"Academic Dishonesty"

This past week, I wrote a panicked e-mail to Brenda with two pages of my student's paper attached to it... While I was reading a revision, I came across a paragraph that was focused, well-crafted, and had a lovely semi-colon in it that was actually being used correctly. While I read the paragraph, my thought process went somewhere along the lines of this nice analysis is coming out of nowhere! I wonder how long it took her to write this... Semi-colon?...What's that doing here? It's perfect. How did it get here? ... and then I re-read the paragraph, and paid closer attention. The grammatical structure wasn't perfect, but this student has had difficulty with syntax in the past; it was much more eloquently written than anything she'd written to date. Also, there were quite a few words in there that I wasn't sure the student would have chosen to use normally, and I couldn't remember her ever using a semi-colon. It was too eloquent. The diction. The structure. The paragraph... it wasn't her voice.

So I panicked, and then went for a walk to clear my head. I didn't want to think about the two words I've chosen to use as a title for this post. Those two words together are just eery. When I got home, I scanned the page prior to the paragraph, and the one with it, and wrote an e-mail to Brenda.

Friday came, and I passed all the revisions back at the end of class except for that student's; I simply asked her (quietly) if  we could talk after class. I asked her how she approached the revision, and she immediately told me that she'd had help revising it. When I asked what part she'd had help with, she pointed straight to the paragraph, and told me she hoped I'd grade up if she used larger words and varying sentence structure. I was so relieved that she'd told me instead of my having to ask if she'd had help or if she'd just lifted it from somewhere. She told me that she'd revised the paper up to a point, and then sent it to a friend who talked her into using another source; after my student had written a paragraph with larger words in it on that source, she sent it to her friend, and her friend "fixed" it.

Ahhhh... So from there I explained what that paragraph had done to her paper - how it had weakened the rest of her work because of its being so different, how her friends' changes had stripped the student of her own voice, and how having such "help" could be looked at as (insert the title here) _____  _________.  I applauded her for having a reader for her text, but suggested that, in the future, she ask only for advice, and that she execute the revisions herself.

I was terrified of asking her to stay behind and speak with me after class, but am very glad that she just told me what she did, and why she did it. What a huge blessing it was to be able to have this sort of experience and be able to come out of it with positive feedback for my student!