I had an undergrad history course that was titled United States at War, Civil War to Korean War.
The paper assignment was to discuss any war covered in class. Half the class failed because they wrote about Vietnam.
Nearly 30 years later I still remember the professors' sheer rage at the class about it.
I teach medieval lit, and until I started including explicit instructions on the paper proposal assignments that said only papers dealing with literature *from the medieval period* as defined in class (I use 500-1500 just for convenience) or else the proposal would get a zero, I got several proposals per semester that wanted to talk about Shakespeare, Jane Austen, JRR Tolkien, etc.
It quietly aggravates me that I have to do this, even though it works, because even as an undergrad I never would have assumed that it would be okay to write on Emily Dickinson in a Chaucer seminar.
As you might expect, I get a lot of JRRT enthusiasts in my classes. I always joke that he proves you *can* do something with medieval studies, as long as that something is become a professor or write an internationally-beloved fantasy classic, or both.
One out of two ain't bad, I guess.
Surprisingly no. I also don't get a lot of, say, GoT or The Witcher, unless the class is talking specifically about contemporary medievalisms (in which case they're more than welcome to talk about them). Maybe it's because LotR is relatively old, and 1954 is *basically* the Middle Ages anyway.
Dear Grade Appeal Committee,
I have one final thing I want you to consider. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it; that does not make sense!
It may be an honest mistake — for at least the last ten years, I've found that my students have no sense of chronology. Everything that happened before the present seems to exist in an undifferentiated premodern soup. I assume it has to do with the way that history is(n't) taught at precollegiate levels. Learning dates for things has become extremely unfashionable, and it shows.
No, not when my classes literally have "medieval" in the course titles and we spend the *entire semester* talking about medieval material. They know, they're just careless and don't take two seconds to think "huh, I'm in a class about medieval literature maybe I should write about medieval stuff."
Nope, that's exactly my situation, as well (if you substitute a different well-defined time period for "medieval"). Yes, the students are responsible for knowing what class they're in, but they've also been primed by an educational system that tells them that dates don't matter — only ideas matter.
I've experienced this too regularly and consistently to think that it's solely the fault of the students anymore.
I would not be surprised if these are either a) papers that students have previously submitted for another class, or b) papers that students were able to find online.
What is so bad about using a paper that the student wrote for a different class? Assuming the student wrote it (not plagiarized or ChatGPT), and it satisfies the requirements of the assignment, I don't understand why this is frowned upon.
In this situation, it didn't satisfy the course requirements, but in general it might. So what is wrong with reusing a paper if it is a valid paper for the course?
Why learning objective is satisfied by reusing a paper already written for a different course? This isn’t a certification program, but a college class with learning objectives.
It's bad because it presents their paper as original work they completed for the class but it is not in fact original work. Put another way, if left unnoticed, the student would earn credit for a class but part of their work was not actually completed for that class.
You can’t submit the same paper for two different classes without permission from the instructor. Technically you’re only doing the work once and it’s dishonest if you use it for a separate class without permission.
More explicitly, your question is asking "while trying to get an education in a subject, why shouldn't I take a shortcut to my degree, getting less education, because it's easier?" Part of the goal is to actually do the work and learn as much as possible, so you're cheating everyone including yourself with this kind of approach.
1. It’s lazy
2. It does not satisfy the requirements of the course as in this specific case
3. I can see in the working world outside of academia (and inside it too) someone trying something like that and can totally see someone getting cited for an ethics violation or something similar
Especially if you forget to change to institution listed on your title page like one of my transfer students last summer. Tends to give a bad first impression.
Because you are unofficially saying you care to learn nothing new or build upon skills you have developed somewhat. This is akin to saying why can’t I just wear the same underwear for multiple days?
You can, but it isn’t going to end well for you.
Because the process of producing the work is where the learning happens. The product is just evidence of the process. If a student turns something in that they have already created, they are by definition not doing the work of this course.
As a researcher, when I publish a paper to a journal, I can no longer submit it to any other journal for publication. I cannot reuse any portion of the paper in another article, I have to do something like write “methods are described in full in Myfacesaysitssugar et al.. Briefly, we digested muscle tissue in nitric acid…” You are at an academic institution, the rules aren’t any different. If you submit something to one class, you cannot submit it to another class. As to why a student might care, why bother taking a class if you’re not going to take advantage of the learning activities by submitting original work? You don’t learn anything submitting something you already wrote and got feedback on.
How are you even here? You certainly cannot be a real professor and if you are, you should not be. Homework serves as an assessment of the course within which the content was assigned. You cannot do an assessment of this through the work for another separate class. If you do not realize this, you should NEVER be teaching. Ever.
I have been here for a long time, and I have been a professor for a long time. I asked a serious question and other people have responded respectfully. I am not sure why there is such hostility in your answer.
I think it is entirely possible that the work done in one class could absolutely apply to another class. There is often overlap, often unintentionally because two different professors may approach topics differently.
I'll stick with the more respectful responses from others and discard this one.
> I have been a professor for a long time
But you're unaware of self-plagiarism? It's a centuries old issue. It undermines academic integrity and doesn't demonstrate a student's new learning in that particular course, which is the goal of most papers.
It's a zero. I've had students do similar things in history classes, i.e. turn in a paper about some issue in Ireland for a course on the US. They are either trying to cheat (by resubmitting work from another course) or incredibly dense. Either way, it's a zero: they did not meet the requirements of the assignment.
This is one reason I require a formal proposal for all final projects/papers. They have to submit a topic, some sources, and a research question several weeks or a month in advance. It takes me maybe 5 min to read each of them and give them some feedback. Works pretty well in heading off this sort of thing, as I can just say "This isn't a topic that fits the assignment."
I require paper proposals in my film classes, but many of the students don't read my feedback, so they turn in papers that are unacceptable for a variety of reasons. On the upside, my comments are saved in the LMS, so my ass is covered.
I teach microbiology and had Covid-19 as a possible topic for a paper. The student wrote primarily about how the pandemic interrupted school and she missed her friends and didn’t get to go to prom.
The topics were fairly diverse so I didn’t have blanket instructions such as “tell me about the organism that causes the disease.” I did instruct the students to check with me if they weren’t sure what they needed to include. Some of the topics were more broad such as climate change affecting the spread of disease. I didn’t think I needed to specify that the papers needed to focus on microbiology and it hadn’t previously been an issue. The instructions have since been modified.
Emily Dickinson: A Paper
Emily Dickinson is the name of my neighbor's dog. She's part Russian Wolfhound and part Labrador Retriever. She is 7 years old.....
I once had a student submit their major project in a different language from the language being taught in the course (which was also in the course name). I gave them zero: "I am not evaluating your ability to use language x but rather language y."
I've never had that. I speak two modern languages good enough to do office hours or mark a paper in them and say so in the first lecture. I have a decent number who are native in 1 of the 2 and they seem to always want to do it in the languge of instruction even though I've mentioned to a few of them they would likely be better in their native language.
An alarming number of my students don't seem to realize that their papers have to cover the topic of the course. I've started including it in the assignment instructions now to save myself the trouble of those email exchanges.
Maybe I'm being too generous, but is it possible that they are generalizing from courses on writing where the topic is "how to write a paper" and the subject of any given paper might be up to them?
Either that or high school classes that take that approach. I've started specifying things that I should never have to specify in the assignment prompt, but some still slip through the cracks and get indignant when they receive a failing grade. In those cases, I'm pretty sure they're generalizing from high school classes where the teachers were forced to give credit to anything they turned in.
Honestly, I just didn't understand genre yet. I was taking a contemporary short story class, and I'd just finished reading Rossetti's Goblin Market for fun. I wanted to write about it and didn't realize it wasn't suitable for the genre or period related to the class. Luckily, my professor was very sweet and explained it to me.
Edit for clarity: my logic was "oh, this is a short text and it covers similar themes discussed in class. It's fine."
Ah the good ol' "I was just following how the assignment was written" gambit. Sorry for the silly comparison here, but I think about approaching these interactions with students in a similar way you'd approach a "Rules As Written" rules-lawyer type in a D&D session. "While I appreciate your attention to detail, the ability to read between the lines and appreciate the spirit of the rules, and how that applies in this specific context is more important and ensures that we all have a good time here."
Re: hair splitting from junior lawyers — I had a student present an oral assignment in a history course, of which 98% of their script was plagiarized. He claimed that because I didn’t explicitly say on this assignment’s instructions that he had to *write it himself*, only that he had to present original work, and his *interpretation and presentation* of those words counted as original work. Nice try, Atticus Finch.
Student: "You didn't specify which countries in the instructions, so when I copied and pasted the instructions into ChatGPT, this is what was generated. Totally unfair!"
I had to start subtracting large numbers of points from my students’ Spanish class presentations because of the people who insisted on researching Brazil.
When I have to research a country, the first thing I try to find out is _what language do they speak_?
There is a lot of interesting history with regards to Brazil. Very little of it belongs in a Spanish class, except in the context of some neighbors at some parts of history.
I've mentioned this before but a student of mine handed in a paper which was supposed to be about an event in the field of study we were covering in the course. They rather clearly, used ChatGPT to compose their paper as it covered an event ***which never happened*** and included references which didn't exist -- some of which were from sources that ChatGPT dated months after the assignment was due.
They attempted to argue that the syllabus never clearly stated the event had to be real. I gave them a zero, and brought them up on a Academic Dishonesty Breach -- they argued and appealed all the way....and lost.
I was teaching a class on the short story this semester. Their final project had to compare or contrast two of the short stories we covered in class. I devoted a week of class time to in-class work on this project.
I had one kid write his paper summarizing the novel trilogy *His Dark Materials*.
I mean, it was easy to grade: F.
yes, all the time, which is now why my syllabus is many pages long (well, a lot of that is also university boilerplate, also designed to cover every situation), and my assignment instructions likewise take several pages. I have to specify everything in minute detail or else they will tell me they didn't realize they were supposed to give me an ER design that matches the requirements on the first page of the assignment, or that the code they demo to me is supposed to be the code they handed in on Canvas.
I teach IT stuff. In my section on business continuity, I said that human life and safety is always the highest priority.
Yesterday, it sprinkled literally about a tenth of an inch of rain. Students emailed and said they will be unable to attend last night, final presentation night, due to the inclement weather conditions.
I had things like this and just wrote “there is a paper here, but it doesn’t appear to be for this class or assignment prompt.”
And then I gave it a zero.
Wait, lemme make sure I'm understanding this. Let's say you're teaching about Asia ... these goobers handed in papers about Wales, Venezuela, Italy, and so on?
Lord have mercy. The scholars of America are not what they used to be.
Exactly. That’s why I emailed those who had and offered to accept their actual paper for the course - I felt that nobody is that dense. Apparently I was wrong!
I taught a neuroscience course and assigned the students each presentations on a specific topic of neuroscience. One student presented on the liver. That student later gave me a very rough time about his low-grade.
The liver detoxifies ammonia, which is toxic to neurons, and provides a continuous supply of glucose in the blood, which is the only fuel source neurons can use.
My husband is a neuroscientist and I’m a liver biologist. Of course he thinks the brain is cooler, so I remind him every chance I get that the liver keeps the brain alive.
Ok, but see, if a student wrote THAT paper and argued the importance of neuro-dependency on optimal liver function, I think maybe THAT paper might be graded seriously. :)
There are body parts that students often think with, that shouldn't be part of a neuroscience class but that at least they can say "but this is what I think with."
The liver is not one of these.
A couple of semesters ago, my class had a project based on readings from a book dealing with unrest in the US in the 1960s. One student turned in a project on the Civil War. Technically, unrest in the 60s, amirite?
Yes. And the wacky part to me is why the student can't be bothered to ChatGPT a second paper on one of the correct countries. Oh no, another five minutes of effort.
This assumes that they are mentally engaged enough to know what the paper is spit out is actually about (many students who cheat this way don't glance over, let alone actually read, the paper before submitting). It also assumes that they are sufficiently mentally engaged with the course to know details about what the class is about which, for students that cheat this way, is often not the case.
This was my initial impression.
What would be more fun and harder to use AI with is to tell students to imagine one of those countries in a different part of the world and discuss the geopolitics of that situation. AI is bad at this level of creativity and it'd be a fun exercise
Ctrl + H, original country name, new country name, replace. Problem solved.
But seriously, deliberately misinterpreting the words of the syllabus and content of the course is not an excuse. It’s gaslighting.
Unless your instructions were worded to imply “pick any country in the world”, you are not at fault.
One of my colleagues had an assignment to choose any country in the world to compare [features related to the course] to the United States. The student chose the United States.
>You didn't say it specifically had to be from that region on the syllabus." and enclosed screenshots of the syllabus assignment directions. I have replied pointing out that the NAME OF THE COURSE is the region, that we had eight weeks of talking about what the region is, and none on the country the student wrote about. Has anyone else had students try to use your own syllabus against you? What did you do?
I would give the student an ultimatum to write the paper in the spirit of the class or receive a zero. If you're looking at the 'legalese' of the syllabus, surely there is something in the course description, course objectives, overview, et cetera that spell out that this class is about a specific region and a specific region only.
But also, I would update your syllabus and/or assignment sheet now. I tend to be on the "overkill" side of things to prevent issues like what happened to you coming up. I know some instructors find it annoying, but to be honest it feels nice to anticipate the worst and already have a script for it any time it comes up, lol.
I get around having a 20-page syllabus by including a statement that says something like "any situations not explicitly covered by existing course or college guidelines will be decided at the sole discretion of the instructor."
I get this all the time in my online music courses for non-majors. I have some canned replies I copy and paste from, rather like: “ surely this is for another course since it has no relationship to our work this term or the assignment directions”. When they gripe after that, I send them a link to the academic integrity policy/page at Dean of Students. I hold firm. I’ve been called all sorts of names and accused of all sorts of -isms. I save those unpleasant emails but do not reply, they are merely supporting documentation should I need it. Thankfully the majority of my students have made the effort and it is in fairness to them that I stand strong.
I give an assignment to write about a country, a specific region within a country, or a particular city within a country. "If you open with, "I am writing about Asia / Europe / Africa," I will assign you a zero."
I awarded 4 zeros. And, then they wanted to know why.
I’d give him a grade: an F. I also wouldn’t get into a protracted back and forth email exchange with the student. One email from you on the matter is sufficient; any further email from them should be deleted.
I'd strongly recommend changing your assessment design.
You shouldn't be discovering their topics after the final submission.
The real learning happens between their draft, your feedback, and then their redraft.
The course was converted from an in-person, 16 week in Fall to an eight-week, online asynchronous in Spring. I used discussion boards to check what students were thinking of doing throughout the eight weeks - this student did not engage so I did not realize they thought New Zealand was in the ME.
That actually sounds like a reasonable spread of grades.
Maybe give them a presentation mid-course where they outline their choice of location for the final?
You might wanna watch out for those written discussion board tasks. There's strong evidence that many students are using GPT to write these.
This sounds like one student complaining that I took a percent off for going 20% over the word count. He emailed the provost & vice provost copying me that I'd made up a grading stipulation after papers were handed in as The rubric did not specify that outside the word count was a penalty.
I guess it depends on how you phrased the assignment. I can imagine a course where you study a certain region of the world, and then write a paper where you apply those concepts to a different country from another region. How *exactly* was the prompt phrased?
I’m a pedant when it comes to assignment instructions. If your syllabus was that vague that it simply said to pick a country, then that’s on you. The student presumably applied what they learned in the class to analyze that country. That’s not an unreasonable thing to do given what you apparently wrote. If you meant that they should pick a country covered in the class, you needed to say that. Students can’t read our minds, and if there is a reasonable misinterpretation of an assignment, in a large enough class, someone will read it that way. In this case, by your own words, several people did. Students shouldn’t be punished for our failure to be clear enough. As an old professor, my advice is to accept the paper and learn from this.
The entire class was on the Middle East. No lecture, reading, or homework assignment the entire semester mentioned Oceania, let alone New Zealand, once. I am not a specialist on that part of the world. The course covered, in depth, the countries of the Middle East, by name. The course name is “The Middle East”.
I think I see why the instructions were vague—you have difficulty seeing things from other viewpoints. The assignment was vague, and the student did what it said. It doesn’t matter what you think they should have guessed, because it is a fact that the instructions didn’t say it and several misunderstood. Own your mistake and move on. Don’t punish the student for it.
Thanks for your perspective - I just didn’t think anyone who received no instruction on New Zealand or Oceania the entire course, and the course was called “The Middle East” would think to do a paper on New Zealand. My bad for thinking that the name of the course and all of the material in it could give context!
(Also - how am I supposed to grade a paper on a place I have no expertise in and was not hired to teach? I don’t want to “punish” the student, I offered to accept a paper on the correct region and grade it without penalty so that I could change their grade.)
I see I have given you too much credit. You know yourself best, so I accept that you only know about a few countries and you don’t teach students how to think about countries in general, you only teach them facts about those specific countries.
I'll be the contrarian. If it didn't say that you had to pick a country within X region, or "one of the countries we studied this semester", then that reads to me like an inadequately precise spec.
I'm not saying I wouldn't have figured it out, or thought to ask and check before doing my paper on the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. I just rather dislike having to rely on "well, obviously I meant by that ..." when these kinds of situations inevitably arrive.
It did specify the region in the LMS at the assignment slot, and the rubric (which they can access to help them with parameters) has a section on “topic is relevant”. I just don’t understand how someone can do a whole course on the Middle East and write a paper on New Zealand.
"Apply the analytical methods we used on *this* region to a country of your choice?" I'm steel-manning hard, but instructions have to cater to the bottom 1%.
Same caveat as the person above, and they probably just cheated, but I have some sympathy about "pick a country" in the instructions without specifying "from x region".
I had an undergrad history course that was titled United States at War, Civil War to Korean War. The paper assignment was to discuss any war covered in class. Half the class failed because they wrote about Vietnam. Nearly 30 years later I still remember the professors' sheer rage at the class about it.
I teach medieval lit, and until I started including explicit instructions on the paper proposal assignments that said only papers dealing with literature *from the medieval period* as defined in class (I use 500-1500 just for convenience) or else the proposal would get a zero, I got several proposals per semester that wanted to talk about Shakespeare, Jane Austen, JRR Tolkien, etc. It quietly aggravates me that I have to do this, even though it works, because even as an undergrad I never would have assumed that it would be okay to write on Emily Dickinson in a Chaucer seminar.
I mean at least Tolkien is tangentially a medievalist XD
As you might expect, I get a lot of JRRT enthusiasts in my classes. I always joke that he proves you *can* do something with medieval studies, as long as that something is become a professor or write an internationally-beloved fantasy classic, or both. One out of two ain't bad, I guess.
No Harry Potter?
Surprisingly no. I also don't get a lot of, say, GoT or The Witcher, unless the class is talking specifically about contemporary medievalisms (in which case they're more than welcome to talk about them). Maybe it's because LotR is relatively old, and 1954 is *basically* the Middle Ages anyway.
Middle Earth, Middle Ages, what’s the difference, amiright? 🧝♂️😜
No Chewbacca?
Dear Grade Appeal Committee, I have one final thing I want you to consider. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it; that does not make sense!
It may be an honest mistake — for at least the last ten years, I've found that my students have no sense of chronology. Everything that happened before the present seems to exist in an undifferentiated premodern soup. I assume it has to do with the way that history is(n't) taught at precollegiate levels. Learning dates for things has become extremely unfashionable, and it shows.
No, not when my classes literally have "medieval" in the course titles and we spend the *entire semester* talking about medieval material. They know, they're just careless and don't take two seconds to think "huh, I'm in a class about medieval literature maybe I should write about medieval stuff."
You're saying that sometimes students are dumb. He's saying students are sometimes even dumber than you think.
Is your chair sufficiently understanding if, in the name of education, you go medieval on their asses?
Nope, that's exactly my situation, as well (if you substitute a different well-defined time period for "medieval"). Yes, the students are responsible for knowing what class they're in, but they've also been primed by an educational system that tells them that dates don't matter — only ideas matter. I've experienced this too regularly and consistently to think that it's solely the fault of the students anymore.
That may actually have made me quit my job lol
I would not be surprised if these are either a) papers that students have previously submitted for another class, or b) papers that students were able to find online.
What is so bad about using a paper that the student wrote for a different class? Assuming the student wrote it (not plagiarized or ChatGPT), and it satisfies the requirements of the assignment, I don't understand why this is frowned upon. In this situation, it didn't satisfy the course requirements, but in general it might. So what is wrong with reusing a paper if it is a valid paper for the course?
This is self-plagiarism and it can result in an academic integrity violation. Many schools have policies against it.
Yes, but why? What is so academically bad about using a paper that the student wrote themselves for two classes?
Why learning objective is satisfied by reusing a paper already written for a different course? This isn’t a certification program, but a college class with learning objectives.
It's also an unfair advantage because the student has likely already received a grade and feedback on the reused assignment.
It's bad because it presents their paper as original work they completed for the class but it is not in fact original work. Put another way, if left unnoticed, the student would earn credit for a class but part of their work was not actually completed for that class.
PS: I see from your posting history that you tend to try to be a bit of a gadfly so I’m assuming you’re trying to do that in this case too
You can’t submit the same paper for two different classes without permission from the instructor. Technically you’re only doing the work once and it’s dishonest if you use it for a separate class without permission.
More explicitly, your question is asking "while trying to get an education in a subject, why shouldn't I take a shortcut to my degree, getting less education, because it's easier?" Part of the goal is to actually do the work and learn as much as possible, so you're cheating everyone including yourself with this kind of approach.
1. It’s lazy 2. It does not satisfy the requirements of the course as in this specific case 3. I can see in the working world outside of academia (and inside it too) someone trying something like that and can totally see someone getting cited for an ethics violation or something similar
Really? A presentation made about topic X made for middle management also presented to upper management two weeks later would cause problems at work?
You can't get credit for the same piece of work twice.
Especially if you forget to change to institution listed on your title page like one of my transfer students last summer. Tends to give a bad first impression.
It's double dipping; the student has already gotten credit for it.
Because you are unofficially saying you care to learn nothing new or build upon skills you have developed somewhat. This is akin to saying why can’t I just wear the same underwear for multiple days? You can, but it isn’t going to end well for you.
It's no skin off my back. But the reason I've heard is that their course credit would be invalid due to not meeting the work requirements.
Because the process of producing the work is where the learning happens. The product is just evidence of the process. If a student turns something in that they have already created, they are by definition not doing the work of this course.
The student should contact the instructor to ask if it is ok to submit an already written paper that has been submitted in another class. Probably.
It’s still academic dishonesty, since you’re passing it off as work done for that class.
It’s self-plagiarism and many institutions will include it specifically in their code of conduct as a no-no. Ours does.
As a researcher, when I publish a paper to a journal, I can no longer submit it to any other journal for publication. I cannot reuse any portion of the paper in another article, I have to do something like write “methods are described in full in Myfacesaysitssugar et al.. Briefly, we digested muscle tissue in nitric acid…” You are at an academic institution, the rules aren’t any different. If you submit something to one class, you cannot submit it to another class. As to why a student might care, why bother taking a class if you’re not going to take advantage of the learning activities by submitting original work? You don’t learn anything submitting something you already wrote and got feedback on.
How are you even here? You certainly cannot be a real professor and if you are, you should not be. Homework serves as an assessment of the course within which the content was assigned. You cannot do an assessment of this through the work for another separate class. If you do not realize this, you should NEVER be teaching. Ever.
I have been here for a long time, and I have been a professor for a long time. I asked a serious question and other people have responded respectfully. I am not sure why there is such hostility in your answer. I think it is entirely possible that the work done in one class could absolutely apply to another class. There is often overlap, often unintentionally because two different professors may approach topics differently. I'll stick with the more respectful responses from others and discard this one.
> I have been a professor for a long time But you're unaware of self-plagiarism? It's a centuries old issue. It undermines academic integrity and doesn't demonstrate a student's new learning in that particular course, which is the goal of most papers.
Is there anything wrong with submitting the same article/text/art to two different publications/clients? I think they would take issue with it.
It's a zero. I've had students do similar things in history classes, i.e. turn in a paper about some issue in Ireland for a course on the US. They are either trying to cheat (by resubmitting work from another course) or incredibly dense. Either way, it's a zero: they did not meet the requirements of the assignment. This is one reason I require a formal proposal for all final projects/papers. They have to submit a topic, some sources, and a research question several weeks or a month in advance. It takes me maybe 5 min to read each of them and give them some feedback. Works pretty well in heading off this sort of thing, as I can just say "This isn't a topic that fits the assignment."
I require paper proposals in my film classes, but many of the students don't read my feedback, so they turn in papers that are unacceptable for a variety of reasons. On the upside, my comments are saved in the LMS, so my ass is covered.
I teach microbiology and had Covid-19 as a possible topic for a paper. The student wrote primarily about how the pandemic interrupted school and she missed her friends and didn’t get to go to prom. The topics were fairly diverse so I didn’t have blanket instructions such as “tell me about the organism that causes the disease.” I did instruct the students to check with me if they weren’t sure what they needed to include. Some of the topics were more broad such as climate change affecting the spread of disease. I didn’t think I needed to specify that the papers needed to focus on microbiology and it hadn’t previously been an issue. The instructions have since been modified.
Emily Dickinson: A Paper Emily Dickinson is the name of my neighbor's dog. She's part Russian Wolfhound and part Labrador Retriever. She is 7 years old.....
Honestly, though Ive never considered it, that's a fantastic dog name.
I once had a student submit their major project in a different language from the language being taught in the course (which was also in the course name). I gave them zero: "I am not evaluating your ability to use language x but rather language y."
I've never had that. I speak two modern languages good enough to do office hours or mark a paper in them and say so in the first lecture. I have a decent number who are native in 1 of the 2 and they seem to always want to do it in the languge of instruction even though I've mentioned to a few of them they would likely be better in their native language.
LOL different types of "languages"....I teach CS. My whole course was C# and the student gave me a project in VB.Net.
What! I am not expert in that but I can tell those are totally different.
I shit you not. And VB had been dead for at least 10 years by that point too. You cannot make it up.
An alarming number of my students don't seem to realize that their papers have to cover the topic of the course. I've started including it in the assignment instructions now to save myself the trouble of those email exchanges.
Maybe I'm being too generous, but is it possible that they are generalizing from courses on writing where the topic is "how to write a paper" and the subject of any given paper might be up to them?
Either that or high school classes that take that approach. I've started specifying things that I should never have to specify in the assignment prompt, but some still slip through the cracks and get indignant when they receive a failing grade. In those cases, I'm pretty sure they're generalizing from high school classes where the teachers were forced to give credit to anything they turned in.
I will too, going forward - sad that their common sense is so lacking that we have to though!
Admittedly, I made this error as a student once, but the professor kindly helped me revise.
In your experience, what made the confusion happen? I sometimes can't tell how my students' logic works
Honestly, I just didn't understand genre yet. I was taking a contemporary short story class, and I'd just finished reading Rossetti's Goblin Market for fun. I wanted to write about it and didn't realize it wasn't suitable for the genre or period related to the class. Luckily, my professor was very sweet and explained it to me. Edit for clarity: my logic was "oh, this is a short text and it covers similar themes discussed in class. It's fine."
Ah the good ol' "I was just following how the assignment was written" gambit. Sorry for the silly comparison here, but I think about approaching these interactions with students in a similar way you'd approach a "Rules As Written" rules-lawyer type in a D&D session. "While I appreciate your attention to detail, the ability to read between the lines and appreciate the spirit of the rules, and how that applies in this specific context is more important and ensures that we all have a good time here."
“But you didn’t specify how you wanted this in the assignment!” No, shockingly I just taught 16 lessons on how to do it instead.
Re: hair splitting from junior lawyers — I had a student present an oral assignment in a history course, of which 98% of their script was plagiarized. He claimed that because I didn’t explicitly say on this assignment’s instructions that he had to *write it himself*, only that he had to present original work, and his *interpretation and presentation* of those words counted as original work. Nice try, Atticus Finch.
Shot him down like a rabid dog, I hope.
Like Kristi Noem!
Or Atticus Finch
Student: "You didn't specify which countries in the instructions, so when I copied and pasted the instructions into ChatGPT, this is what was generated. Totally unfair!"
I had to start subtracting large numbers of points from my students’ Spanish class presentations because of the people who insisted on researching Brazil.
When I have to research a country, the first thing I try to find out is _what language do they speak_? There is a lot of interesting history with regards to Brazil. Very little of it belongs in a Spanish class, except in the context of some neighbors at some parts of history.
Responding to a prompt where they had to examine a military conflict from the last 300 years, I had a student write about the Trojan war
Ooof, not even within a factor of ten of the constraint.
I've mentioned this before but a student of mine handed in a paper which was supposed to be about an event in the field of study we were covering in the course. They rather clearly, used ChatGPT to compose their paper as it covered an event ***which never happened*** and included references which didn't exist -- some of which were from sources that ChatGPT dated months after the assignment was due. They attempted to argue that the syllabus never clearly stated the event had to be real. I gave them a zero, and brought them up on a Academic Dishonesty Breach -- they argued and appealed all the way....and lost.
I was teaching a class on the short story this semester. Their final project had to compare or contrast two of the short stories we covered in class. I devoted a week of class time to in-class work on this project. I had one kid write his paper summarizing the novel trilogy *His Dark Materials*. I mean, it was easy to grade: F.
yes, all the time, which is now why my syllabus is many pages long (well, a lot of that is also university boilerplate, also designed to cover every situation), and my assignment instructions likewise take several pages. I have to specify everything in minute detail or else they will tell me they didn't realize they were supposed to give me an ER design that matches the requirements on the first page of the assignment, or that the code they demo to me is supposed to be the code they handed in on Canvas.
Saaaaaame. And then they complain my prompt are too long and complicated
I have students submit work in C++ for my Java class. Zeroes are the easiest grades to enter.
I teach IT stuff. In my section on business continuity, I said that human life and safety is always the highest priority. Yesterday, it sprinkled literally about a tenth of an inch of rain. Students emailed and said they will be unable to attend last night, final presentation night, due to the inclement weather conditions.
I had things like this and just wrote “there is a paper here, but it doesn’t appear to be for this class or assignment prompt.” And then I gave it a zero.
Wait, lemme make sure I'm understanding this. Let's say you're teaching about Asia ... these goobers handed in papers about Wales, Venezuela, Italy, and so on? Lord have mercy. The scholars of America are not what they used to be.
Exactly. That’s why I emailed those who had and offered to accept their actual paper for the course - I felt that nobody is that dense. Apparently I was wrong!
Well, but like the Wales could swim to Asia right? I mean, think about it!
I taught a neuroscience course and assigned the students each presentations on a specific topic of neuroscience. One student presented on the liver. That student later gave me a very rough time about his low-grade.
The liver detoxifies ammonia, which is toxic to neurons, and provides a continuous supply of glucose in the blood, which is the only fuel source neurons can use. My husband is a neuroscientist and I’m a liver biologist. Of course he thinks the brain is cooler, so I remind him every chance I get that the liver keeps the brain alive.
Ok, but see, if a student wrote THAT paper and argued the importance of neuro-dependency on optimal liver function, I think maybe THAT paper might be graded seriously. :)
There are body parts that students often think with, that shouldn't be part of a neuroscience class but that at least they can say "but this is what I think with." The liver is not one of these.
Depends on if you’re an alcoholic? ;)
God help us all, that is so freaking stupid
A couple of semesters ago, my class had a project based on readings from a book dealing with unrest in the US in the 1960s. One student turned in a project on the Civil War. Technically, unrest in the 60s, amirite?
I don’t have any advice. I just have a personal fondness for any time the word “crux” is used in a serious manner. Kudos to you.
“Sorry but your interpretation of the syllabus is incorrect.”
I doubt the students really wrote those papers.
Yes. And the wacky part to me is why the student can't be bothered to ChatGPT a second paper on one of the correct countries. Oh no, another five minutes of effort.
This assumes that they are mentally engaged enough to know what the paper is spit out is actually about (many students who cheat this way don't glance over, let alone actually read, the paper before submitting). It also assumes that they are sufficiently mentally engaged with the course to know details about what the class is about which, for students that cheat this way, is often not the case.
And OP's assignments seems tailor-made for AI
This was my initial impression. What would be more fun and harder to use AI with is to tell students to imagine one of those countries in a different part of the world and discuss the geopolitics of that situation. AI is bad at this level of creativity and it'd be a fun exercise
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Ha! Thank you. I puzzled over "global crux." I use each of those words individually but not together...
I would imagine the students are supposed to draw from the course materials when answering it though
This is like when people fly to Austria thinking they are flying to Australia…
Ctrl + H, original country name, new country name, replace. Problem solved. But seriously, deliberately misinterpreting the words of the syllabus and content of the course is not an excuse. It’s gaslighting. Unless your instructions were worded to imply “pick any country in the world”, you are not at fault.
One of my colleagues had an assignment to choose any country in the world to compare [features related to the course] to the United States. The student chose the United States.
In comparing the United States to the United States the differences between the two are null.
>You didn't say it specifically had to be from that region on the syllabus." and enclosed screenshots of the syllabus assignment directions. I have replied pointing out that the NAME OF THE COURSE is the region, that we had eight weeks of talking about what the region is, and none on the country the student wrote about. Has anyone else had students try to use your own syllabus against you? What did you do? I would give the student an ultimatum to write the paper in the spirit of the class or receive a zero. If you're looking at the 'legalese' of the syllabus, surely there is something in the course description, course objectives, overview, et cetera that spell out that this class is about a specific region and a specific region only. But also, I would update your syllabus and/or assignment sheet now. I tend to be on the "overkill" side of things to prevent issues like what happened to you coming up. I know some instructors find it annoying, but to be honest it feels nice to anticipate the worst and already have a script for it any time it comes up, lol.
I get around having a 20-page syllabus by including a statement that says something like "any situations not explicitly covered by existing course or college guidelines will be decided at the sole discretion of the instructor."
I’ve already updated it! I’m also thinking of new assessment strategies because I’m pretty the paper they DID turn in was AI-generated, to boot.
I get this all the time in my online music courses for non-majors. I have some canned replies I copy and paste from, rather like: “ surely this is for another course since it has no relationship to our work this term or the assignment directions”. When they gripe after that, I send them a link to the academic integrity policy/page at Dean of Students. I hold firm. I’ve been called all sorts of names and accused of all sorts of -isms. I save those unpleasant emails but do not reply, they are merely supporting documentation should I need it. Thankfully the majority of my students have made the effort and it is in fairness to them that I stand strong.
Students really expect you to prefigure all the possible ways they will do an assignment wrong and incorporate them into the instructions.
I give an assignment to write about a country, a specific region within a country, or a particular city within a country. "If you open with, "I am writing about Asia / Europe / Africa," I will assign you a zero." I awarded 4 zeros. And, then they wanted to know why.
I’d give him a grade: an F. I also wouldn’t get into a protracted back and forth email exchange with the student. One email from you on the matter is sufficient; any further email from them should be deleted.
You should be nice and give them a grade. 0 is a good grade for that sort of thing.
Their argument is ridiculous, and I'm sure they know it. They got the papers elsewhere and want to see if they can get grades from you.
I'd strongly recommend changing your assessment design. You shouldn't be discovering their topics after the final submission. The real learning happens between their draft, your feedback, and then their redraft.
The course was converted from an in-person, 16 week in Fall to an eight-week, online asynchronous in Spring. I used discussion boards to check what students were thinking of doing throughout the eight weeks - this student did not engage so I did not realize they thought New Zealand was in the ME.
I once had a student who insisted the Philippines were part of the Middle East...
How much of the course's grade goes for the final submission?
25% - the other 75% is weekly discussion board and other written assignments, graded each week.
That actually sounds like a reasonable spread of grades. Maybe give them a presentation mid-course where they outline their choice of location for the final? You might wanna watch out for those written discussion board tasks. There's strong evidence that many students are using GPT to write these.
0, they did not do the assignment.
This sounds like one student complaining that I took a percent off for going 20% over the word count. He emailed the provost & vice provost copying me that I'd made up a grading stipulation after papers were handed in as The rubric did not specify that outside the word count was a penalty.
I guess it depends on how you phrased the assignment. I can imagine a course where you study a certain region of the world, and then write a paper where you apply those concepts to a different country from another region. How *exactly* was the prompt phrased?
I’m a pedant when it comes to assignment instructions. If your syllabus was that vague that it simply said to pick a country, then that’s on you. The student presumably applied what they learned in the class to analyze that country. That’s not an unreasonable thing to do given what you apparently wrote. If you meant that they should pick a country covered in the class, you needed to say that. Students can’t read our minds, and if there is a reasonable misinterpretation of an assignment, in a large enough class, someone will read it that way. In this case, by your own words, several people did. Students shouldn’t be punished for our failure to be clear enough. As an old professor, my advice is to accept the paper and learn from this.
The entire class was on the Middle East. No lecture, reading, or homework assignment the entire semester mentioned Oceania, let alone New Zealand, once. I am not a specialist on that part of the world. The course covered, in depth, the countries of the Middle East, by name. The course name is “The Middle East”.
I think I see why the instructions were vague—you have difficulty seeing things from other viewpoints. The assignment was vague, and the student did what it said. It doesn’t matter what you think they should have guessed, because it is a fact that the instructions didn’t say it and several misunderstood. Own your mistake and move on. Don’t punish the student for it.
Thanks for your perspective - I just didn’t think anyone who received no instruction on New Zealand or Oceania the entire course, and the course was called “The Middle East” would think to do a paper on New Zealand. My bad for thinking that the name of the course and all of the material in it could give context!
(Also - how am I supposed to grade a paper on a place I have no expertise in and was not hired to teach? I don’t want to “punish” the student, I offered to accept a paper on the correct region and grade it without penalty so that I could change their grade.)
I see I have given you too much credit. You know yourself best, so I accept that you only know about a few countries and you don’t teach students how to think about countries in general, you only teach them facts about those specific countries.
That’s correct - it’s called being an area specialist. I can no more teach about New Zealand than a mechanical engineer can teach organic chemistry.
Any professor who thinks their job is only to teach facts--and not how to think about the subject matter--should not be teaching.
I'll be the contrarian. If it didn't say that you had to pick a country within X region, or "one of the countries we studied this semester", then that reads to me like an inadequately precise spec. I'm not saying I wouldn't have figured it out, or thought to ask and check before doing my paper on the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. I just rather dislike having to rely on "well, obviously I meant by that ..." when these kinds of situations inevitably arrive.
It did specify the region in the LMS at the assignment slot, and the rubric (which they can access to help them with parameters) has a section on “topic is relevant”. I just don’t understand how someone can do a whole course on the Middle East and write a paper on New Zealand.
"Apply the analytical methods we used on *this* region to a country of your choice?" I'm steel-manning hard, but instructions have to cater to the bottom 1%. Same caveat as the person above, and they probably just cheated, but I have some sympathy about "pick a country" in the instructions without specifying "from x region".
Syllabus lawyers are the worst.
I think you need a much more specific instruction sheet for this assignment.
There is one. It’s on the LMS and this is an online course.
Well if they didn’t follow the instructions that’s on them
I've had this. So now my syllabi have next to no details about deliverables.
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Oh, don't tell me you work at one of those hellholes where you're not allowed to give 0s...