a short assignment that they copied word for word off each other. I had quite a lot of grading to go through and wouldn’t have noticed, except they guy they copied from used a very technical engineering term to explain a complicated concept and i KNEW the other three boys did NOT know that word. Went back and checked all their work. Busted.

By: cTo

cTo — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 21:16:25 +0000

I think Wiktionary would have been the better location.

By: cTo

cTo — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 21:13:43 +0000

The Industrial Revolution was neither industrial nor a revolution. Discuss.

By: cTo

cTo — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 21:13:02 +0000

urg god i **hate** going back through a stack of papers and references trying to remember where I first read something that I have just cited in my paper….

By: cTo

cTo — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 21:10:00 +0000

I like the coffee and donuts idea better. I’ve worked training animals, and I’ve worked training students, and positive reinforcement works. I teach a biology lab and every few weeks during the semester we have a lab that is messier than most. Rather than taking off points if they don’t clean up the lab (which doesn’t work, cause there’s always some frat-boy-athlete group that doesn’t care and leaves their area trashed), I offer everyone extra credit if they really work hard to clean up after lab. And lemme tell you, they do.

By: cTo

cTo — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 21:01:58 +0000

Yeah, exactly.

1)”Hmm, here’s a topic I don’t know anything about. Lemme get a broad overview….”
2) *Browses Wikipedia*
3) “Oh ok, I have a general outline in my mind now, lemme find some sources to fill in the gaps and add detail….”

By: Cyph

Cyph — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 16:20:45 +0000

The sad fact about most universities is that is doesn’t matter if you get caught, as long as you can whine about it to enough faculty and staff who’re scared to be “the bad guy”. No prof wants to get a bad student review, because THOSE are what get you tenure now…

Pathetic really.

By: RoyBatty

RoyBatty — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 19:21:02 +0000

Cohice was Cochise’s little brother….

By: Liz

Liz — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 05:16:30 +0000

From one smart college student to another, WORD. Keep fighting the good fight Gio.

By: Bunny

Bunny — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 04:48:21 +0000

Yeap I vote “plagiarise” – actually it is only the US dictionaries that
accept “Plagiarize” as the correct spelling- so I think those who say
z instead of s are outnumbered by the rest of the English speaking world.

BTW did you realise that Americans, actually speak a dialect of English,
called Anglish ~EWG~

By: Bunny

Bunny — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 04:44:28 +0000

We were always given word counts rather than number of pages and
we couldn’t count the words we had quoted. Much fairer way of handling
it…..

By: Dee

Dee — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 01:26:07 +0000

Encyclopedias and dictionaries cannot be considered sources because they
are common knowledge.

By: Elliott

Elliott — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:34:38 +0000

What the hell kind of college professor would let you use Wikipedia as a source for ANYTHING? Every single prof I’ve had would fail people immediately if Wiki was a source for their paper.

By: Ellen

Ellen — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 16:22:12 +0000

Shut up about the “cohice” I think it’s been thoroughly covered and you geeks that all spell (and sometimes pronounce) “the” “teh” have no room to say anything!!!

By: sassyviolet

sassyviolet — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 22:28:38 +0000

no, no, no, college students are just much better at editing, then CITING copy and pasted work off the internet!!! And there for it is not plagerism, its called “using and citing a sorce”

By: Rob

Rob — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 20:42:14 +0000

Plagarism is just wrong, you are taking someone else’s work and claiming it to be your own. If you did some actual work and happened to quote/paraphrase from the original than that’s ok.

Besides, Its not only essays that get plagarized…

http://mine.icanhascheezburger.com/view.aspx?ciid=3305368

By: Ev

Ev — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 18:11:10 +0000

I don’t know; if I were a teacher, I think I’d rather see good, original work a student had done previously than a lame mashup of largely irrelevant information in four different writing styles as an effort specifically for my class. Now me, I was the kind of student who really liked writing research papers, so it was a moot point, but I’d certainly not call that cheating. And there’s little I hate more than cheating.

By: Ev

Ev — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 18:00:04 +0000

Not true. You have to change the copyright date as well.

By: Claude

Claude — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:12:35 +0000

No, it’s not allowed in schools either. At least not in my little corner of the world.

Some more free tools to cut down on the time spent finding the sources students copied from are: http://www.textbroker.de/uncover/ (a program to download and install) or http://plagiatcheck.de/ (online check). Both are easy to use – even though not in English (neither British nor American).

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:01:48 +0000

Because, OMG! When your graph is about competence in essay-writing, you should at least attempt to show some competence in spelling, typing, grammar and proofing yourself. For example, I didn’t simply leave the typo I just wrote spelling yourself “yourslef;” I edited it before posting it to a public forum where I would likely be judged on certain factors, such as ability to spell, type and proof. So no, it’s not about being better than someone else and never having transposed letters, it’s about being aware enough to correct it before it’s in a public setting.

By: brokenyard

brokenyard — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 09:34:32 +0000

No what’s ridiculous is people don’t use Wikipedia despite it having no more serious errors than Britannica

By: Gio

Gio — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:06:08 +0000

Well, whenever you can’t argue a counterpoint, argue against a non-point.

By: Gio

Gio — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:04:32 +0000

What exactly is the purpose of posting it under another pseudonym? Or is that your way of telling people that it really was you who put it up there, not someone else. “See professor. I used a fake name on this paper online. It really is my work, but it’s not under my name. I know it sounds sketchy, but you’re just going to have to believe me on this one.”

By: Somebody Else

Somebody Else — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 23:43:47 +0000

Other countries pronounce it differently.

By: Liza

Liza — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 19:13:59 +0000

I worked on a Summer Uni last year and one of our key objectives was to try and get it into the student’s heads that YOU DO NOT PLAGIARISE at university! This is tolerated in secondary schools / high schools and that is why it still happens at university. The students really cannot see that what they are doing is wrong so how can they be blamed. The system allows them to profit from plagiarism. When I was in school you knew that if you cheated by copying another pupil’s work or by cheating in an exam then you would fail. Full stop. No arguments. That should be the line. Cheating = failing.

By: crazykitteh

crazykitteh — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 17:43:49 +0000

My favorite part is when people criticize something without reading the whole thing. This has been addressed enough times, let it go people.

By: crazykitteh

crazykitteh — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 17:41:59 +0000

I feel weird for actually doing legitimate research for my studies.
Why would anyone go to University if you don’t really want to be there? Are people that stupid? And in that case, how did they get in? It boggles the mind *rollseyes*

By: crazykitteh

crazykitteh — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 17:40:15 +0000

People always and only notice the small little mistakes that don’t mean anything, and miss to see the point. It’s very frustrating.

By: D'oh

D'oh — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 14:02:44 +0000

WHOA! seriously – cohice – I hope you grade better than you graph

By: grammagal

grammagal — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 06:28:31 +0000

I really hope one of the things you don’t teach is grammar. I’m referring to the last example listed (red).

By: Cate

Cate — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 06:28:13 +0000

My favorite part is that the teacher who made this graph misspelled the word “choice” in the legend.

By: nick

nick — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 04:55:45 +0000

It’s fairly obvious that I didn’t bother to check for the little red squiggles. I have a lot of work to do and this wasn’t exactly important to my career. I needed to vent, I vented, and didn’t care a whit about it.

My peer-reviewed articles rarely get this much attention, though. Perhaps I should create Graphjam graphs for a living. The more typos, the more interest they will generate.

p.s. I am not British, or a product of any once-imperial nation. I just think the UK spelling is more elegant. So suck it.

By: nick

nick — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 04:51:53 +0000

In terms of classwork, turning in work you’ve done for another class, or turning in work you yourself have published anywhere else also fails…

By: Bravesgyrl

Bravesgyrl — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 03:46:57 +0000

But the question is how long does the creator of this chart spend using spell check before submitting something? CHOICE not COHICE….