Plagiarism & the Culture of Customer Service

Every case of plagiarism is devastating. I'm crushed by the squandered opportunity of it all, the betrayal, the death of the sense of working together to a common end. And in many cases -- the one that moved me to write today included -- my intelligence is insulted, 'How could you possibly think this would fool me' style.

This term one of my students, and a fairly good one to that point to boot, turned in as his own one of the example programs that comes with the Alice programming environment / IDE. Not only did this example program have nothing to do with the requirements specified for the final project, it was wildly more elaborate than the final project needed to be (not to mention the fact that I recognized the moment I saw it as one among the sample programs provided with Alice).

This is an online class (did I mention how spectacularly difficult i find teaching programming online?) and I returned the assignment electronically with a note calling the bluff and emphasizing how disappointed I was. About 12 hours afterwards I get the following terse little single-sentence email from the student at issue:

Please call me at [phone number].

I know, I know - at least he said please, right? Didn't address me at all, didn't sign, didn't express an interest in straightening out a terrible misunderstanding, just "call me." Ach du liebe!

It's troubling not only for the extent to which the approach is so profoundly misguided but also for the disrespect of it all. Haranguing about the commercialization of higher education is tired and boring, I know. Nevertheless, if we didn't operate in a culture that encourages students at every turn to think of themselves as customers, I'm doubtful such an email would ever have graced my inbox. And if we didn't operate in a culture that encourages students to think of themselves as customers we'd have fewer cases of plagiarism in the first place.

Now comes the claim that there must have been some sort of technical error, that he never uploaded any such file, that, while no easy explanation for how what happened came to transpire avails, this was all just, y'know, a glitch. Such clotted nonsense. In for a penny, in for a pound - I suppose it's human nature.

Normally this job is great, inspiring fun. Other times, alas, it is not.