The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Jackmormon:

Anonymous, I agree completely with the substance of what you write--and by the way I'm in zhof's position and sympathize, oh yes, and unionize--but I do want to point out that your suggestion that a teacher could go consult the local bibliophile for help seems rather optimistic to me. I'm a grad student and TA at an Ivy League University. Even my students don't seem to have time for me, let alone aged faculty members.

And typing every slightly suspicious phrase into Google (especially from a dial-up shared with two roommates) is not the best use of an instructor's time. If I have doubts about an essay, I'll type in three or four phrases; if the student passes the sample size, I figure it's time to move on. Hanging onto the paper and submitting portions of it to an online "expose all plagiarists now" forum seems less important in the long run than making sure I don't spend too more than the official 15 hours/week on my teaching duties.

As for recognizing the original, the only time I've heard a fellow grad student claim to do so was when it was his own writing that the student plagiarized. Even then he had to think about it for a couple of hours. This semester I had Poe on my syllabus. There must be over ten thousand crackpot Poe sites out there; just the scholarly stuff is enough to make your head spin.

My understanding about the English universities is that the marking is often also done by post MA-level students. It's possible that English university administrators would tend to believe the marker rather than the student, unlike their American counterparts, but I imagine that they too would want to see a ream of supporting material, have forms filed in triplicate, and require multiple letters to be written.

Besides the time proving such suspicions can take, and the hostility with which such accusations are usually met on an administrative level, I think there's also the factor of sympathy. Not that instructors sympathize with plagiarists--no, when I've caught students I tended to surprise myself with how angry I got--but rather we don't want to believe nasty things about our students.

As for the re-enrolling idea, if the student really wants to re-do his education, he should re-apply (probably to a different institution) and pay for it himself. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this lawsuit was his way of trying to get out of the new increased university fees in England.

Faiza posted some earlier photos in the May archive, labelling them as from "our old life," in which she's out in public wearing cute calf-length dresses and no headscarf.

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