In Which I Rant About Plagiarism...Again

I find it mildly ironic that a comment left on one of my previous posts is from someone advertising a website that writes papers (for a fee) that are guaranteed to be plagiarism-free. I find it even more ironic that the first question that crossed my mind was, "I wonder if they're hiring?"

The thing is, I am tired. Tired of all the cheating. Tired of people who claim to live by a certain moral/ethical code who then have no qualms about having someone else do their work for them, whether that be in the form of lifting information off the Internet and inserting it into a paper (which is just plain stupid) or in a more crafty form that maybe I can't even discern.

I graded some papers today from a student whom I had caught plagiarizing on another assignment previously. All the new papers went through Turnitin.com without any problems, and yet, it irked me that it felt like the student had submitted extremely well-written papers that had no major flaws but yet weren't quite what I had asked for in the assignment.

Truth be told, I asked myself the question: Is it possible that the student got someone else to write the papers? And the realization I came to was that yes, it was possible--but no, I was never going to be able to prove it.

It's things like this that make me wonder what I see in distance education, how it's possible that I could believe in it. (And I do.)

But the problem isn't the distance. God knows, students on campus cheat and/or plagiarize just as much as online students do. And God knows, the people who are determined to do it are going to find a way.

The problem is that there are so many people who care more about turning their education into a commodity than they do about actually becoming educated people. Because once education is comprised solely in a diploma, then it's an easy sequence of steps that will lead a determined individual to achieve that end.

Tragic waste, if you ask me. For all parties involved.