Internal Dialogue

A while ago I wrote about picking your battles when it comes to being mad. I think today I found another battle that I need to let go.

Yesterday I wrote about having to write in a web-log, and that I was looking for subjects. I wrote one today and I’ll submit it tomorrow after checking it, but there’s something that really bothered me today. In class, we were given the assignment to look over each others blogs. There are four weblogs, and each weblog has about six to eight students writing in them. Each of these students has to write four entries on all things E-publishing, but other new media related subjects are also allowed.

And today we had to judge each others weblogs. In my opinion, one posting was using quite peculiar language. It just didn’t fit: words were used that you’d normally never see in work done by a student, and certain sentences were constructed in a way that made my plagiarism alarm bell go off. We entered a sentence into Google, and guess what? The *entire* posting was copied from somewhere else.

We figured, oh well, one bad seed. But then we started to read the other entries. Each and every one seemed strange, and so we checked them all on Google. Except for the first entry, they were all copy/pasted! I can’t speak for the rest of my group, but I was literally shocked. How stupid can you be? How much of an asshole can you be? I knew certain students were lazy, but plagiarism? At this stage in your education? I just couldn’t wrap my head about it.

Back in class we (sort of) confronted the authors with it. Someone else from my group said it was very shameful, and I blatantly told them that it was a huge insult to every one in our class who did take the time to write blog postings. And now comes the worst part: they didn’t give a fuck! They looked at us like we were the crazy ones for actually writing something real. They also peeked to see if the teacher had noticed our discussion… their eyes were actually begging us not to tell on them.

We did write commentary and in it we said that their weblog was one big plagiarism fest. Unfortunatly the assignment was a big vague, so I don’t know if this information will ever reach the teacher. I’m a bit torn: on one hand I know that we cannot be the only ones who noticed. But on the other hand: what if no one else did? What if the teacher doesn’t find out? I know it’s not my duty to report plagiarism, but I find this so ridiculous that I actually wanted to report them. But I didn’t. Someone else just told me that it’s not up to me, that it’s up to the teacher to judge their work and I shouldn’t get involved. That’s probably good advice, and I think I’m gonna have to let this go. This is not my battle.

But I’m still dumbstruck. How big of an idiot can you be? Did they really not realize that the things they pasted in their weblogs would seem out of place? The bastards didn’t even take the time to adjust the font type and size to their own weblog standard! I really don’t get it. In high school there was someone (mr. overactive, remember him?) that kind of leaned on me assignment-wise. I did the majority of all the work, but he still got the same grades. I was told that someone like that would fail in college, that such a person could never succeed. And then I encounter this. Third and fourth year students that copy/paste entire articles just because they don’t want to write their own. I really can’t wrap my head around it. I’m mad, because people like that are almost never punished. In my first year we were told how bad plagiarism was, and that you better not get caught! Yet, in all my years, I have never seen anyone get in real trouble for copying stuff. I hate the fact that people like that can get through their studies by doing nothing themselves. People like that disgust me.