If you can't tell by the quotation, I'm feeling very upbeat today. I had my dreaded meeting with The Cheater, and it went well. Really well.
Yesterday morning I received a surprising phone call from my boss at the college. She had finally gotten around to looking at the evidence I had accumulated, and finally understood what I meant when I said that the student didn't have a leg to stand on. That's how blatant the cheating was. Anyway, because she finally realized that I wasn't 1) crazy, 2) making it up, or 3) lying about how extensive the cheating was, she was calling to let me know that the plan was changing for the meeting. She was going to lead the discussion rather than have me lead it. The main goal of the meeting was to impart one piece of knowledge to the student (plagiarism is bad) and to inform her that she would be failing the class. She could either accept it or challenge, but because of the evidence I could provide she didn't have a challenge that would be successful.
The meeting itself was bizarre. The student was given the opportunity to give her view on the matter, and her explanation took me completely by surprise. While I fully expected her to bring up the fact that English is not her native language (which she did), I thought she would say that she misunderstood the instructions or at the very least say that she thought what she doing was allowed. Instead, she flat out denied copying and pasting from the Internet. She said because she wishes to be a better writer in English, she spent many hours reading reviews of all the books so that she could eventually "match" what they said. But she didn't copy and paste.
The first time she said this my brain sort of went (in it's best Krafty voice) "What, what, WHAT?" But then my boss started talking and I snapped back to the present. The second time she insisted that she had absolutely not copied anything from the Internet, I jumped into the conversation. I pulled out her assignments and started doing a side by side comparison. Everything was highligthed and color coded. A 4-year-old could have followed the chain of evidence. I showed her not only a big chunk of information that had been copied verbatim from Wikipedia, but I showed her that I knew the websites she had only taken a sentence or two from. As her face had started to look like that of a kicked puppy, I only showed her one assignment. But I had more. Lots more.
In the end the student capitulated and received a failing grade for the class. She will not challenge it. She did try to make a last ditch effort to say that she had worked hard compiling those assignments and didn't think she should receive an F, but it was explained to her that the time she spent cheating did not matter. It was not her own work she submitted.
After the meeting my boss just shook her head at me. She wondered why the girl tried to claim that she had written the assignments. I've had some time to consider this, and the only theory I can come up with is that she didn't think I knew where she had taken the information from. I'm sure didn't realize that I would be able to track it down so easily. My guess is that when she got that first email from me saying that I didn't think the work she submitted was her own she thought I was suspicious because it was so well written. Hence her emulate argument.
So that whole mess is over, and I feel like celebrating. Any suggestions? :-)
posted by Kelly @ 1:18 PM
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