Correcting

Today is my day for correcting essays. I find the library is a nice place to work than my office. But unfortunately I feel the need for a computer a lot. I find I very often have a need to google a sentence or a passage to check for plagiarism.


My tolerance threshold for copy & pasting is set very low. But I am actually surprised at the very low level of sophistication of the copying I encounter. So far today I have seen spelling mistakes on a website reproduced in a paper. A simple spell check would have caught that. The laziest thing I see every year is the copy and paste from wikipedia that leaves the hyperlinks in tact. That is just so lazy.

Students who copied and pasted any text should expect to get zero for the paper. But I expect that I won't catch everyone. Some students are a bit cuter than others, mostly because they have more experience of cheating.

Grumpy

I was a bit grumpy at work today. I think I am in a bad mood because of the uncertainty about what I will be teaching this semester. I like to be some bit prepared for a class. But it's hard to invest in a subject on the off chance that I might end up teaching. It also frustrates me that I don't get to teach the things I know most about.

Mentoring

I went to a talk on mentoring on Thursday. It was very interesting and very useful. I'm not sure if I should become a mentor though. It seems fraught with risk and there are no supports structures in place. I must think about it some more.